Glennda Orgasm: from Drag Activist to Post-Queer Contrarian
The East Village, New York City, 1990. It was the Golden Era of DIY creativity, a few years before the arrival of a nascent Internet, when interactive screens were nothing more than a dystopian conceit in a Ray Bradbury novel. The AIDS crisis was in full swing, but that didn’t stop downtown denizens from flocking to clubs such as the Palladium and the Pyramid Club, and attending performance art shows at homegrown venues like Dixon Place and PS 122. This was the milieu of Brenda Sexual and Glennda Orgasm, the drag personas of Duncan Elliott and myself. Our surnames were chosen to assert our gay-sex-positive stance in the face of right-wing bigotry, and our style was influenced by the East Village performance scene, which offered a new form of drag that commented on and satirized the art form itself. As Glennda Orgasm, my journey as a drag activist had begun — but as the culture wars of the ‘90s amped up, I found myself rebelling against the activist orthodoxies of the era.
In June 1990, we premiered The Brenda and Glennda Show on Manhattan Public Access TV. Democratic, freewheeling, and eccentric, Public Access TV offered timeslots to just about anyone who could produce their own show and slap it onto a U-Matic broadcast tape. The Brenda and Glennda Show was inspired by our activism in ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power) and the East Village drag scene, combining camp with politics. We took drag out of the nightclubs and into the streets with a guerrilla talk show format that tackled issues around LGBT rights and the AIDS crisis. We were at once earnest, angry, and silly. And even though we’d only aired three episodes by the end of that summer — with locations ranging from the back of a 9th Street crosstown bus to the top of the Empire State Building — we quickly garnered a cult following in Downtown New York.
Caption: Glennda (pictured left) and Brenda (pictured right) flying to Buffalo, 1990.
Word spread to the art world, and in November, we were invited to do a series at Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center in Buffalo, NY. We flew there in drag and filmed shows on the streets, invading the homophobic mayor’s office in City Hall with a petition demanding that Buffalo be renamed “the Queen City.” And over 30 years before Trump Derangement Syndrome was a thing, we shepherded a group of drag queens to Donald Trump’s Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City. We were thrown out of the gambling area for “wearing too much makeup” and conducted a talk show on the boardwalk, where we railed against “racism, sexism, and homophobia at the Taj.”
Subsequent shows included a “gender cruise” on a touristy boat ride with drag queens and self-identified male-to-female lesbian transsexuals and a trip to Grand Central Station with Two-Spirit Native Americans. We even had an election-themed show filmed outside the 1992 Democratic National Convention with guest co-host Joan Jett Blakk, the first drag queen to run for President of the United States. (I’m not sure if there have been others, but Anna Khachiyan referred to Trump as a “drag king” during my 2024 Red Scare podcast appearance.)
By the end of 1992, Brenda had had enough of New York and moved south to pursue a career in landscape architecture. Glennda was now free to work with a rotating roster of guest co-hosts, and the spin-off show Glennda and Friends was born. The inaugural episode premiered queercore filmmaker Bruce LaBruce’s first drag persona, Fonnda LaBruce. Adorned in leather jackets, combat boots, and slinky dresses by designer Sylvia Heisel, we co-hosted the episode Bad Grrrls at a Riot Grrrl conference on the Lower East Side. It was early spring 1993, Nirvana and grunge were huge, and the feminist punk Riot Grrrl movement, which was spawned a few years earlier, had become vampirized and co-opted by the mainstream media. Bruce and I decided to satirize the situation, posing as square, middle-aged women from Queens who heard about Riot Grrrl by reading an article in Cosmopolitan about Sassy magazine’s coverage of the scene — the trickling down and diluting of a radical, underground movement for staid mainstream consumption.
My alliance with Bruce LaBruce was part of a shift in Glennda’s approach, from earnest, albeit campy activism to mischievous satire. But the real turning point began a year earlier, at an ACT UP meeting in early 1992. That was the year ACT UP, to that point a major activist org, started to fall apart. Contentious infighting and peripheral causes were eroding the movement. I was seated at the meeting with Emily Nahmanson aka Annie Thing, my co-editor on Pussy Grazer, a queer punk zine that took aim at the excesses of the gay mainstream and even radical activism. During this time, many types of so-called left-wing groups would show up at the meetings and try to get on the agenda to amplify their messages, angling to leverage the mass and might of ACT UP for their causes.
Glenn Belverio as Glennda Orgasm
On this occasion, a newly founded group called WAC, the Women’s Action Coalition, was invited to make an announcement at the ACT UP meeting. WAC was composed of established female artists, like Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer. One of their big grievances was that women artists’ work wasn’t being shown enough in galleries and museums. They staged demonstrations using drum corps and the slogan “WAC is watching.” They had come to ACT UP with the news of their latest target:
“We’re here because we’re organizing a protest against anti-feminist writer Camille Paglia, whose dangerous book Sexual Personae is akin to Mein Kampf,” the spokeswoman for WAC announced from the ACT UP stage. Her shrill voice echoed through the cavernous Cooper Union meeting hall, producing a sound like a cross between Mrs. Kravitz from Bewitched and Joseph Stalin.
She was clearly taking cues from the journalist and activist Gloria Steinem, who originally made the comparison between the two books, saying, “Camille Paglia calling herself a feminist is sort of like a Nazi saying they’re not anti-Semitic.” There’d also been a recently published article in The Advocate — an interview with Paglia by Steven Petrow titled “Who Is Camille Paglia, and Why Is She Saying Those Terrible Things About Us?” During the interview, Paglia called out the AIDS activist organization. “When ACT UP behaves well, they’re fabulous. But we have example after example of stupid behavior. Every time this happens — breaking into St. Patrick’s Cathedral, throwing condoms at a priest — there’s 30 more years of fag bashing ahead.”
The WAC women had clearly come to the right place, as many members of ACT UP could not tolerate any criticism of the group or their tactics. The WAC spokesperson then explained they were holding an anti-Paglia protest at a bookstore that was selling the paperback edition of Sexual Personae — which was pretty ridiculous, considering that just about every bookstore in the country was selling Paglia’s book, a NY Times bestseller. (A review in the left-leaning magazine The Nation raved, “This book is a red comet in a smog-filled sky […] brilliant.”)
Well, I had of course heard of Camille Paglia but had yet to read her. And this WAC lady’s sanctimonious indignation made me want to run out of the meeting and make a beeline to the nearest bookstore to buy Paglia’s book. What I did know from numerous news items was that Sexual Personae was written by an out lesbian who loved art, drag queens, and pornography — cornerstones of any self-respecting metropolitan fag’s existence. I turned to my friend Emily and said, “Is this where the left is now — they’re banning books?” To me, it didn’t matter that Paglia was critical of the same kind of in-your-face activism Glennda embraced; it was a matter of principle. Being free to speak your mind is a bedrock issue — without which there’d be no LGBT rights.
Soon after, Emily and I started spending a lot of time watching and VHS-taping all of Camille’s TV appearances — because back in those days, she was constantly being interviewed on TV. We took notes and roared with laughter during her cutting attacks on the feminist establishment and political correctness. After years of activist-movement indoctrination, it was refreshing to watch this erudite, dynamic dyke blaze a path where so many others feared to tread.
Fast forward to October 1992. Camille’s first essay collection, Sex, Art and American Culture, had just been published, and the sharp-tongued, fast-talking author (she often referred to herself as “the Joan Rivers of academia”) was giving a lecture at the 92nd Street Y to promote it. After the talk, I approached her to get my copy of the book signed. We immediately bonded when I told her how much I loved her essay on Elizabeth Taylor (“Butterfield 8: a dream vision!!” she scrawled with a dramatic flourish on the opening page of my copy of the book). I wasn’t in drag, but I explained that I did a drag public-access TV show. I told her how much I appreciated her theory of “drag queen feminism” — which asserts that mainstream feminist rhetoric is based on the victimization of women, while Paglia’s tough, street-smart drag queen philosophy is based on the idea of “woman as dominatrix of the universe.”
When I told this story to a collaborator of mine — filmmaker Maria Beatty, who worked with post-porn modernist Annie Sprinkle on a video called Sluts and Goddesses — she wanted to direct a video co-starring Camille and Glennda Orgasm. We drew up a proposal, sent it to Camille’s publisher, and received a response almost immediately. Camille was intrigued. I won’t go into the messy details, but at one point, Camille decided she didn’t want to work with Maria, fired her from the project, and started calling me on the phone on a regular basis so we could strategize our plans for the video.
This was early spring 1993, and I was busy filming episodes of Glennda and Friends with Bruce LaBruce. After our Riot Grrrl adventure, we cooked up a plot to launch a new movement that was in opposition to the trendy queer activism of the moment. In late 1992, Queer Nation had staged protests against Paul Verhoeven’s brilliant film Basic Instinct (1992), a neo-noir erotic thriller starring Sharon Stone and Michael Douglas. Queer Nation opposed the film because they felt it was “a homophobic portrayal of a bisexual serial killer.” One incident involved the group setting off a stink bomb in a theater showing the film. As with the WAC women trying to ban Sexual Personae, I was having none of this. It was just more ill-advised censorship from the left. (Camille later provided the DVD commentary for the film.)
Bruce and I decided to go back to our pre-Stonewall gay roots and founded the Post-Queer Movement. Post-Queer was an embrace of hedonism, art, and old Hollywood, and a rejection of strident activist dogma. We kicked the movement off with the Glennda and Friends episode The Post-Queer Tour, a satirical romp filmed at various locations in the “old-school” West Village (with Bruce in drag as Judy LaBruce, a punk iteration of Judy Garland). After quizzing random queers on the street with lines from old Hollywood movies, we performed “Post-Queer civil disobedience” by snorting poppers in broad daylight near the West Side piers. (In those days, poppers weren’t always easy to find, having been outlawed by the Crime Control Act of 1990.)
I sent a VHS copy of the episode to Camille, and she was delighted by the wicked humor and Warholian style of filming. It inspired the two of us to devise our own tour of Greenwich Village — an unscripted stroll in which Glennda and Camille would discuss the current state of feminism and gay identity, porn, and whatever else popped into our heads. After choosing the title — Glennda and Camille Do Downtown — we nailed down a date and filmed on a gloriously sunny day in May.
Glennda and Camille Paglia filming a segment.
The most famous scene in the episode was a spontaneous, unplanned confrontation with anti-porn demonstrators from the group Feminists Fighting Pornography, who were stationed on the corner of West 8th Street and 6th Avenue. As the women were trying to block our cameras with the back of their placards — which featured hardcore porn images of women being tortured on the front — Camille and I heckled them with lines such as “A day without pornography is like a day without sunshine!” and “Go look at Caravaggio, Michelangelo! Look at Greek art! This is so fucking puritanical. Go to India! Pro-sex Hinduism! This is bullshit, you people suck!”
After the video aired on Public Access, it became an instant cult classic. But not everyone loved it. People I knew from ACT UP openly voiced their disapproval. Some even began crossing the street when they saw me coming. Camille was an enemy of gay and bi people, they argued. They considered her views on date rape, in particular, repugnant. In a 1991 article for New York Newsday, Paglia had written, “Feminism keeps telling women they can do anything, go anywhere, say anything, wear anything. No, they can’t. Women will always be in sexual danger.” The activists felt Paglia was dangerous because “she was only half right.” ACT UP women I knew were also outraged by Camille’s characterization of lesbians, whose more incendiary quotes included, “The lesbians of America are the walking wounded. I want them to be fabulous,” and “Lesbians are frumps, sleeping bags with legs.”
Aligning with Paglia made me a traitor. I had betrayed the movement. In their eyes, I was no longer a righteous drag activist — I was the Leon Trotsky of ACT UP.
A few months later, I submitted Glennda and Camille Do Downtown to the Sundance Film Festival. They accepted it on the condition that I shorten the video from 29 minutes to 15. And I needed to have it transferred to 16mm film, which cost me $1,000 (a lot of money in those days for a struggling artist). In an amusing twist of fate, the 16mm version of Glennda and Camille Do Downtown was programmed alongside the AIDS activist film Fast Trip, Long Drop by Gregg Bordowitz, who was absolutely horrified when my film received wild applause at a screening in the festival’s Egyptian Theater.
Back in NYC, I continued producing episodes of Glennda and Friends, including more shows with Bruce and a sequel with Camille: Glennda and Camille Do Fashion Avenue, in which we mischievously praised the art of mink-coat making by visiting a fur factory in the garment district and extolled the virtues of rail-thin models at a mannequin showroom. I relished my cultivated role as a contrarian and free speech warrior. It was exhilarating and addictive. And the work I was creating had extended beyond Public Access to international film festivals and art galleries.
Glennda and Camile.
In 1995, Bruce (reprising his role as Judy LaBruce) and I decided we wanted to “cure ourselves of our homosexuality” (but still be drag queens) and visited the Aesthetic Realist Foundation in Soho, a wacky art cult that claimed it could “cure” gayness. After they threw us out into the street, we decamped to our videographer’s apartment and stuck forks into an electric socket while watching joyful scenes from the 1970 film The Boys in the Band — our own little “DIY electroconversion therapy.” (A transcript of the episode, A Case for the Closet, appears in Mark Simpson’s heretical anthology Anti-Gay (1996).)
The last episode of Glennda and Friends was filmed in the fall of 1995. Entitled One Man Ladies, it co-starred LA drag queen terrorist, performer, and fine artist Vaginal Davis. At the time, Vag was in search of a stable romantic relationship, having grown tired and depressed with one-night stands. Her bible was a bestseller called The 10 Stupid Things Women Do to Mess Up Their Lives (1994) by conservative psychiatrist and radio talk show host Dr. Laura Schlessinger, which mapped out retrograde rules and advice on marriage and monogamy. Glennda and Vag headed to West 57th Street with the book and interviewed women on the street about love and relationships. The results were hilarious, and while it seemed like we were satirizing Dr. Laura’s advice, Vag was in fact dead serious. Glennda, not entirely convinced, played along.
Glenn Belverio and Camille Paglia
In 1996, I was invited to England and Italy for retrospective screenings of my work and to perform with actor and drag artist Alexis Arquette on the roof of a castle in Bologna. While it seemed like Glennda was now on top of the world, riding on the mid-‘90s drag explosion, getting written up on Page Six of the NY Post, and maybe on the verge of something bigger (an agent at William Morris had taken me on), I was having an existential crisis.
After almost getting evicted from my rent-stabilized apartment because I was too busy soaking up the glamor of fame to think about generating a stable income, I had a reality check. I had turned 30 that year, and the life of a starving artist was starting to wear on me. My Capricorn instincts kicked in. I hung up my wigs and heels and joined the workforce: first as an assistant fashion stylist, then as a journalist and fashion editor, and finally as a marketing copywriter for brands like Bloomingdale’s and Tiffany’s.
I spent the next two decades barely thinking about my drag past, as the videotapes languished in my closet and at my co-producer Stevin Michel’s office at NYU. In 2018, after my work was excavated by curators in England, I was approached by Video Data Bank, a Chicago-based distributor of artist-created videos. In 2019, they digitized and preserved my entire archive, giving the work a whole new life for contemporary audiences.
A film is now in the works, a documentary titled Glenn & Glennda, which has brought up a barrage of questions I keep asking myself. Can Glennda be resurrected? Should she be resurrected? How will that look 30 years later, in a media-saturated, post-post-post world of digital noise, amid new culture wars raging around gender and sexuality? In the spirit of DIY creativity, I’ll just have to grab a mascara wand and a microphone, and dive in. After all, I was a free speech contrarian decades before it was cool.
Published June 15, 2025
Published in Issue XIII: Heretic
