advertisement
advertisement
|
By Gerry Visco
Friday, October 05, 2007
Iconic downtown personality, outrageous performer, musician, party promoter and relentless rebel Dean Johnson, 45, died Sept. 20 while visiting a friend in Washington D.C.
Johnson was scheduled to begin hosting his weekly series titled “Reading for Filth: Queer Writers Read Queer Sex Stories” starting Oct. 3 at the Rapture Café in the East Village. To honor Johnson’s memory, owner Joe Birdsong and manager Brian Butterick, aka Hattie Hathaway, held a memorial there.
Johnson cut a wide swathe in downtown Manhattan and hundreds of mourners spilled out onto the sidewalk of the Café, which is also a bookstore, while friends such as Village Voice columnist Michael Musto, performer Lady Bunny, party impresario Chi Chi Valenti, former go-go boys and “everyone from the downtown scene from the last 20 years,” according to Musto, gave eulogies. Admirers brought in Johnson memorabilia that they set up on an “Honoring Wall.” Projected on the opposite side of the room was a film of his last performance at the Howl Festival on Sept. 8; his is projected singing and camping it up dressed as a Keystone Kop.
Musto reminisced about how he was Johnson’s first supporter in the press and how he put him on the cover of The Village Voice in 1986 with the headline, “Not just another bald 6’6” drag queen.”
“What impressed me most about him at the time was he was a completely defiant, unapologetic gay icon for the downtown community,” Musto said. “He was always on the edge and one of the last great rebels.” In addition to his height, the perpetual renegade was extremely thin, fond of wearing cocktail dresses, heels, outrageous eyewear and pendant earrings—which he proudly claimed he’d stolen. One grieving friend labeled him a “glamorous general” who relished fighting repressive gender roles and the restrictive conventions of society.
Johnson never minced words and could often be rude and outspoken, especially when proving a point, but he was also widely known as friendly, humble and not at all snobby. One friend said that deep down Johnson was actually a “marshmallow,” a bit shy except when he was performing.
Butterick said that Johnson “always lived larger than life, over-the-top, even in his death.” Johnson’s body was discovered on Sept. 20 and was held in a morgue for several days until he could be identified. Johnson’s cause of death is still unclear but is being investigated by the violent-crimes bureau of D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department.
A self-proclaimed sex worker and escort, Johnson was reputed to travel to Washington to organize sex parties, perhaps for a wealthy Saudi Arabian. On Sept. 19, he was visiting to console his friend, Steven Saleh, who only days earlier had another friend, Jordan Cronkin, 29, die in the same apartment of a drug overdose. A police spokesman speculated whether drugs combined with Viagra or Cialis could have also lead to Johnson’s death.
A minister’s son, Johnson moved to New York City from Maine in 1979 to attend New York University. By 1984, he had become a prominent figure in the downtown club world, beginning as a doorman at Save the Robots on Ave. B, where he stood on a platform wearing a green miniskirt. He was a go-go boy dancing atop the bar of the Pyramid, where he first met Butterick, the club’s manager, who pulled him from a line of patrons outside waiting to get in. They soon became friends.
Other gigs included being a doorman at the World where on Tuesday nights he hosted the Rock and Roll Fag Bar. Also at the World, he formed the band Dean and the Weenies which also played at clubs like the Pyramid, Danceteria and Area. In one of their trademark songs, “Fuck You,” Dean and the Weenies would sing, “Fuck Union Carbide, fuck third world genocide, fuck thermonuclear ware, fuck Mary Tyler Moore!”
During the late ’80s early ’90s, he started using heroin and was in and out of rehab. After a failed suicide attempt, in 1995 he returned to his musical career and formed the band The Velvet Mafia. He continued to organize and promote parties such as the Foxy Competition at the Cock, where exhibitionists gleefully took off their clothes. He performed in live sex shows at the Sperm and The Black Party and since most gay venues didn’t play punk rock or alternative music, he created HomoCorps at CBGBs, a monthly queer music showcase celebration. One of his more notorious soirees was Triple XXX at The Hole, featuring a highly charged sexual atmosphere where he boasted “customers can help themselves to the go-go dancers the way you would help yourself to a tray of hors d’ouevres.” Along the same idea, he threw the more scandalous Magnum at The Park, which the police soon shut down.
Throughout his life, Johnson was proud of being gay and politically incorrect. He was an advocate for open and even public sexuality. His parties featured go-go boys dancing atop the bar, clad in briefs or nude, and sometimes masturbating, ejaculating into the crowd. In a letter he wrote to the New York Blade published in 2005, he wrote, “In most indigenous tribes, people are comfortable with nudity and children grow up watching adults copulate. No one is traumatized by these displays of coitus because for them it is perfectly NATURAL. For us it SHOULD be.”
A blog recently posted on motherboards.com cites him as New York’s “only hugely hung real dom/top.” Speaking of his large endowment, one recent lover lamented Johnson’s demise. “I met him at the meatrack in the Pines. He had one of the biggest dicks I’ve ever seen, amazing, bigger than a tall beer can.”
Not only large in body, he was big in spirit. Butterick praised Johnson as being generous to other performers. Birdsong, who first met the queer rocker more than 10 years ago at CBGB’s and who later worked with him in several clubs, agreed. “He made everyone around him a star.”
Controversial performance artist Karen Finley lauded her late friend’s courage in fighting gender stereotypes. “Besides his humor and being insanely talented as a performance artist himself, one high heel at a time, Dean always encouraged me in my artistic battles and stay true to the art.” Certainly Dean Johnson was down-to-earth. Exulting over some of the highlights of his colorful life, under the 2004 entry on his blog he noted, “I even managed to turn a good trick last night—43 years old and still getting paid for sex. Is this a great country or what?”
|
