. . . FOR MM

Man:

Who is your greatest super star?

Smith:

Mario.

Man:

Why?

Smith:

Because he immediately enlists the sympathy of the audience.¹

Mario Montez was the great drag Superstar who reigned over the New York City underground film and theater scene from the early 1960s until the mid-1970s. In 1977, Montez quietly disappeared from the public eye, and his whereabouts remained a mystery to scholars and most of his former colleagues and friends for almost thirty years. In 2006, he resurfaced momentarily for an appearance in Mary Jordan’s documentary Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis. The return of Mario Montez, once again on screen in drag, alongside his longtime friend, performer Agosto Machado, would seem to have warranted a documentary of its own. It wasn’t until 2009, however, that Montez at the age of 74 finally made the commitment to cultivate once again his public persona and pursue stage, film, and modeling work. He made a number of public appearances and granted interviews at festivals, universities, and retrospectives in Berlin, Frankfurt, New York City, and Wroclaw until his death at age 78 on 26 September 2013.²

I was fortunate enough to have been able to facilitate most of Montez’s recent appearances and to conduct many interviews with him since his return to the public eye. I naturally took advantage of these discussions to inquire about the inherited wisdom about the Superstar. Montez had agreed to only a few interviews during his roughly fifteen years of continuous work in film and theater, so there was very little available—and reliable—information about him.³ The existing accounts in the film and theater literature tend more toward half-truths, projections, and whimsy than accurate representations of Montez’s real-life experiences and perspectives. In what follows, I provide a brief summary of Montez’s career with the main goal of highlighting the development of his performance identity. At the same time, I hope to suggest the scope of this unique artist’s involvement in and contribution to the 1960s and ’70s underground art scenes and to clarify some of the myths and falsehoods about Montez and his work that emerged in the absence of his own account. I’m not primarily invested in adjudicating disputes over the Superstar’s actual thoughts and feelings about his work. Rather, I’m interested simply in expanding our conceptions about this figure central to 1960s film and theater beyond the limited perspectives previously available. Montez’s reappearance in the final years of his life afforded him the opportunity to weigh in on the body of writing about him and his work that emerged over the last four decades. While Montez’s recent memories were certainly as selective and partial as anyone’s, they nevertheless brought clearly into focus a dynamic image of an ever-evolving performer variously involved in the queer, film, and theater subcultures of his day. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes in this essay are from my discussions with Montez.⁴

Mario Montez was born as Rene Rivera in Ponce, Puerto Rico, on 20 July 1935. When he was nine years old, his family relocated to the United States. “My father had left us six months earlier to get a job and an apartment in New York City. He got a job with the city doing pipe maintenance for the water works.” Rene lived with three younger siblings and his parents in El Barrio, on East 111th Street between Third Avenue and Lexington Avenue. Throughout his childhood, he was the family photographer, taking hundreds of photos of family members and gatherings over the years. He attended the New York School of Printing to study graphic arts and graduated in 1954. “Then I worked as an apprentice in a shop in Manhattan for about six months. And then I quit. . . . It was too messy, cleaning up. I didn’t mind setting up the tiles. But you had to clean your own press. Ew!” He went on to work as a photo finisher and shipping clerk before finding regular work as an office clerk. Contrary to many published...