‘When I was 12 or 13,” says Justin Vivian Bond, “my parents took my sister and me to dinner at Disney World where this performer called Helen O’Connell did a show. She was wearing a beautiful beaded red dress and I thought, ‘That’s what I want to do. I want to wear fancy dresses and sing songs in glamorous places while people are eating.’” The New Yorker magazine has since crowned Bond “the greatest cabaret artist of [their] generation”. Bond chuckles. “I guess you could say I succeeded.”
The transgender, trans-genre artist is speaking from their apartment in New York’s East Village, where the air outside is thick with smoke blowing over from Canadian wildfires. It’s morning there and, over the phone, Bond’s voice is luxurious and woody. “I don’t have a beautiful voice that makes people think, ‘That’s magic coming out of that person’s throat.’ That’s not what I’m about. I feel like I need to have a justification for asking people to listen to me. But I think, through the work I’ve done, I’ve earned that.”
This July, Bond is heading to the Hall, a newly built venue for the Manchester International festival, to perform One Night in Trans Vegas, a retrospective evening of stories and song. Their long career in cabaret is most defined by being one half of the chaotic lounge-singers duo Kiki and Herb. In this collaboration with Kenny Mellman, Bond played Kiki DuRane, a mouthy, drunken older woman, while Mellman’s obliging pianist Herb, banging the keys to keep up, wasn’t blessed with a surname. Performing other people’s songs with wit and boozy charm, they shone. “A performance that should,” the New York Times wrote, “be just a night of imitative song and shtick from another pair of happy high-campers from the alternative club scene becomes irresistibly full-bodied art.”
Kiki and Herb was forged from fury during the Aids crisis: when Bond gave interviews during lockdowns, they frequently reminded journalists that Covid was not their first pandemic. “I was a young queer person during the time of Aids,” Bond recalls, “and I wanted to do something that addressed the situation. As a 20-something, I felt that talking about all those subjects could come across as too earnest or didactic. So I created this 66-year-old alcoholic woman who had seen and done everything. She was supposedly loaded onstage, so I could get away with saying just about anything. It gave me a lot of freedom, to be a channel for the rage my community was feeling.”
Kiki was wild: the night Bond first created involved her dancing on a table and kicking out the teeth of a dead cow, and the backstory they built was wildly elaborate. Offstage, Bond’s life is a lot more measured. In conversation, they are affable and introspective. “I’m not constantly performing when I’m offstage like some people,” Bond says. “I’m afraid people find me boring when they meet me in person.”
As Aids continued to ravage the queer community, Kiki and Herb snowballed, going from Greenwich Village’s Cowgirl Hall of Fame to Broadway and Carnegie Hall. After 15 years, Bond was exhausted. “Living onstage and keeping that kind of rage for all that time was taking its toll,” they say. “We were so successful that it didn’t leave me a lot of time to do anything else.” After a decade and a half of sampling pop songs and musicals, the imperative for the character had faded. “Instead of something that gave me the ability to soar, it was holding me down.” Bond sent Kiki to a care home and went solo.
Despite majoring in theatre at college, Bond was rarely cast in the main plays. “And certainly not any of the good roles, because I am,” they say slowly, elegantly, “too whatever it is that I am.” Instead, they were frequently picked for original cabaret shows, with the pieces written by students or staff that addressed contemporary issues like the policies of then-president Ronald Reagan; for Bond, politics and performance have always gone hand in perfectly manicured hand. They studied books and videos to learn about the history of cabaret, then began immersing themself in its heady, whirlwind world.
It would be Bond who popularised the prefix “Mx” in place of “Mr” or “Mrs”. But growing up in a small town in Maryland, their queerness was discouraged. “My parents wouldn’t let me express myself as a trans person and dress the way I wanted and act the way I wanted,” they say. “They were afraid I would be hurt or mistreated and so they wouldn’t allow me to be who I was.”
In 1989, after studying on Long Island, Bond moved to San Francisco, to what felt like the centre of everything. Their first show was at a little Greek restaurant, immediately fulfilling their aim of singing to entertain people as they ate. The brilliantly named Dixie McCall’s Patterns for Living got rave reviews. “And I haven’t really stopped since. I love that nobody tells me what to sing or what to say. I have complete control.”
Over time, their performance has grown and stretched to fit; their career across stage, screen and record has involved a turn as mistress of ceremonies in John Cameron Mitchell’s erotic comedy film Shortbus, solo albums with eclectic original songs, and a starring part in Olga Neuwirth’s Viennese opera based on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Now, they tend to perform as a heightened version of themself, stealing and inventing, magpie-like, eccentricities from others. “I’ve always been most interested in women who were not what you would expect,” they say. “I love Marianne Faithfull because of the world-weariness of her voice and her presentation. I love that when you heard Nina Simone perform, it wasn’t just a singer, it was a world.
“When I was young, I didn’t feel like I was able to embody those qualities myself so I created this character who had history.” This has changed with age. “By the time I was 40, I felt like I had lived. My voice had matured to a way that when you hear me sing you can hear many of the drinks I’ve had, many of the cigarettes I’ve had, and many of the experiences I’ve had, positive and negative.” There is a self-assurance in their voice now. “Time and age allowed me to be the performer I wanted to be.”
In Manchester, Bond’s performance – with special guests – will mine the extravagant heights and depths of the singer’s experiences. “The whole show will be an exhibition of my life and the music I have loved.” They talk about ageing with both pleasure and relief. “I was onstage recently and I said something about being old, and somebody in the audience screamed, ‘Older!’ And I was like, ‘No, old.’ I’ve spent my entire life fetishising old women and now I am one, you’re not taking that away from me!” They laugh easily and earthily. “I’m coming into my own at 60.”
Bond has never been one to sit still. Change suits them. “That’s one reason to stay alive, isn’t it? If you don’t get better and keep growing as you get older, you’re not living your life properly. I use this line on people sometimes, because if people start talking about their frustration with pronouns, or if they get angry about something new, I just look at them and say, ‘When was the cut off point when you decided you didn’t need to learn anything else?’”
They feel weary by growing levels of transphobia “We live in a world that is so full of judgment and prescribed behaviour. I think a lot of people resent trans people because of our freedom, because they can’t allow themselves to have it. They may not be trans, they just might not be able to live the way they want to live because they are afraid of being rejected or judged.”
As Shon Faye writes in The Transgender Issue: “That is why some people hate us: they are frightened by the gleaming opulence of our freedom. Our existence enriches this world.” Bond is no less resolute. “Trans joy,” they say, “is an active revolution.”
