Justin Vivian Bond: ‘I learned as a queer person very early in my life that we are the magicians of the workaround’

The town of Hudson sits on the east side of its eponymous river, 150km or so north of Manhattan. Forests bank the river on either side, trains making their way along the water’s edge. This old whaling-industry town is now a hub for artists. There’s Basilica Hudson, a performance venue in a 19th-century factory building, which is co-owned by the Smashing Pumpkins and Hole bassist, Melissa Auf der Maur, and her husband, the film-maker Tony Stone. There’s the nearby Art Omi, with its 120-acre sculpture park, and the line of galleries on Warren Street.

Drive a little way out of town and you’ll reach a quaint, sleepy village with a bookstore, a couple of restaurants and the House of Whimsy, the home of the great American cabaret artist Justin Vivian Bond, who pulls up resplendent in their recently purchased car.

Bond is a pioneer of queer performance and alternative cabaret, a Tony-nominated, Obie-winning singer, songwriter, shape-shifting performer, author, actor, painter and activist, as well as one of those high-grade conversationalists and raconteurs who make spending time with them feel like sinking into the most comfortable couch ever, and never wanting to stand up again.

They are currently preparing for a trip to Dublin to perform Only an Octave Apart at the Gate Theatre, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival, alongside their collaborator Anthony Roth Costanzo, the astonishingly talented, Grammy-winning opera singer, who returns to the Metropolitan Opera next May as Orfeo in Orfeo ed Eurydice.

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The pandemic stalled the original performances, so Bond and Costanzo recorded the album version first, overseen by their musical director and producer, Thomas Bartlett, whom Irish audiences tend to be most familiar with as a member of The Gloaming. A work of stunning juxtaposition, the album and its live performance blend influences and covers as diverse as Dido’s Lament and White Flag, Walk Like an Egyptian and Hymn to the Sun, from Philip Glass’s opera Akhnaten.

Bond’s cats, Pinky and Leather, lounge in the kitchen as Bond prepares bagels and lox from Russ & Daughters, delivered by the previous day’s interviewer.

“I learned as a queer person very early in my life that we are the magicians of the workaround,” Bond says of their capacity to fit multifaceted forms of performance to their surroundings and vice versa. “When I was ready to start performing in San Francisco, to do my very first show in 1989, I was, like, ‘Where am I going to do this show?’”

Bond sets the scene: we’re in a Greek restaurant on Valencia Street more than 30 years ago. “It had one wall that was all fake stones with a water fountain and plastic flowers, there was a big picture window at the end of the room with a stuffed boar’s head, and I was, like, ‘This is where we need to do the show.’ Nobody had ever done a show there before, but we charmed the people who ran it, who were lovely. This woman was originally from Greece, and she was very dramatic, so she loved having us there, and she loved all the gay people coming in, because they were big tippers and everything. So that was how I did my very first show.”

When Kiki and Herb – Bond’s groundbreaking controlled-chaos collaboration with Kenny Mellman, the conceit of which frames them as octogenarian lounge-pop-performing monologists – migrated to New York City, they initially landed in Eighty-Eights, the Greenwich Village cabaret spot.

“They didn’t really know what to make of us, but they were nice to us, and we brought in a crowd,” Bond recalls. “Then we went to Cowgirl Hall of Fame, which is a cowgirl-themed restaurant in the West Village. Then we went to Flamingo East, which was a sort of glamorous room on top of another restaurant. Finally, we got into Fez, which was this really good music venue, and that’s where we really took off. Then we did the traditional route: Broadway, Carnegie Hall, Joe’s Pub.” If Bond is rooted anywhere, it’s at the latter, a performance space in the Public Theatre in the East Village, where they played the first week it opened, in October 1998, and continues to do so.

There have been many career highlights. Bond thinks about the ones that really stick: Kiki and Herb Mount the President, on HMS President on the river Thames in London; their first concert at Carnegie Hall, when their mother chartered a busload of people from their hometown of Hagerstown, Maryland; reopening St Ann’s Warehouse during the pandemic, when Bond and their mother, sister and niece spent most of the evening on a carousel. “People would jump on and talk to my mom, and I just sat there and people would bring me drinks. We had so much fun. My mom said that was one of the most fun nights of her life.”

Bond’s mother died this year. Before her death, Bond decided to make 2023 a year of radical self-care. “Of course, the first month of it, I was taking care of my dying mother, which as it turns out was probably one of the most radical acts of self-care I’ve ever done, because that time I spent with her – the resolution of a lifetime relationship that was very fraught, that was always filled with love but was at times extremely painful: there were years that went by when I didn’t speak to my mother – that we ended up, the two of us alone in this room when she passed, with this love and care and understanding that we had, it was such a gift.”

The recent death of Sinéad O’Connor also looms. When Bond was doing their Diamond Jubilee 60th-birthday shows at Joe’s Pub last May, the set list was rooted in the artists who most influenced them. O’Connor had to feature. Bond performed Troy. About 35 years earlier, Bond was living in Washington, DC, and spotted The Lion and the Cobra, O’Connor’s first album, in Tower Records. “I had never heard of her, I didn’t know anything about her, but I was having that! I bought the record, brought it home, and I was blown away.

“When I moved to San Francisco I worked at A Different Light bookstore, which was a queer bookstore in the Castro. When I tell you that record and I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got were on rotation, believe me. It was, like, Cocteau Twins and Sinéad. Occasionally Diva, by Annie Lennox. That was a very formative period of my life.

“Act Up, Queer Nation and her being so brilliantly astute at putting certain messages through, like the ‘Wear a condom’ [T-shirt] when she was pregnant, all that stuff, which was so genius. You felt, like, well, Rolling Stone said she was the first rock star of the 90s, and the biggest rock star was on our side. So.” Bond pauses. “I just always loved her.”

Bond has been at the forefront of trans activism for many years; the conversation inevitably slips into the “current climate” of threats, violence and policy designed to oppress trans people. “I kind of feel somewhat overwhelmed by it, but not cowed by it … [Ron] DeSantis is so clever to be destroying people’s opportunity to educate themselves. He wants everybody to be as dumb as the people that do whatever he wants. And the ones he knows never will, he wants to get rid of. And that’s us. Same with Trump.

“I mean, it’s the whole thing. I’m using DeSantis as an example, but that’s the mentality around all of it, in whatever country. That’s fascism. So how do we combat it? We call it out for what it is, I guess, as much as we can. And we do our best to educate people. But I don’t know if that’s going to work, because the reason men have been in charge forever is because they have more strength and they don’t give a sh*t about using it.”

[ Justin Vivian Bond... And Things of THAT Nature! review: Charismatic, magnetic | Tiger Dublin Fringe ]

As we wrap up, Bond offers a tour of the house’s art. Here, a set of porcelain elephant tables owned by Joan Didion, which Bond won at an auction of the Didion estate after the writer died. (Bond’s second album, Silver Wells, named for the fictional hometown of the protagonist in Didion’s novel Play It as It Lays, sits atop one of the stands, alongside two editions of the book.) There, a Catherine Opie photographic portrait of Bond. The performance artist Christeene was a recent guest, and the Irish drag artist Veda is en route as we speak, the train trundling upstream, through the valley, in and out of the woods.

Only an Octave Apart is at the Gate Theatre, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival, from Tuesday, September 5th, until Sunday, September 10th