Reminder: Billy Bowers runway fashion show at Steven Wolf Fine Arts @ Fri Dec 31 8pm - 11pm (Queer Things)

more details » Billy Bowers runway fashion show at Steven Wolf Fine Arts Steven Wolf Fine Arts 2747 19th Street, A San Francisco, CA "Walt Disney was Homosexual" Billy Bowers makes clothes for parade floats, nightclub stages and candy-colored hallucinations. Trashy, colorful, plastic, gorgeous, the costumes are ideal for drag queens and people who want to shout without opening their mouths. "I was born to be cheap and vulgar," said Bowers, and he's proven it over a 40 year career: in the '60s, he made acid-trip tranny clothes for the Cockettes; in the '70s glam rock costumes for Alice Co...oper, Mick Jagger and Salvador Dali. Later on he began documenting underground gay culture and from these investigations studded leather wall hangings dotted with photos of S & M scenes emerged. "I'm a tramp and a slut and a drug addict," said Bowers once, who in person is extremely low-key and polite. He has lived in New York, San Francisco, Key West and New Orleans. He's seen high times working with the Rolling Stones, and hard times working in cheap hotels to pay the rent. His new work captures all these aesthetic moments in one audacious, confident vision, and it will be on display New Years Eve at Steven Wolf Fine Arts in San Francisco, where the gallery will host a special one-night runway event and party. After the opening, the clothes will be fitted to mannequins and shown in the gallery alongside the wall hangings. Unfettered by those pesky distinctions between commercial craft and fine art, Bowers negotiates the heavily guarded border between fashion and assemblage with the same ease that he traversed gender boundaries with the Cockettes. You could cut up his pants and mount them on a wall or sew up the wall hangings into a jacket and it wouldn't diminish their impact. They are made for both men and women but often worn by people somewhere in between. With Bowers, it's art and fashion, male and female, serious and fun, just like the vintage Hollywood Star headline screaming from the butt of the most garish pair of pink and black hot pants ever: SUPERSTARS WHO WERE FORMER HOMOSEXUALS. In the lounge, Steven Wolf Fine Arts presents photos of the Cockettes and the Angels of Light from a never-before-seen series by San Francisco artist Roger Anderson. In 1972, Goldie Glitters got Anderson a backstage pass at the Palace Theater so he could photograph the acid-inspired, gender-rebellion performance collective. The young photographer asked the performers to pose as though they were on a Vogue magazine shoot. Not exactly shy, they obliged. The result is a blend of high-fashion camp and backstage drama. One minute you're in a Vanity Fair layout, the next you're in a Playbill bio. The photos don't gawk at the performers, whose drug, dress and laissez faire stage antics made them an alien spectacle even to 1960s San Francisco. Nor do they linger over them with the intimacy of a friendly biographer. Rather, Anderson intuited what mainstream fashion designers would do with the Cockettes decades later, when their myth was revived by a thrilling documentary—he transformed their politics sexual and otherwise into fashion codes. While not shying away from the bearded glitter of their gender confusion, the Cockettes in these photos come across as friendly circus folk dressed up for Carnivale. Gone is the trampy otherness, the scary sexual pioneering and the free food/free theater ideology: these Cockettes are star struck, stage brats, ready for their close-up with a mainstream culture that wouldn't be ready for them for another four decades. When Fri Dec 31 8pm – 11pm Pacific Time Calendar Queer Things Who • larrybob@gmail.com - creator

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