“Obey the walrus”

If by any chance Johnnie Baima is not dead, he would soon turn 64. A few days ago a friend uploaded a Facebook group a video called Obey the Walrus and sold it to us asking "What do you think about this job?". A real scumbag: a drugged transvestite, anorexic and polio sufferer dancing tap as if someone was pointing a gun and, while filming it, he says "Dance for me, damn you unhappy!".

Whoever dances in the video is Johnnie Baima, known as The Goddess Bunny, a famous drag queen from the suburbs of Los Angeles. What you see on YouTube was filmed in 1980 in a home-made way by another trans star, Glen Meadmore, when The Goddess was barely 20 and had tested positive for HIV. At that time, it was also known as AIDS terrorist as its photos were disseminated among some families on the East Coast of the United States to promote homophobia in the fight against AIDS. "I was going through a great depression, I was trying to deny my condition and I refused to eat because I thought I was going to die. I saw myself as a cut of a Karen Carpenter doll, "he said in an interview in 2008.

Director Nick Bougas decided to make a documentary about his life where she starred in it; Then included in the film the famous 1980 video. The film was called The Goddess Bunny and premiered in 1998.

The Goddess is not a character that could be in the program of Anabela Ascar. He could not because his physical affection does not cause grace. O does cause, but not with hilarity; But rather as a morbid fact. The Goddess could not leave at two o'clock on the Chronicle TV screen because in Argentina parents take care of their children many and never let them see such a horrible subject.

II
The version of the video that circulated on the web and today exceeds 3 million views is this and is edited to give it a satanic effect and create the idea of ​​a trance through the screen. But the original version is much more cruel because it shows the truly terrifying: that everything is real.

Traditional horror films were losing ground in front of the gore subgenre where mutilation of bodies is an amazing megashow. Why should a child who is emerging from childhood should be more afraid of a psychopath with a chainsaw than a monster with claws and fangs capable of appearing in dreams and killing him? Easy: because the pain of amputation of an arm with a chainsaw is plausible.

Once it is understood that what shows Obedece to the walrus is real, is not trucado and has no effect that slims the limbs to the character (not everything is photoshopeable) you enter a different path, that of the morbid. That subject is real, like you. Thus the grotesque is constructed, with a brutal exaggeration to deform the material of our finitude: the body. The sensation that generates to see a deformed body dancing tap and begging the spectator with the glance is a conceptual compact between pity and disgust; And an unconventional, unhealthy, immoral, sweet-tasting horror: the morbidness stuck in the brain like the injection of a morphinomaniac.

III
Perhaps Donna Haraway, when she published her Cyborg Manifesto in a magazine in 1985, had already seen the video of The Goddess [1]. Haraway said that the problem of feminism and socialism was its lack of irony in the face of a situation of domination. When the tools to counter machismo are a series of insults nullifying the other position the debate is lost. That is why she understands that irony is the way to deal with contradictions, to hold together opposing things. This is the case of morbidity: uniting pity with perversity. And to think it requires irony not to fall into the commonplace of political correctness.

There is no way to respond unilaterally why a video is so viewed; What can be said is that the contradiction plays a central role, the acidity of irony, a second round of thread to the foreseeable fear: why does a sick transvestite of polio gives you laughter or disgust or impression or fear? Is not God's creature so equal - so innocent and guilty at the same time - like any other?

IV
At first The Goddess became known in the gay and trans subculture of Hollywood under the name of Sandy Crisp. Her physical appearance attracted attention not only for her exaggeration in female makeup but also for her limbs crippled by polio. The Gothic and drag tendency that was practiced in the underground of the time allowed to him to construct its identity like independent actress. A chronicler [2] who saw The Goddess on the scene said she could not believe how a transvestite who could barely stand up kept his audience so captive.

Made debut in the cinema in 1986 with the film Hollywood Vice Squad where it shared scene with Carrie Fisher, Princess Leia Organa of the saga Star Wars,Which at that time was in a fatal decline due to the daily consumption of cocaine. That same year he posed for Joel-Peter Witkin, a renowned photographer who mixes perversion with atrocity, in a show that traveled the world [3]. According to some rumors, Witkin would have asked The Goddess to have an erection at the time of photography to which she replied that it would only be possible if he himself practiced oral sex. He also starred in three more films: The Goddess Bunny Channels Shakespeare (1989), The Drift (1989) and The Ma Barker Story (1990).

When Marilyn Manson saw the photos of Witkin called her to ask her to be in the video clip of The Dope Show. "He's the sweetest man I've ever met. It's a person with dynamite, "said The Goddess Coneja.

And so was the chain. The rapper Dr. Dree saw that video and also called it. In the subject Puppet Master, The Goddess appears dancing tied like a marionette, disguises of nun and with an octopus between the legs.

V
In The Fairy Fairies [4], Baudelaire relates that all the parents of a French people carried their newborns in their arms to witness the Great Fairy Assembly. They, less prudent than capricious, were in charge of giving a gift to each of the babies. But this gift had an ambiguity: happiness and misfortune were exchanged in that conceived grace. When the populace was retiring, a subject shouted at the Fairy that was closest to him that his son was still missing. The Hada, annoyed by having worked all day, after a few seconds of reflection gave him the gift of liking. "Like it?" Said the man. The scene ends with the French totally perplexed and the Fairies leaving, talking to each other, mocking the poor guy who does not know what awaits him.

The more than three million views in the video The Goddess say she really likes. But not in the conventional way. On the Web there is a prominent flood of tender kittens, sensual bodies, graceful falls and epic combats. The gift of The Goddess is different. In his grace, misfortune and happiness make a strange symbiosis: the morbid blessing of liking the populace.

SAW
The childhood of such a person is never angelic: he suffered sexual abuse and contracted poliomyelitis of very small, a disease that affects the central nervous system causing from muscle atrophy and paralysis until malformation. It is contracted by respiratory secretions (cough, sneezing) or by the oral fecal route, that is, by eating excrement, a practice that has to do - somehow - with continued anal and oral sex and coprophilia.

When her parents separated, The Goddess - who was still Johnnie - went to a community foundation. Tortures were everyday. They broke her bones, tied her, burned her, and even made her defecate on herself. Then he got her to adopt a kind but ignorant guy. And as you know, ignorance can kill. He took her to swim several hours a day to strengthen her bones but the opposite occurred and brought complications; Had to undergo spinal fusion surgery urgently. Then the doctors implanted a bar of steel in his spine. This operation, which is now illegal, stopped its growth forever. "Believe me, I know what medieval torture is," he said in an interview.

Not only childhood, but also adolescence and maturity. He worked as a prostitute for two years for an unemployed man and drug addict. She was raped by two guys on a subway. Her first husband died in a traffic accident. Until The Goddess Bunny arrived, the great movie of his life.

"Although it was basically an innocent and almost quaint scene, the video has a tendency to make the uninitiated nervous," director Nick Bougas said in an interview. "It seems as if the scene of a horribly malformed individual trying to do something funny was something unbearably hideous for most people."

As soon as the filming of The Goddess Bunny ended, The Goddess married a newly released ex-convict. They lived for a time in a trailer with their mother-in-law, a Christian fanatic who believed the lie that Johnnie Baima was a woman. That relationship ended badly: the man was violent and fajada all the time.

VII
One of the many nicknames of The Conga Goddess was The Walrus. When the YouTube-edited video of the movie clip spread, many began to have nightmares. It created the myth of a trans sect that worshiped Lucifer and sought to attack the minds of the infants to pervert them and thus create an army of transvestites maniacs. The Goddess always laughed grotesquely when some journalist asked about Satanism. Then he would pause, drink a sip of bourbon-an American whiskey, his favorite-and stare at the interviewee. Then, with a hoarse voice from the cigarette, he would say, "I would never ... I could never do that, I love mI public "///// PACO

Notes

At that moment the Goddess was a cyborg not only to have a bar of metal in its body, but also by its condition of trans, where its feminine identity is not a priori organic.

The testimony is by an artist bearing the pseudonym of Red Cell and is located on this page.

In the sample, The Goddess recreates to Leda producing the demystification of the beauty in its more radical state. One detail: the floor is totally pissed.

Poem in prose included in The Spleen of Paris, by Charles Baudelaire, published in 1869.

Sources: Thanks to Luciano Sáliche and the other contents of the post is my own, and / or, is a compilation of different sources.
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