Justin Bond / Jackie Curtis

About this book

In the heyday of Andy Warhol's legendary hub of art, subculture, and insanity known as the Factory, one performer made his mark like no Jackie Curtis. A wildly creative, avant-garde performer, poet, playwright, and longtime friend and collaborator of Warhol's, Curtis was well known as a cross-dressing phenom whose personal life went even further and was even wilder than anything onstage and onscreen. This limited edition book contains an essay by Hilton Als and a collection of archival photographs of Jackie Curtis interspersed with photographs Als took of Justin Bond, the creator of Kiki and other intriguing personalities. The parallels between Curtis and Bond are Bond, like Curtis (who died in 1985), is a man of many characters. He performs sometimes in light drag, sometimes in heavy drag, and when he performs in heavy drag favors frizzy wigs and glitter eye makeup and a certain air of debauchery. Like Curtis, Bond is an intelligent and subversive writer and a thrilling performer. So it is not strange that Als paired them. What is unusual is that, having made the connection between two of his favorites, he would write-and self-publish-a book about them and, more, about their importance to him. It's a very intimate, personal project in every the essay, the photos, the look and feel of the thing itself-Als had only a handful of copies printed.