Justin Vivian Bond Mad At Mainstream Press—Again!

Spring is in the air—time for another throw-down between performer Justin Vivian Bond and the media!

Last May, holding the #1 position on Bond’s shit list was writer Carl Swenson, after his six-page profile of Bond was published in New York Magazine.  It was the kind of extensive coverage that most downtown performers dream of, but Bond took to her website to deride Swenson’s effort as “transphobic,” “salacious,” “hostile” and filled with “snark and sarcasm.”  As far as she was concerned, it was another example of a New York article “written primarily from a patronizingly bourgeois, white gay male perspective.”  Oh, snap!

Almost a year later, it’s Erik Piepenberg of the New York Times getting a public smack down on Bond’s website.  After supplying a quote to Piepenberg about a LGBT movie that changed her life (Marlon Rigg’s Tongues Untied), Bond was appalled to find her nuanced critique whittled down to two sentences.  The changes, she says, “effectively make me sound racist, classist, condescending and rude.”  She also disparaged the Times’ entire “clueless, revisionist reportage.”  Yes, girl, she went there!

Hmm, I don’t want to stir the pot, but the recent Times book review of Bond’s memoir, Tango, wasn’t exactly a rave.  Could Bond still be feeling a little resentful toward the Old Grey Lady?

Uh oh, I’d better be careful or I’m gonna be next on Mx Bond’s media shit list!