[Note: Justin Vivian Bond goes by Mx (pronounced ‘mix’) Justin Vivian Bond, and prefers the pronoun “v”.]
On Monday night at the Ace Hotel Mx Justin Vivian Bond—trans-activist, cabaret chanteuse, performance art icon, and memoirist—will speak with Mike Albo about literature as a way of being, thinking, and taking flying leaps.
Onstage, Justin Vivian Bond is known for v’s ability to harness a stream of consciousness flow of narrative ideas to construct complex characters in real time right in front of the audience’s eyes, polishing them off through simple verbal repetition. The process so impressed Pulitzer-Prize winning author Michael Cunningham, he brought his creative writing students to Bond’s performances as lessons in how to develop characters.
“I [am] a rotten typist,” Bond admits, “but I’m a pretty good storyteller.” Bond dictated most of Tango, v’s memoir of transchildhood. “We’d sit out on my fire escape and I told [my intern] the story—he could type about as fast as I could talk.”
As a child, Justin Vivian Bond sashayed around the house on v’s tiptoes and wore v’s mother’s Revlon Iced Watermelon lipstick to school (v now prefers MAC’s Lady Danger lip color). As an adult, v has inspired the East Village queer culture while prompting a post-millennial evolution of language: the simple act of choosing your own pronouns changes the way everyone around you uses language itself.
Tyler Oates wrote: “To talk—or write—about Mx Justin Vivian Bond requires patience, forethought, and courtesy; one can’t easily ramble off words about v without stopping mid-sentence to use the correct pronoun.”
On Monday night, Justin Vivian Bond will lead us through v’s own glamorous take on DIY ingenuity, helping us follow the breadcrumbs, Hansel and Gretel style, toward crafting our own characters, narrative, and language, especially when the socially accepted ones don’t fit.