volcano
“What if, by mistake, one forgot that the person holding one’s hand was a man – or a woman – and if one, equally by mistake, were to slip into a heterosexual relationship with a woman, a lesbian relationship with a man?” (Daumer 1992: 97)
I first encountered Del LaGrace Volcano when he was Della Grace, lesbian photographer, when a book of hers, ‘Love Bites’ was used as a prop in a play I was in for a lesbian theatre company. She was considered by those in the company who knew her work to be controversial, a bit naughty, and they gave the impression that if you liked her stuff you were considered modern and ‘cool’ and if you weren’t you were old-school. I liked it. It was sexy, nicely done. I guess I was one of the cool kids.
Then when I was doing my under-graduate degree one of my fellow students, Jules, arranged for a talk by Del LaGrace, drag king/gender variant artist. I hadn't been aware of the changes that were enabling Della Grace to become Del LaGrace and was fascinated to see this once Femme lesbian was now a handsome, dapper drag king.
His talk was intriguing and stimulating. He asked a guy sitting in the front row was he a man or a woman and the guy said, ‘a man’. Del asked how he knew this and the guy sheepishly pointed to his groin. ‘In the first world war it was common for soldiers to have their genitals blown off by mines and so return home without their penis. Were they no longer men?’ he asked the squirming guy.
Del LaGrace then proceeded to show his journey from long haired, lipstick wearing femme Della Grace to the non-gender-specific hermaphrodite we saw before us. He told us that he had married a man – Johnny Volcano. He was now Del LaGrace Volcano
Del LaGrace Volcano has had relationships with both men and women but will not say he is bisexual. He calls himself ‘he’ though he identifies not with one gender or the other. He also calls himself 'herm'. And it is he who labels himself.
I ask the question: if this is a woman who has altered her body to become both male and female or neither male nor female, can the person holding Del’s hand ‘forget’ the gender? And what, then, does their relationship become? What is Del’s relationship with Johnny? Is it heterosexual or queer? Would it ever be described as bisexual? And when Del has a relationship with a woman, what then? Is that a lesbian relationship?
For me, the journey of Della Grace to Del LaGrace Volcano and all that it involves is a living example of Daumer’s seemingly metaphorical quote: gender can be 'forgotten' and the relationship can’t be gender defined. Even though his gender-fuck is deliberate, conscious, and part of his artistic work as well as a very political life-statement, it is still alive, part of an everyday world. And as part of the drag-king and gender-variable world, he is not alone.
I also think that the work produced since Della transitioned to Del has been extraordinarily powerful, moving, provocative, and much more stunning than i found the earlier 'Love Bites' era stuff to be. I can't describe why: it's visceral with me, as usual.
(copyright corinna tomrley & The University of York 2005)