Kay Turner
Kay Turner is a performer, writer, musician and folklorist. She is the author of many books and publications, the lead singer in her rock punk band “Girls in the Nose” and a Professor of Performance Studies at NYU. From her groundbreaking work bringing goddesses and women’s altars out of the margins of history to her queering of religious and pop icons, Kay has centered her life around creating space for feminist communion. The following conversation was recorded on March 7, 2020 at 11am in Kay’s Apartment in Brooklyn, New York.
Gwen Shockey: What was the first space you were ever in that was queer or lesbian?
Kay Turner: You know, I would have to say that in a way the first place that I really knew there were other lesbians was in my dormitory in college. I was very fortunate to live on a long wing that had twenty rooms on one side and a lounge kind of thing in the middle and then twenty more. So, there were twenty rooms, two in a room… eighty women or so.
GS: Was it an all-women’s school?
KT: All women’s school, Douglass College, which is the women’s school of Rutgers in New Brunswick, New Jersey. So, out of those eighty there were eight women who were coupled!
GS: Really? Wow!
Image courtesy of Kay Turner.
KT: In 1967! I started college in the Fall of ’67. I had a girlfriend in high school but we didn’t know what we were doing, we were just doing it! You know? We had no community! We knew no one else who was doing what we were. It felt very exciting but also dangerous and we didn’t want to be found out, we knew that.
GS: Did you have language for it then?
KT: No! No. Not at all. I didn’t look up the word lesbian until I was in college. I looked it up in the dictionary.
GS: (Laughing) That’s classic!
KT: It’s classic! The two words that I looked up: lesbian and folklore. After going to Mexico to trace the Mayan moon goddess, Ix Chel [Lady Unique] I was putting books away that I had carried with me on the trip and I looked at the back cover of this one book of Mexican folktales edited by Américo Paredes and on the back it said, “Américo Paredes is the director of The Center for Folklore and Ethnomusicology at the University of Texas at Austin” and I remember the word folklore just kind of jumping out at me and I was like: Folklore… Maybe that’s what I am interested in. And so I looked it up! I had to look it up! And then I wrote him a very naïve letter, like: I’ve just been in Mexico for almost a year looking at… I don’t know… female images or whatever… You know! I tried to tie it down to something anthropological or whatever. And he was so sweet! He was a major figure in the field. He’s dead now but he was a preeminent folklorist of Mexican-American culture. So, he writes me back and it was great! He goes, “You know? I think you do have an interest in folklore! I’m not sure, but I think you should come to our program and get a master’s degree and see if it works out for you.” So, that’s how I wound up going to Texas. I wanted to be close to Mexico. There were other programs in folklore around the country but I wanted to be close to Mexico. Plus I had learned the meaning of folklore off the back of his book so then he became my professor.
GS: So you were drawn to Mexico because of the Mayan moon goddess and you found out about her through reading?
KT: My girlfriend Nancy at the time – her father was in the State Department, we later learned he was CIA but we didn’t know it at the time – lived all over the world and she had been raised in Mexico City because he was there in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. She was there for like seven years. So, she was and is fluent in Spanish and she loved Mexico. I met her at college but we didn’t become girlfriends until 1972, after I had graduated. My first full-time job was managing a bookstore in New Brunswick where I was also the book buyer. I got hired and then I had our boss Joe hire Nancy.
GS: I was born in New Brunswick actually!
KT: You were! Where?
GS: At Robert Wood Johnson hospital!
KT: No way!
GS: Yeah! I love New Brunswick.
KT: Brunsy! I was just in Brunsy about a month ago! I’m always back there at some point or another. Where Robert Wood Johnson is now… Oh! I should show you some pictures. I will one day Gwen when we have a little bit more time. I was part of the Save Little Albany Street Collective. So, that place, where the hospital is now, that was a street with houses on either side. They took two full blocks ultimately for the hospital. We had protests and all that kind of stuff. We also had our very famous and beloved Little Albany Street Fair every summer and I’ve got pictures of that! I worked at Rutgers Mental Health Center up in Piscataway and I was a CETA worker. I hope someone eventually does a project on this. CETA should be happening right now. It came out in the Johnson years and Nixon carried it on. The government subsidized people coming out of college, or not even in college, to go and apprentice in these different areas and you were paid a regular salary. The government paid like half or two-thirds of it and the organization, which had to be a non-profit, paid the rest. So, I was part of this thing at the Rutgers Mental Health Center called COPSA [Community Outreach Program for Senior Adults]. We started it in 1975 and it’s still around! It was at a time when these mental health studies had been done that showed that lots of elderly people were starting to come into emergency mental health care all over the country. Their children were moving and leaving them stranded. We pretty much created the program whole cloth. There was no model and not much help from the psychiatrists who ran the mental health center. So, I was a feminist trying to assert liberation practices on the job and no one minded. And I had a consciousness raising group for seventy, eighty and ninety-year-olds and a drama group! In this picture here is Birdie, Florence and Maggie! (Laughing and holding up a photograph) They were game for anything. This was when our little play-reading group presented at the Little Albany Street Fair one summer in a tent. CETA workers could do anything! It was so great! You had a supervisor, who was like a supervisor over there… they didn’t actually do your work with you. You created the work that you wanted to do and proposed it. Someone else in the mental health center had proposed the need for this outreach center but then we created it and we did it primarily as a cultural thing. So, I had my CR [consciousness raising] groups and I had charge of the van, like an eleven-seater van, that I could take anytime I wanted and I would just go around picking up all these old ladies and old guys and we just went everywhere! We just tricked around! We went up in the Watchung mountains, we’d go here, we’d go there! We drove into the city one time and got totally lost… we were somewhere in Fort Lee. I don’t know, I made a bad turn… but we went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was just so awesome! We had so much fun!
Image courtesy of Kay Turner.
GS: And it was all funded?
KT: All funded!
GS: There needs to be more programming like that!
KT: If you meet people of a certain age… I run into CETA workers all the time between the ages of like sixty and eighty. It was a very well-funded, very wide-spread program in the ‘70s… people have this vision of the ‘70s as everything falling apart, drugs and all that kind of stuff, but in fact a lot of things were also being seeded for growth especially around cultural and social kinds of things. This group that I worked with was a mixed group of housewives and radicals. We all just landed in the same room together. This housewife, Lee, from East Brunswick was way old school Italian, red hair out to here, chain-smoked, wore leopard prints – she was great! Women of very different backgrounds. We all just kind of got in together and formed this government-funded thing!
GS: I feel like we need that more than ever right now. Those kinds of dialogues with people from so many different backgrounds coming together intergenerationally.
KT: There are still hundreds of CETA workers…
GS: It’s still an active program?
KT: Oh no, no it went away in the Reagan years I think. CETA was fabulous. So, Douglass College was having it’s one-hundredth anniversary in 2018 and I did a thing called “Dink Dykes” and a bunch of us who had come out at Douglass and had then become sort of local forerunners in the lesbian feminist cultural movement… You know, what is written in the history more obviously is what happened in New York and LA and in larger centers but we were in and out of New York all the time and I had started the Oral Tradition singing group and then Lady-Unique and, you know, I was on the Heresies collective here in NYC for the Goddess Issue, so there was a lot of interplay.
So, I wanted to do something for the one-hundredth anniversary and they had published a book that gave just a paragraph or two to gay culture at Douglass and they didn’t really use the word “lesbian”, it was “gayed” out. And, you know, it was referred to as a “time of turmoil”. It was a time of turmoil because it was the Vietnam war a lot was going on but the sentence just bugged me and there just wasn’t enough information in there except there was a picture of me! I was on the cover of the first women’s studies pamphlet. So, years later they dug up some picture of me and this friend of mine and they put it on the cover of their pamphlet. The book editors showed that pamphlet as an example of women’s studies starting and evolving at Douglass. After the “time of turmoil” then maybe we can have a women studies minor or something like that. (Laughing)
GS: How did you discover that there were eight lesbians in the dorm at Douglass?
KT: It was an interesting process of elimination! Also I was kind of a boisterous person and so they’d hear me coming! My friend Joanna and her girlfriend Linda, they had their beds together but in a kind of way – not squarely together, but sort of connected – everybody had their arrangements for how they kind of did it. But slowly through my freshman year we all kind of found each other and really that was the first time I ever knew multiple women who were gay! Yeah! And that whole scene evolved over the years that I was in college and we came into the city and went to places like the Firehouse and ultimately to all of the lesbian bars that existed at the time… the Duchess, Bonnie and Clyde, Julie’s, Rubyfruit… But my very first gay bar, well lesbian bar, that I was in was in Asbury Park: the M&K! M&K was total butch/femme, old school and we used to go down to the shore in the summer and then go over to the M&K and they had a great jukebox. It was primarily black, but whites went there in the summertime, I think, more often, and we were kind of there a lot for a couple of summers. There was a place in Sayreville too that was a lesbian bar in the ‘70s… I wanna say Sayreville. I knew about M&K because of my friend Paula. She still lives in Jersey. She was in The Oral Tradition too and is a very good friend of mine from way back in the day. She would remember the place in Sayreville.
GS: You’re so lucky that in undergrad you found queer women already. Are you still in touch with some of those people?
KT: Yeah! Oh yeah! Joanna. I just saw her last week! (Laughing) She was my first discovery! So, she played the guitar and sang folk songs. Everyone smoked cigs. I didn’t. I wasn’t a smoker but lots of the girls smoked and there was a smoking lounge in our dorm and Jo smoked at the time. So, she had her guitar and she’d be in there playing her like, “Five hundred miles! Five hundred miles!” (Singing) And I was overly friendly and trying to find my way because I had come from Detroit and I was like: Where am I? So, I would pop in on her when I would hear a song that I knew because I had been a hootenanny singer in Detroit. I had my chops! I had like a whole little routine that I did in Detroit in high school!
GS: Can you explain what a hootenanny singer means?
KT: Ok, so the hootenanny movement was part of the folk music revival of the ‘60s and hootenanny is an old word for a gathering of folk singers; hootenannies were all the rage in the mid-1960s. They started in Washington Square Park. Some of the first hootenannies were done in the Park after WWII and they became really popular in probably ’62 or ’63. This was Greenwich Village: the beats and the hootenanny singers. This was a culture that was blending, that would give rise ultimately to the late 60s left, you know, to the anti-war movement and everything that came out of it. Drugs and rock and roll really started to come into play. But that wasn’t until, I mean, it was coming into play then but acid came in around ’65, you know, weed was always there, but acid and mescaline came in around then all of the music associated with it. The folk music revival was overcome for the most part by Hendrix, Janis Joplin and The Doors.
GS: But it was happening in Detroit too?
KT: Oh it was happening all over the country. Yeah. It was happening all over the country – Canada too – it was very popular! Lots of people were learning the banjo! Like me! I played the banjo and I sang and I had a guitarist.
GS: Did you write songs?
KT: I wrote occasional songs but I never sang them. I didn’t really know that… I mean, I made up songs but I was like: Why would I sing my songs? You know? In that folk song period everyone sang old tunes and spirituals. And I loved them. I sang “Long Black Veil,” “500 Miles,” “Motherless Child.” But then! Then later, much later, I was like: I’m going to sing my songs! (Laughing)
GS: How did your band Girls in the Nose start?
KT: Yeah! Girls in the Nose started in Austin, Texas in 1985. In 1981 I met a young performer named Gretchen Phillips and she and I started hanging out and listening to records together and we were just music nerds and she played guitar and then my friend Betsy Peterson, a folklorist who moved to Austin, joined. I started a business called Texas Folklife Resources with Betsy and another friend Pat Jasper, a not-for-profit arts organization presenting folk art exhibitions and performances and concerts and things like that. So, Betsy moved to work with me and Pat at Texas Folklife and she played guitar. We started getting together with Gretchen over at my house and we started our little band! (Laughing) So, we had to come up with a name because this friend of ours Barb who was moving from Austin to New York. She was having a good-bye party and she said, “You have to play at my party!” That’s the way it always starts! Someone wants you to play at their party! So, we had to come up with a name and we were sitting around drinking beers after one of our rehearsals and we were telling stories. Gretchen has a really distinctive nose, I have a distinctive nose, and Betsy has a very distinctive nose too, and as it turned out, each of us had a horrific story about how some man had told us that we would be prettier if we had nose jobs. So, we became “Girls in the Nose!” That was our band. We would carry the power of the big female nose forward.
GS: Did you three write songs together? What genre would you call yourself?
KT: Mhm! Yep! We weren’t punk rock, we were kind of rock punk. You know? Because there was a punky edge to a lot of the songs that we did. Gretchen and I wanted to start a band and we invited Betsy to be part of it. Betsy is straight.
GS: Gretchen is gay?
Girls in the Nose. Image courtesy of Kay Turner.
KT: Oh yeah! Very! Gretchen and I would sit around and complain about women’s music. We were like: Oh. Women’s music… We’re so over it. Why can’t we just rock out! Like, you know? I turned her on to Sonic Youth, she was turning me on to other things! Holly Near and Meg Christian were just not going to cut it for us anymore. We just needed a different… you know. We wanted to go a different direction. But that’s kind of how we started writing music that was more rock and punk. We had a song called “Where Girls Go,” a song called “Sodomy,” “Breast Exam”… a lot of them are on SoundCloud. But yeah. We released three albums, toured the country several times. We were active from ’85 to ’96. Eleven years.
GS: You’ve been performing recently though, yeah?
KT: Oh yeah! We’ve been touring again! We’re playing in San Francisco for Pride in June. You should come out. We’re playing three shows! We still give a really good show. I’ve got to say!
GS: Do you still write new music?
KT: You know, I’ve done other music projects here. I did a project with Carolyn Dinshaw called “Snaggle Tooth” in the mid-aughts, then a more recent project, begun in 2013, called “OTHERWISE: Queer Scholarship into Song” with Viva De Concini and Mary Feaster, so that’s where the new writing has been since I moved to Brooklyn in 1998. Part of the problem with “Girls in the Nose” when we do these reunions we come together from other parts of the country, so we’re not in the room long enough generally. This picture is from our first show as a band at the Continental Club in Austin. (Holds up a photograph) So, that’s Gretchen, that’s Joanna who I went to college with, that’s Betsy, back there that’s Kathy Korniloff our first bass player, me…
GS: Were you always the lead singer?
KT: I was always the leader singer, yeah.
GS: Was there ever any drama with Girls in the Nose? (Laughing)
KT: Oh yes. If there is a band, there is drama. There were three iterations of Girls in the Nose. Never any drama with the original people. The first and the third iterations were fine but Gretchen and our original drummer Pam, they got a record deal with Rough Trade for another group they had called “Two Nice Girls.” They had to leave because they were going to make a record and tour. It was one of those moments in like ‘89. Our band had been growing for four years and I was like: I can’t stop now! We were writing all this great stuff and I wanted to tour! I wanted to get out on the road in the van! So, I put together a new band. It was very unfortunate… they were kind of… uh. One person in particular was greedy for power. They weren’t very feminist. They were fine musicians. They were lezzies but they weren’t very feminist. I had a specific lesbian feminist vision for this band. So, I was like: Uh-uh. Can’t do that. So, I fired two of them. That was very hard for me. But I just couldn’t go forward. I just felt like it would drag on the way those things do. I was the leader of the band and I had to fix it. Bands can drag on with people feeling miserable and all this kind of stuff. The third version of the band was great. We were together five years.
Riya Lerner: So, how did you come to love Madonna so much?
KT: It was in the mid ‘80s, around 1984. I was getting my PhD at University of Texas in Austin like I said. I was working on my dissertation on Mexican American women’s home altars. Old Mexican-American women in South Texas were teaching me about their faith in the Virgin Mary, the Madonna. I was also teaching and I had a student, Lynn Keller, still a very dear friend of mine, who moved to New York in 1981 and lived in Soho and the East Village and she became loosely affiliated with the scene that included people like Madonna and Keith Haring and various people who were around in that area.
RL: Was she an artist?
KT: She was a musician who was working as a studio manager for a fashion photographer. People who know his work really love it. The long story short is just that Lynn was living on 13th and Third Ave. and somehow got to know a little bit about Madonna. She helped Madonna get some early PR shots done. And Madonna had released an EP or two. Her music was starting to circulate, and so Lynn sent me an EP to me for my birthday and said in her card, “I don’t know if you’re going to like her music but I know you’re going to love her name!” The name of the record… it was the EP for “Everybody” and “Burning Up” and I loved both of those songs. I went crazy for both of those songs plus I loved her and I just immediately sort of fell into the Madonna abyss. Well, I was already in the Madonna abyss with the other ones – the saints and virgins – and so I just naturally fell into that hole. So, that’s how I got into Madonna. And I did a book about Madonna I Dream of Madonna: Women’s Dreams of the Goddess of Pop. Girls in the Nose covered “Burning Up”, that was one of our songs, and so in my stage patter I would always tell the audience: I should really be dreaming about the other Madonna, but for some reason I’m dreaming about Madonna Ciccone! The singer! So, then women started coming up to me after shows and they’d go, “I’ve been dreaming about her, too!” I was like: Really? So, I started carrying a little pad around and having them write their dreams down and I’d just throw it into a file.
RL: Straight women too?
KT: Oh yeah! It was mostly lesbians but yeah. There were straight women too! The pattern that emerged in the dreams was really quite beautiful because women assigned a certain deep level of friendship to their relationship with Madonna and Madonna always helped them in their dream.
GS: Oh wow!
KT: Yeah. They’re beautiful dreams really.
GS: Like a spirit guide kind of.
RL: That’s amazing!
KT: Yeah.
RL: I assume you’ve met her?
KT: I have met her! Yup! Because when I did the book… well I met her twice. I don’t know her but I’ve met her twice. Once… (Laughing), at Sandra Bernhard’s thirtieth birthday where I danced with Madonna! We had a great dance together. This was in June 1988. Sandra was doing her show “Without You I’m Nothing” in the East Village and Madonna was on Broadway doing “Speed-the-Plow,” the David Mamet play, and so they were both locked down in the city because they had shows every night. They became friends and that’s when all the stuff went around about Madonna having an affair with Sandra and Jennifer Grey. Madonna and Sandra made an infamous appearance together on David Letterman implicating, but never confirming, a relationship. They were goofing off. So, they were all at this party. My friend old friend Cherese Campo was Sandra’s stage manager for “Without You….” Cherese was invited to the party and she asked me to be her date. I flew from Texas immediately.
RL: There was a rumor that Madonna was having an affair with Jennifer Grey?
KT: With Sandra Bernhard but Jennifer Grey was in the mix, too, they were all sort of lezzing around, going to the Cubbyhole…
RL: (Laughing) Oh wow! I had no idea! I had such a crush on her as a child!
KT: Oh yeah! It was really great because at the birthday party Jennifer Grey was trying to get Madonna to do all these fancy “Dirty Dancing” moves because that was when her movie “Dirty Dancing” had recently come out, like the year before [1987], so Jennifer Grey was trying to do all this stuff with Madonna and I saw Madonna… I was just doing regular old lezzie groove dancing, nothing remarkable. I mean, I think Sylvester was playing, you know, “You Make Me Feel Mighty Real”. I was in the groove and so my friend Cherese cruised past me and goes, “She’s looking at you!” And I go: Yeah! I know! I know and I’m just going to keep right on dancing! (Laughing) So, ultimately what happened was she moved down the floor to me and we danced and then Jennifer Grey came and stole her back! Took her by the arm and pshhhh! The way I love telling this story is that Jennifer Grey was like, “Who’s that nobody? Come back to me!” Just a nobody! (Laughing)
GS: Well, clearly she had her eye on you though!
KT: Clearly she did. She definitely came down the floor to dance with me. I think she just wanted to groove you know? For all true Madonna fans there’s this sort of insider thing about her wink. She has a great wink and you see it in different videos, you know… and so she winked at me! We were dancing and she was enjoying the dance and she winked at me and then she turned me around and we kind of did one of those little moves…back to back shimmy.
GS: Oh my god! I’m so jealous!
KT: It was heaven!
GS: Did you feel nervous?
KT: No! I was a wreck afterwards, you know? We were walking around the East Village smoking pot and we just stayed up the whole rest of the night because it was just so crazy!
GS: That’s one of those moments you’ll never ever forget.
RL: And that was right when she was starting to get famous?
KT: Yeah! That was 1988. “Like A Virgin” and “Material Girl” and all of that was hitting. Yeah, yeah.
GS: Wow. That’s really wild.
KT: I know, isn’t that wild? Here! I should show you! I don’t know if I ever showed you this book, Gwen? I Dream of Madonna.
GS: I’ve never seen this in person! Oh my god it’s so beautiful! Did you make these collages?
KT: Yeah! Mhm! With my friend David Kolwyck. They’re inspired by the dreams and also by my relationship with… (Laughing) Well, I started making collages to go with the dreams and my friend David helped, you know. He was in NYC; I was still living in Austin then. The circumstances that gave rise to the book were very serendipitous. After some GITN show in late fall 1992, I was out partying with different people in different bands and this woman had come to the show and her name was Rose, She was a very cool rock critic from London. So, we were drinking and talking and whatever and she goes, “So, what else are you doing? What other stuff do you do?” And I said: Oh… I just finished my dissertation… la la la… And I said: Right now I’m kind of in this project collecting dreams about Madonna! She was like, “What!” She goes, “Really? You have a collection of dreams about Madonna?” I go: Yeah… It’s part of my stage patter, didn’t you hear me talk about it tonight in the show? And she said, “I wasn’t there for that part of your show I don’t think!” So, she looks at me and she goes, “I know someone who would be very interested in that project. In fact, I will tell this person that you have this project and you will get a call by the end of the week.” And I was like: Oh! Sure… But I got the call by the end of the week from Thames & Hudson in London. It was published by Harper Collins here but it was originally published in London and they sold rights to the U.S. publisher. So, it had a European house and a house in the U.S..
GS: That’s amazing! You really just never know who you’re going to meet!
KT: Yeah! That was just such a… you know! And she said, “I know you probably don’t believe it but you’ll get a call by the end of the week!” I got a call from Thomas Neurath who was the director of Thames & Hudson. His father was the founder after WWII. And they had been searching for a smart project to do about Madonna. A few people had brought some projects to them that they didn’t like and they just went crazy, you know, for this. The only thing that was kind of crazy about it was that the turnaround on it had to be really fast because she was going out on tour in the Fall of ’93 and they wanted the book on their list for the tour and so this was all happening in early 1993.
GS: How many months did you have to make it?
KT: We had like two months – January and February and then it went into production, proofs, permissions, and so on. Oh, I was just… it was crazy!
GS: You must have been a wreck!
KT: I was a wreck. I was a wreck! I had to like… (Sighs) Making all the collages… we had a hellhole over on Broadway. I would come up from Austin. I had been collecting dreams since about 1988 or 1989 but very haphazardly. I just collected them as they came to me. At that point when we were getting I Dream together I had about enough dreams to make the book but I needed a few more. I needed like fifteen or twenty more, so then I had to go on this like collecting thing… I was like… Oh, it was crazy. I reached out to friends and GITN fans and to this little teen Madonna fan club I met in NYC in 1988. They had great dreams to share. We got the book done! Published in Fall 1993. And the publisher was so smart, they did take the book everywhere Madonna went on “The Girlie Show” tour!
GS: She must have seen it then?
KT: Well, the thing is… what I did… I was like: I’m going to make this work for me. So, I stipulated in my contract that approval had to come from her for the project. They were like, “She doesn’t have to approve this! It’s people’s dreams!” But I was like: I think she should approve it, and I’m not going to sign off… I got really, like, you know. I put my foot down and was like: This is your only opportunity Kay… So, my editor at Thames was like, “I know what you’re doing, Kay.” I said: Of course you do! I’m working my ass off for you and you’re going to make some money! Then he goes, “We’re all going to make some money!” I said: Well, ok. He said, “Ok. I’ll tell the lawyer that it has to go through her lawyers first.” And I said: I want to make sure that she sees it! (Laughing) So, she did! They sent the proofs to her! She was in Miami and she loved it. She called on the phone…
GS: She called you?
KT: She called my publicist on the phone and in the end I never got to talk to her but she said, “I want you to tell the author that it’s a crack-up and I just love it!” So, she’s from Michigan and I’m from Michigan and if you call something a crack-up in Michigan that’s very high praise. It’s a super high colloquial praise phrase. To say that something is a “crack-up” means it’s like really smart and funny – like her! You know?
GS: Wow! That’s so cool.
KT: Yeah, yeah. So, it was very cool.
RL: That’s an amazing story.
KT: She bought like thirty copies and gave them to her staff for Christmas that year.
GS: It’s wild how many people have had dreams about her!
KT: I know! I continued to collect them! I could have done part two! People still tell me their dreams about Madonna. I still dream about her!
RL: I had a friend in middle school who was obsessed with her and had posters of her all over her room, would have dreams about her constantly and for Halloween once she was Madonna during the cone-boob era and she got in trouble because it was too erotic…
KT: (Laughing) That is hilarious! She had her Jean Paul Gaultier gold corset look!
RL: Full DIY Gaultier corset!
KT: That is great! Oh, that is fabulous! Shame on the school though!
RL: I know! She had finally found this icon for herself…
KT: Beautiful! Well, I mean for me I had had no other icon in my life except for Roy Rogers! So, it was Roy Rogers and Madonna!
GS: Why Roy Rogers? (Laughing)
KT: When I was a child I was a tomboy, so I was Roy. My family called me Roy! As a child… (Laughing) And they were very nice about it! I wasn’t even that insistent but I would always sign things Roy and, you know, my mother indulged me. She wrote me sweet notes addressed to Roy and put them in my school lunch bag. Yeah, so that was really the only other pop icon of my life until Madonna came along and there hasn’t been another one since! I keep a picture of Roy Rogers! He’s right there! Right behind the monitor over there!
Kay Turner a.k.a. Roy Rogers. Image courtesy of Kay Turner.
GS: (Laughing) Oh yeah! That’s hilarious!
KT: (Laughing) I’m telling you, you know, I had to have those outfits! Come here! I’ve got pictures up! So, these are pictures of me when I was a kid in my outfits.
GS: Oh my god!
KT: That was my full-on Roy outfit with the big hat!
GS: Oh my god those are so amazing Kay.
KT: Aren’t those hilarious? And this was kind of my Davy Crockett outfit! (Laughing) These were all taken by my mother! Luckily I have documentation!
GS: You really were quite a tomboy!
KT: Oh yeah!
GS: Was your mom pretty accepting of you? Did you come out to your mom?
KT: No! I came out to her many years later and it caused a huge… it didn’t work! It didn’t work.
GS: Did you grow up Catholic?
KT: No, I grew up Presbyterian. My study of Roman Catholic folk religion was a study of that. I didn’t come from it.
RL: What is the story of this photograph of Madonna?
KT: Oh this is a great story too! This is a very famous Steven Meisel photo that was on the cover of Vanity Fair. I think it was shot in 1990 or 1991. It was during Madonna’s “Blond Ambition” period.
GS: It’s an amazing photo.
KT: I know, it’s a great photo right? And this one! This photo (shows another vintage Madonna photograph) is from the “Who’s That Girl” tour. That was her second tour. She became famous in “Express Yourself” for doing the crotch grab and this is the first example of it. It was on that tour. She’s singing “Who’s That Girl”. I went to that show. Of course.
RL: I used to love that movie as a child.
KT: Oh my god, didn’t you love that movie? I loved that movie!
RL: Desperately Seeking Susan I watched constantly!
KT: Yeah! I watched that constantly! When Who’s That Girl came out I just loved her in it. She was so cute. She was adorable. And she’s kinda like that! Kinda goofy!
GS: Would you say your feelings towards Madonna are both sexual and just adoring and friendshippy? How do you feel towards her?
KT: (Laughing) Well, I used to… yeah. I used to have a crush on her. Like a fan crush. In that sense. I definitely had sexual feelings about her! So, yeah! I’ve had feelings about Madonna from day one! (Chuckles) When I opened that album and listened to the song “Everybody”… the thing that drove my feelings was that I love her music, you know? I’ve listened to all her songs very carefully! I used to host video analysis nights in Austin whenever a new video came out on MTV! MTV was your only source then for getting the videos and sometimes I would say to my girlfriend Mary: You know, the greatest thing you ever gave me was the VCR! (Laughing) In 1985! (Laughing) So I could record the Madonna videos off MTV and give these analyses – these little parties where we would discuss what we thought each symbol, each move, and all the lyrics meant and all that kind of stuff! Other friends would be like, “Kay is so crazy!” But they went along with it because we would all dance at the end! I did that for years in Austin. I don’t know, from 1985 until… I guess until I left and came back to New York in 1998! (Laughing)
GS: What is it about her that initially caught you up?
KT: Well! I was caught up by her name! The thing that I loved about her on the intellectual side was that she was very deeply Catholic but tearing the Church patriarchy out from under itself by what she was doing. To this day every show that she does she always has some song setting where she either kicks a priest down to the ground or hangs on the cross… I think her critique of Catholicism has been very powerful. It’s definitely kept me interested for all these years. Plus I just like her! She makes mistakes and she does stupid things but everybody does… but, I just like Madonna! That night dancing with her at The World was just amazing!
GS: Oh! Can you tell me about The World?
KT: The World had a private party room! It was a club on Avenue A! Either A or B… It might have been on B. It was totally queer, gay, straight cross-over kind of place and lots of musicians went there!
Kay walks to the front of the apartment
Do you want to see the folk-art bathroom? This is where the witches live! This is one of my favorite little areas. This is the guest bathroom so this is where, you know, I force people into my world! This witch my friend Ann Cvetkovich gave to me! (Laughing) She got her I don’t know where… There she is. And then this one…! She’s really good. She turns on. (Witch doll cackles) I love her. I got her at the ninety-nine cents store around the corner! She lifts up, look! She’s taking off! And this one is the Baba Yaga. She’s good. She’s very good. She’s from Canada. My friend Pauline Greenhill found her at Value Village in Winnipeg. All of these are scavenged witches… (Laughing) It’s like they cost $2.99, $8.99, $1.99… (Laughing) And here we have the little Hansel and Gretel witch serving bread to the children.
GS: Do people always bring you little witches?
KT: Oh god, they always do. Bunch of witches floating around here.
Witch with glow eyes keeps cackling
KT: Ok! Ok! I’ve got to turn her off! (Laughing) I know! You like to fly, don’t you? There you go! Whoaaaaa! Until we meet again.
RL: Have you always done work around witches and Madonna alongside each-other?
KT: Madonnas, witches and goddesses! That’s been my trinity! Beautiful Necessity came out of this publication that I did that was kind of a queer lesbian feminist effort back in the day. I published this from 1976 to 1983 and it was based on a trip that I made to Mexico where I was trying to trace the lineage of this major goddess from Central America, Guatemala and Southern Mexico who had had great power and a great sort of influence before the invasion. She was always only mentioned in the footnotes of any scholarship that I could find! The gods were in the body of the text and the goddesses were in the footnotes. This was in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s when I was really beginning to come into lesbian feminism and performance around that! I had a group called “The Oral Tradition.” We dressed in nightgowns that we got from Sears and wore black lipstick – we were kind of proto-punk weirdos. We had little fluffy nightgowns that we got at Sears for nothing, black lipstick and we re-did all these various Motown songs that I had grown up with like “Heard It Through The Grapevine” with funny little lesbian skits. We changed the pronouns and did all this kind of stuff. We used to perform at Rutgers all the time and once they brought Meg Christian, the famous lesbian singer songwriter, who then became a Buddhist monk, which is what I think she is now. Yeah. So, Meg Christian had heard of “The Oral Tradition” and we were hanging out before the show and she was really nice to us and we were having a good time and everything and of course we liked her but I don’t know what she thought after we performed… I don’t know what she thought she was going to get from us. (Laughing) We gave this really wild ass show! We started drinking in the bathroom before we went on and I think I fell on my face in the middle of “Heard It Through The Grapevine” or something like that! (Laughing) It was just trash! It was a trashy, great show! We really nailed it, you know? We were “The Oral Tradition!” Meg Christian left, walked passed me without saying a word – just like, turned her back and just pshhh!
Kay and The Oral Traditions. Image courtesy of Kay Turner.
Kay and The Oral Traditions. Image courtesy of Kay Turner.
GS: Oh my god!
KT: Oh yeah! So, Paula and Jo and Nancy were like, “Don’t feel bad Kay!” And I was like: I don’t feel bad! What does she know! We’re “The Oral Tradition” because we’re not her! Our thing is not to be her! But she should like us because we still like her!
GS: Do you think she thought you were going to sing one of her songs or something?
KT: I don’t know! (Laughing) “The Oral Tradition” – I had stolen that… well, now that was in 1972 and I didn’t really know about folklore yet but I was the manager and book buyer at Gramercy Books in New Brunswick, NJ and I had ordered a book called Oral Tradition (1965) because I loved the sound of it and it turns out it was a famous folklore studies book done by Jan Vansina this Belgian anthropologist. I loved the name, Oral Tradition, and then of course I learned later on what the oral tradition really is. But it was just funny. I think that she [Meg Christian] might have suspected that it was all part of a folk kind of thing and that we were going to be singing like old English ballads or something and then oh, did she get a surprise! (Laughing) Oh my god! That show…
GS: What were a couple of the other songs you would sing?
KT: We did “Heard It Through The Grapevine”, we did “Testify” (singing) – “ I just wanna testify what your love has done for me!” We did “Sweet Inspiration,” we did Supremes “Stop in the Name of Love,” we did the Beach Boys “California Girls!” (Laughing) And with each song there was like a weird thing – we’d change costumes on stage and have little props! We did “Fever” they had me in some sort of hospital gown or something and The Traditions were behind me carrying these big thermometers and they were trying to like, you know, put them all over me while I was singing! (Laughing)
GS: It sounds like it was very performative!
KT: Oh yeah! It was wack! It was super wack, feminist performance. It was all about lesbian eroticism that was really not available in those other songs that were much more about partnering! They were about having a girlfriend and they were romantic but we were not of that ilk.
GS: Did you start “The Oral Tradition” at Douglass College?
KT: We started it the year after I graduated, yeah. I graduated in ’71 and our first show was at a party in February of ‘72. It was great and the costumes were amazing. We were so happy! There was a Sears right off the campus on Route One right back there and we just went over and got those night gowns! But anyway that was all connected to music and lesbianism. And then Nancy and I went to Mexico to look for the moon goddess and when I came back in March 1975 I organized this collective to publish Lady-Unique-Inclination-of-the-Night, this journal about feminist art and women’s spirituality. We had monthly meetings from 1975 until 1977 and we put out the journal starting in 1976 until 1983. Lady Unique had her debut in 1976 and for the bicentennial in 1976, the 200th anniversary of the U.S. of A. we did a cross-country Lady-Unique tour so that I could meet other women who were doing lesbian feminist print culture at the time. There was Chrysalis, Heresies magazine here, Woman Spirit magazine in Oregon – we were all starting to make these journals and newspapers and things like that. So, our first issue was coming out so we did a tour to advertise… (Laughing) I then moved to Texas for graduate school. The final Cycle – we called them cycles not issues – of Lady Unique was an issue on women’s altars. (Shows Gwen and Riya a copy) Expanded years later, this became my book Beautiful Necessity, published in 1999, essentially. But for Lady Unique we had the altar sweatshop in New Brunswick and Austin. Many women contributed to this beautiful insanity. We made fifteen-hundred individual altars and affixed them to the cover of each journal and so you lift up your little altar and then underneath it is this printed image of a very ancient Mycenaean altar.
Image courtesy of Kay Turner.
Image courtesy of Kay Turner.
GS: Oh my god that’s so beautiful.
KT: I know! It’s so beautiful!
GS: It’s just so small and so sweet!
KT: I know! And they were all so beautiful! I do have some documentation of all of them, we laid a hundred to a hundred and fifty of them out at one point and photographed them all but we made fifteen-hundred of them! (Laughing) Here on the inside it says, “Cover concept by Kay Turner, bag lady supreme, fifteen hundred individual mini altars were created for the covers of Cycle six by members of the Transcontinental Altar Sweatshop and Koffee Klatch Collective in Texas and New Jersey. Do with the altars what you will.”
GS: And each one was different?
KT: Each one was different! Yeah! I broke out all of the weird things I had collected… Here, I think I have another copy somewhere. They were all different. Then this one is the very first issues – Cycle 1. It’s very fragile. We printed the first two issues by ourselves on an AB Dick. The covers were all hand silkscreened. In New Brunswick, New Jersey I belonged to a printing collective. I guess I started in that collective right after college, ’72 or ’73, and everybody was doing radical stuff and trying to own different aspects of knowledge production in ways that were being done in the ‘60s and ‘70s and so we had a small print collective in this old building and we had a couple of AB Dick offset printers and letterpress printers and stuff like that. We had to do all the typesetting and laying of the lines – each line, each sentence. Back in the day you had to handset everything and then lay it out by hand and it would get transferred onto a metal plate. I can’t believe we did three issues like that…It took forever. Finally everyone was like, “We can’t print anymore we have to take it to a printer!” But we always did the covers by hand. This was our logo (Kay shows inside frontispiece), lady-unique-inclination-of-the-night, she’s the Mayan Moon Goddess in her aspect of the waning moon. That’s what “inclining towards night” means, she is the waning moon going into darkness. The picture of her here is taken from an old Mayan codex – sacred book. See her hands. This is one of her mudras – one of her gestural symbols. So, this came out in the bicentennial year and I think we went on tour for the month of July. We had little flyers! (Laughing) I would really like to see this journal get more play I think this is, I mean in my history, it’s one of the most important things I ever did. I was an early publisher of a lot of people like Harmony Hammond and Mary Beth Edelson and women like that but when these retrospective shows come up Lady-Unique never kind of shows up! We were very obscure and I had to do every issue in my own, you know, a too prissy kind of way – I can be a real perfectionist – and so in the end we only did six cycles. It was a lot of work. But it was really… yeah.
GS: How long were you involved with Heresies?
KT: For the goddess issue! A little bit for the lesbian issue – that’s how I came to know about it. But I did the most for the Goddess issue in 1978. I worked on it all through the spring and summer of 1977. When it came out I had moved to Texas by then.
GS: Do you feel like it was the beginning for you of the work you continued in the rest of your career?
KT: Yes! That was definitely the beginning. The very beginning of it was probably in my growing up in Detroit in my tomboy years. When I was a young child I had a very active imagination and I made things and songs and stuff like that. I used to go out in those little cowboy outfits and knock on people’s doors with my little guitar and go and play songs for bridge clubs and stuff like that! (Laughing)
GS: Oh wow! You were a performer from the start.
KT: Yeah! Yup! (Laughing) And that definitely came out of my tomboy personality, my cowboy… You know… I could do those kinds of things because I wasn’t like a little girl.
GS: Did you play mostly with boys?
KT: Yes! I played mostly with boys, especially my friend Herbie Boyer. Until I was about nine. I had one very good girl friend, my best friend, growing up who lived down the block from me named Sandy Deevey and she tolerated my madness. But she was really interesting. She was Christian Science and from a very young age we had these very involved discussions about religion. Very deep in. That was my favorite thing to talk about. Favorite thing to think about… religion. I almost became a preacher!
GS: I could totally see that! I feel like you were doing that in so many ways in your performance work!
KT: Yeah! I know! (Laughing) I was kind of headed in that direction to go to seminary! That was my thinking when I was like fifteen or sixteen and I was very active in church. I was head of the youth group and all that kind of stuff.
GS: What about religion interested you the most?
KT: Well! You know, I was very interested in things that couldn’t be explained! Miracles! Things like that, on the one hand. And I was also very interested in the ethical teachings of Christianity that are completely sort of underwater now. It’s all been so pushed back by fundamentalism. It just doesn’t really exist. It’s not in the discourse. Not here. Maybe somewhere it is but definitely not in the U.S.. But I definitely learned my lessons on how to treat people.
GS: Do you think you were drawn to the more mysterious aspects of religion because of your queerness?
KT: Yeah! Yeah! So, this is me when I was about three-and-a-half, four and I went on a trip to Florida just with my parents. (Showing snapshot to Gwen and Riya) My brother was already in school. He’s two-and-a-half years older than me and it was just the three of us. So, we were in Key West and my dad had taken me on this day to fish with him and I caught a little sunfish about yay big. Well. It started this whole thing where I had to take the fish home and we were renting a little cabin or something like that and it had a little icebox and I said to my mother: Put it in the icebox! So, then, at night I wanted to bring it back to life! So, at night I would gather my… (Laughing)
GS: Oh my god! You were trying to resurrect it?
KT: (Laughing) I was only three-and-a-half! I still remember what my instruments were! I had stolen the little ball chain off of the motel key, so that was one of the things, I had a pencil stub, and I had a feather that I had found. Probably a seagull feather. (Laughing) Those were my instruments! My parents were like, “Oh god. Kay wants to get the fish out again.” And it’s like day three. I’d be like: Can I get the fish? I have to make it come back! I’m so thankful I had the parents I had because I would never have turned out this way! You can imagine that some parents would have said absolutely not, we don’t do it that way. You know? Give me the chain back! Take your pencil stub and go to bed! But they let me! I have such strong memories of doing that and it became my art practice! So, it’s really old in the sense of it being old in me that I had these ideas about, you know, wanting to experience transformation or mystery and I’m doing it again right now with this Persephone performance I’m doing in Toronto in April! (Unfortunately cancelled due to pandemic)
GS: It’s amazing that you felt that as a kid, so young!
KT: I know! Yeah! Music and this! Both of which have carried me through. I’m seventy-one now, so a long time! (Chuckles)
GS: How did music enter your life?
KT: Through my father! My father was Canadian and on the Canadian side we have a very musical family and my mother loved music, too, but he was a wonderful singer and whistler and he knew lots of songs that he taught me. He was the one who taught me how to plunk on my little guitar that I took around and my mother loved music too so… That was part of it and I was in choirs from the age of four.
GS: I remember you telling me a while back that you knew Viola Liuzzo as a kid…
KT: Yeah! She was my neighbor! I finished that essay! I’ll send it to you. It also has some insightful things in it about me and how I negotiated my own queerness on the block in Detroit. In terms of mapping spaces, some of it is also about childhood spaces! I grew up in a working-class neighborhood that had little houses – houses that face this way on one street and that way on the other street over with an alley in between and so the alley was the liminal space where you could do stuff and get in trouble and all kinds of things like that.
GS: What would you do in the alley?
KT: Well, that was where I played with boys and we did all of our cowboy stuff and had our Conestoga wagons and all that kind of stuff running up and down the alley. And we had a vacant lot at the end where we did lots of crazy stuff but those were the spaces that for me kinda opened up my sort of lezzie side.
RL: When you would do the performances for the neighbors how did they respond to your gender presentation?
KT: They loved it! They called me Roy [Rogers] too! I was known as Roy! Everyone kinda got into it. The whole neighborhood… they supported my weirdness. Until they didn’t.
GS: What are you working on now Kay?
KT: The latest project I’ve been working on is a performance of sorts about Demeter and Persephone at the University of Toronto. I’ve been collaborating with other performers in Toronto and the artist Elizabeth Insogna in NYC. I’m working with architects from here [Natalie Fizer and Emily Stevenson] who are building out a new gallery space at UT. When I asked them what kind of environment they’re going to make up there they said, “Oh! It’s a cave!” I was like: A cave! Oh, I’m so there! It’s in a beautiful new building of the School of Architecture at University of Toronto. So, it’s very cool, the whole thing. The audience will descend and go down into the cave and that’s where the story will begin. We’ll have two Persephones instead of one. The first Persephone carries the scars of the foundational narratives of patriarchy, rape and abduction stories. This project came up for me when the whole Harvey Weinstein thing happened and when the “Me Too” movement started. I had that thing where like a few months into it when all of those guys were falling, like Charlie Rose… I was like, where do they get the balls, what is the thing that gives them that privilege? There are lots of things, but one thing that I think gives privilege to that behavior are these imbedded Western narratives that are foundational, you know? It’s like Daphne and Apollo, it’s Echo, it’s Demeter and Persephone… and that’s a family story because Zeus and Hades are brothers! So, when Hades wants Persephone, Zeus goes, “Oh! I can set that up for you! I’ll open the earth for you and you can just snatch her and take her!” You know? So, there are all of these abduction stories. I’m not as interested in the rape end of it as I am in the stalking, the abduction and seduction. I’m interested in how those go together and how those then get vaunted into high art forms like opera and painting and theater. And then you begin to see that some of the major players like Weinstein and Rose and Louis CK a lot of them, they’re story-makers themselves!
GS: That’s so interesting. I definitely have been feeling the need to be surrounded by femininity and narratives created by women. You’ll have to let us know how the project turns out! I hope you bring it to New York!
KT: I definitely will let you know!
GS: Thank you so much for letting us invade your home like this and for letting us include you in this project! It was such an honor.
