The Infectious Queerness of SSION

The first time I saw SSION (that’s shun as in pronounciashun, temptatshun), the band was doing an immersive art installation called BOY at The Hole, a brand new New York gallery. It was 2010 and Deitch Projects—legendary art dealer Jeffrey Deitch’s iconic downtown New York gallery that was so close to the cutting edge you might actually get cut if you didn’t watch where you were going—had just shut its doors after 14 years. I’d been an intern at Deitch Projects, and the one thing I remember about the space was the way it brought together people from all walks of life. Rich people, hipsters, drag queens, transgressive queers—it was all very Warholian. Everyone in the New York glitterati warned that if Deitch Projects closed there would be a “giant hole” in the New York art world, hence this new gallery’s name—The Hole.

BOY was certainly a queer experience. Live concert video footage looped on the gallery walls, and the gallery itself was relatively dark. It seemed like every inch of space was splashed in some kind of glitter or hand-drawing. When I walked up to the gallery for the exhibition it felt like a party on the sidewalk as well as in the gallery itself. Even though SSION was not performing live, club kids still showed up in their most ridiculous looks, smoking cigarettes and looking effortlessly cool. Mustaches painted on their faces, headpieces properly affixed. One thing was clear: these were not just passersby—these were diehard fans. They’d been following SSION from the beginning and had fully subscribed to SSION’s unique, queer creative alternate universe.

SSION has impressive indie street cred, having toured with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, CSS, The Gossip, and NYC’s House of Ladosha. Fronted by mad scientist Cody Critcheloe, who has made music videos for other indie acts including Santigold and The Gossip, SSION is technically a band but it is more of a queer performance art laboratory. Drawing musical influences everywhere from punk rock to electronica, and visual cues from bad drag and John Waters, SSION is an experiment with the possibilities of queerness; a critique of queerness from the purview of queerness. In Cruising Utopia, José Muñoz reminds us that queerness is never in the present moment. Queerness is always a future essence that we are striving for but that we can’t reach right here, right now. Queerness is that reach for a better, queerer place. This thirst for a future queerness is a kind of “critical idealism,” a mode of queer theory that privileges hope rather than the standard, anti-utopian negativism that courses through the veins of much queer theory. “Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on the potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.”¹ Put differently, queerness is an essence that rejects oppressive norms of all sorts and reaches forward toward a future place that is not here, now, but there.

The theme of transgressive queerness appears throughout SSION’s creative oeuvre. On Fools Gold, from 2004, Michelle Nolan sings “I wonder/Yes I really wonder/Is there any future for/The woman” on the funky electro-feminist jam “The Women,” and “Street Jizz” is a crowd favorite. Yet the song that visually captures the essence of SSION’s queer futurity is the music video for “My Love Grows In The Dark,” from their 2011 release Bent. The video features two boys in gender-fuck drag, not including Cody Critcheloe who has his own look. One of dancers is a shirtless black male who wears brightly patterned pants and neon lipstick; the other is an androgynous male wearing all white. The drag feels less like a Butlerian commentary on gender and more like a wink to the pleasures of edgy, gender-bending, subcultural nightlife fashion, a world deeply embedded to queer performance art history. These aren’t drag queens—they’re club kids working some serious looks.

Getting dressed for the night is fabulous because fashion becomes a space where bodies get...