Vaginal Davis

Vaginal Davis (born Clarence Dennis Williams on 1969 February 23) is a punk rock drag queen and an avant-garde performance artist. Davis' name is an homage to the radical black feminist Angela Davis. Journalist and musician Craig Lee bestowed the middle name "Creme", but Davis herself prefers that people not use the name Vaginal Creme Davis. She's also known as her dominatrix-alter-ego Veronika V'Intrest.

Life and Career

Davis has had an exceptionally prolific career, and is often associated with the formation of the queercore movement. She has performed with such artists as Lisa Crystal Carver, Margaret Cho, and Beck, and has collaborated with underground photographers/filmmakers Bruce LaBruce, Rick Castro, the performance artist Ron Athey, and more recently with the Cheap experimental theatre collective in Berlin, Germany.

One of her first bands was Pedro, Muriel & Esther (PME), co-founded with Glen Meadmore, who recorded their first single for independent record label Amoeba Records, and went on to record The White To Be Angry with producer Steve Albini. Davis is also a founding member of ¡Cholita! the Female Menudo with Alice Bag (of seminal 1970s punk band The Bags). Davis and Bag also worked together in The Afro Sisters. She was also in a band called Black Fag with Beck's mother Bibbe Hansen, and more recently, as a part of her collaboration with Cheap in Berlin, Davis formed a punk band called Ruth Fischer (Fischer was a leader in the German Communist Party).

In her home town of Los Angeles, Davis is also known for hosting Club Sucker (1994-1999), and Bricktops (2003-2005) - the latter was inspired by Bricktop, one of the more fascinating vaudevillian figures of the 1920s and 30s.

Davis has authored a number of underground films, including The White to Be Angry (1999), Designy Living (1994), Three Faces of Women (1994), and appears in queer underground video classics such as Super 8 1/2 (Bruce LaBruce, 1994) and Hustler White (Bruce LaBruce and Rick Castro, 1998), and Rosa von Praunheim's Can I Be Your Bratwurst, Please? (1999). She also directed an episode of Gideon's Crossing.

Vaginal Davis is the editor of the noted zines Fertile La Toyah Jackson Magazine and Shrimp. Aside from her own zines, her writing (somewhere between casual philosophy and gossip) has appeared in many publications, including Glue (in which she had a gossip column called "Because I Said So"), Ben Is Dead Magazine, the seminal queercore zine J.D.s, and the LA Weekly. One of her stories was anthologized in The Best American Erotica of 2003, edited by Susie Bright. She regularly writes for the Berlin/Dutch Zoo Magazine. She also has an upcoming book entitled Beware the Holy Whore, a compilation of interviews with her plethora of celebrity friends like Keanu Reeves, Missy Elliot, and Eminem.

Frequently in her stage shows Davis performs "shrimping", a slang term for toe sucking. On her tour with Margaret Cho she performed the "Ancient Shrimp Ritual" during which she would select a male volunteer from the audience, bind him to a chair, remove his shoes, slather his feet with whipped cream and cherries and would then proceed to suck his toes to the tune of Prince's "Cherries in the Snow".

As of 2007 Vaginal Davis resides in and is based out of Germany.

Trivia

• She has recently claimed that Condoleezza Rice is her first cousin.
• Beth Ditto has said she's the most attractive person in Hollywood
• She's six feet six inches tall
• She's one of 12 children; her mother was 45-years-old when she had her, and her father is Jewish-Mexican

Films

• Beyond Lovely, directed by Hilary Goldberg (2005)
• The White To Be Angry, directed by Vaginal Davis (1999)
• Can I Be Your Bratwurst, Please, directed by Rosa von Praunheim (1999)
• Hustler White, directed by Rick Castro and Bruce LaBruce (1998)
• Live Nude Girls, directed by Julianna Lavin (1995)
• Three Faces Of Women, directed by Vaginal Davis (1994)
• Super 8 1/2, directed by Bruce LaBruce (1994)
• Designy Living, directed by Vaginal Davis (1994)
• Tales of the City (television mini series) (1993)

Sources

• José Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) ISBN 0-8166-3015-1

• Jennifer Doyle, Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). ISBN 0-8166-4526-4

External links

• Vaginal Davis Official Site
• Vaginal Davis at Internet Movie Database
• The Cholita! Page
• The Cholita! Family Tree, compiled by Ms. Davis
• Bruce LaBruce essay on Davis

This article is based on a GNU FDL LGBT Wikia article: Davis Vaginal Davis

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