“I’m not sure if I consider myself a drag queen anymore. Maybe years ago! It’s taken on a new face. I do love to dress up, but for the world I have to say I’m an artist, because sometimes I don’t even wear a dress. I just want to sing. With Manfred Thierry Mugler, we went with the concept of ‘Z chromosome’; not he nor she but Z, the last letter of the alphabet. I don’t consider myself X or Y. My job is to entertain. I was engineered to perform, to make babies — my art is my child!” – Joey Arias
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JOEY ARIAS x LOGAN LYNN
for HuffPost Queer Voices (2013)
(Photo by Ruvén Afanador)
“Participating in the arts, as an observer or creating it, can be a way to touch and heal and recontextualize and bolster and imagine and be excited by and to be let loose which, for someone whose very self is at odds with the world around them, can be the literal difference between life and death. It is important for the well-being of all people but I think it may have a slightly more significant place for LGBTQIA+ people or for any group or individual who faces an excess of scrutiny, bigotry, violence, or ostracization for who they are. It is a place to turn negative experience and negative feeling into something other than oppression or pain.” – Jamie Stewart, Xiu Xiu
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JAMIE STEWART x LOGAN LYNN
for DotGay Blog (2021)
(Interview posted at OhHey.gay and LoganLynnMusic.com)
#XiuXiu
(Photo by Jeremy Lange)
“People think we made it all up. They think that we improvised. We took a lot of acid — I mean a LOT of acid — at the time, but not while we were working. Acid was Saturday night. You know, John (Waters) wrote every word. None of this was improvised. John was pack leader, gentle and respectful. He didn’t bark, he didn’t bite, but definitely pack leader. There was no fucking up on the set, because we couldn’t. The budgets were so tight. The scenes were shot in masters. Now, I’m not telling you to do this, but if you go back and look at Pink Flamingos, notice that there are no cutaways. If the scene was 4 and a half minutes long and somebody blew a line at 4 minutes 15 seconds, you had to all start over. None of us knew what the hell we were doing, but I think for people who were untrained, our level of commitment was astonishing. We all really wanted to do it right, and we had fun. We were glad to be there, but we knew that we couldn’t fuck up. It wasn’t pressure. It was responsibility, which is different.” – Mink Stole
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MINK STOLE x LOGAN LYNN
for HuffPost Entertainment (2013)
(Photo by John Edmonds)
“I like this idea that sometimes you can inherit a gay from your mother. Sometimes that happens. Like ‘Baby, you remember uncle Ron? Well, he got a D.U.I. so he’s gonna babysit you from now on.’ The magic of the relationship between an old gay man and a little girl is, like, the best friendship that you could possibly have on earth. They will watch Twilight as many times as you want and they will play Barbies with you and they don’t have to be Ken. It’s like ‘Girl, I wanna be Skipper!’ and it’s the most beautiful thing, so I wanna really acknowledge that, and call out that one relationship that I know exists. There’s never been a movie about it. There’s never been a TV show about it, like that generational comedy between this really old gay man and this really little girl. It’s such a funny thing. It could be a crime duo! The closest thing to it is Paper Moon but that’s not even really it. Really old gay and really little girl is such a perfect combination of personalities, so I’m really trying to explore that.” – Margaret Cho
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MARGARET CHO x LOGAN LYNN
for Portland Queer Voices blog series (2013)
(Photo by Nick Spanos)
