My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them

Ms. Kiki Durane (Depression Era): Her Sound and Fury

116 Ms. Kiki Durane Her Sound and Fury Christopher Schmidt Kiki Durane is the more outgoing half of Kiki and Herb, the drag performance act that has been an underground, and increasingly aboveground, New York institution for the better part of a decade. I mean “better” in the primary sense of the word: Kiki and Herb have brightened my nights and given voice to a whole spectrum of desires and disappointments that I didn’t know were in me until given life onstage. Meet Kiki, a washed-up cabaret singer with an epic backstory who stays afloat with a tumbler of liquor and a talent for the withering comeback. Played by Justin Bond—a dashing, androgynous, 117 let’s say late-thirty-something performer—with an inimitable blend of ingenuousness and cynicism, one of Kiki’s least heralded virtues is her expansive taste in music. Kiki and Herb bring their lounge-act stylings (Kiki’s gravelly baritone is backed by Herb’s thundering piano arrangements) to the indie pop canon, covering everything from Joni Mitchell to Kate Bush to Radiohead. Then, just when you think they can’t push their sublime ironies any further , they’ll unearth the piquancy in some pop trifle like Britney Spears’s “. . . Baby One More Time” or Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy”— pure genius. But the definitive moment in a Kiki and Herb show is when, amid one of many autobiographical vignettes, Kiki sparks to fury, attacking some chimerical or real foe (George W. Bush, for instance ). Her anger is cathartic and oddly communal—the only time I’ve felt the queer fellowship I always anticipated I’d find in New York City. A Kiki and Herb show is more glamorous than a meeting at the LGBT center, less competitive (and generally disappointing ) than a night at the bars. Kiki possesses a rare, magical ability to electrify the audience’s raw need—that universal need to be rescued from loneliness and obscurity—and transforms that energy into a circuit of queer community and political activism, if only for one dazzling night. After the show, Kiki’s fans will act as if they own her, convinced Kiki speaks only to them. There are bragging rights. As for me, I’ll admit that I did not know Justin when he was—as legend has it—a precocious drama student at UC Santa Cruz. Nor did I see Justin/Kiki when s/he began her illustrious career in San Francisco, circa 1993, emerging phoenix-like from the embers of ACT UP. My own bragging rights are paltry. I once interviewed Bond in his 13th Street tenement apartment for a magazine article. Bond was charming and whip-smart, but confessed to me the toll performing Kiki exacts: “Most people struggle to have a positive outlook in life, and to be productive and to enjoy some sort of . . . pleasantness in their existence. And when I’m doing Kiki five or Ms. Kiki Durane 118 six days a week, I have to work that much harder—really, fucking hard—to have a positive attitude and be happy. It strains me.” Bond was trying to cut Kiki loose at the time of our interview by adopting alternate personas, like one called the “cool babysitter ” (short-lived). I’ve seen Bond perform many times without Kiki’s age-makeup and prosthetic birdseed breasts. Bond solo is soigné, smoky-voiced, and dissolute—half Ute Lemper, half Lou Reed. But folks still clamor for Kiki. Finally, Bond decided that to move on, Kiki had to be killed off. In 2004 Bond and Kenny Mellman (who plays Herb) staged a blowout farewell concert at Carnegie Hall called Kiki and Herb: We Will Die for You. I was there, as was half the gay population of the East Village—everyone, it seems, I had ever bedded or wanted to bed. (I attended with my boyfriend.) I had worried that the uptown venue might stifle Kiki, but the performance was better than I could have imagined—in a word, incendiary. For the first of many encores, Kiki lassoed up a gaggle of celebrities, including Rufus Wainwright, Sandra Bernhard, and Debbie Harry, to help her sing “Those Were the Days.” Amidst all that star wattage, Kiki still ruled the stage. After the show, rumors swirled. Were Kiki and Herb really splitting up? Could they be successful doing anything else? Was Bond really off to...