Photos by Ana Grillo
There’s this song. It’s a piano ballad, one written for the pre-HIV/AIDS era of San Francisco where poverty-stricken street hustlers wandered Polk Street, turning tricks and sharing burgers at the famed Grubstake diner. "I saw the best bodies of my generation sold, bartered, and destroyed by drugs and prostitution," the lyrics go, describing the "dumb men" who paid the rent and the "young men" who loved them. But "The Golden Age of Hustlers" is beautiful, too, a poetic, vivid song for gloomy cabarets and lonely spotlights, an artifact of a not-so-distant era of queer existence on the brink of vanishing entirely. And its author, "the unsinkable" Bambi Lake, lived it all.
A fixture in alt theater and cabaret troupes in 1970s and '80s San Francisco, Bambi enchanted everyone she met. With her wild beauty and pre-punk, theatrical antics, she was a source of both bedlam and irresistible energy, an early member of the Cockettes who was frequently kicked out of venues and arrested by the police. But Bambi endured, putting out a record of cabaret songs laced with glam and punk DNA in 2005, Broadway Hostess. She also never stopped performing those songs, even to this day: Bambi appears now at cabaret nights here and there across San Francisco, an unstoppable artistic force who found solace from the hardships of being a trans woman in America through song, and whose voice and music shaped countless artists coming of age in the embryonic punk and spoken word scenes of the time.
Silas Howard, the former Tribe 8 guitarist turned documentarian and director, was one of those artists. The first time he saw Bambi, she was crashing a Pride parade. "There was this tow truck pulling a fake cop car, and it was surrounded by all these punks and drag queens with baseball bats and high heel shoes smashing the cop car," Howard recalls. "And then in front of it it said ‘NO APOLOGIES, NO REGRETS.’ That was the sort of crew that Bambi was performing with." Through Howard’s time with the groundbreaking, incisive Tribe 8, he ran in the same circles as Bambi, and became enamored with her as a larger-than-life character, a rare older member of the queer artistic circle in a time when tradition and histories were being erased by the generations lost to the AIDS epidemic.
Last year, Howard returned to Polk Street with camera in tow to put Bambi on film. The resulting short documentary, Sticks & Stones: Bambi Lake, takes a stroll with Bambi as she points out old haunts and dishes on her past, intercut with interviews with longtime creative partner Birdie Bob and archival footage of Bambi performing at San Francisco clubs. The doc is a glimpse into Bambi’s art and life, while also serving as a time capsule of a fringe artist pushed to the margins of history and a San Francisco in the thick of gentrification.
Without question, Bambi’s influence has persisted. Justin Vivian Bond, the NYC-based cabaret legend and trans activist, still performs "The Golden Age of Hustlers" in their live shows, and even sang it in a tender music video that Howard and Erin Ereenwell directed last spring. Filled with a crop of current drag queens and performance artists, the video captured the impact that fringe artists like Bambi have had on current generations of outré artists. But her impact extends even further: just last month, teen fanzine Teenage News tracked her down and interviewed her.
Pitchfork: Can you tell me about the first time you met Bambi?
Silas Howard: In San Francisco, in the early '90s, Bambi Lake was performing with this group of people that were all coming out of activism around Act Up. I often tell this story of moving there as a young person and trying to find my way but not really connecting with the lesbian bar scene or the gay bar scene, and kind of hanging out with the bike messengers and going to see bands all the time. Then my best friend and I went to the gay pride parade and all of a sudden there was this commotion on the sidelines and there was this tow truck pulling a fake cop car, and it was surrounded by all these punks and drag queens with baseball bats and high heel shoes smashing the cop car. And then in front of it it said "NO APOLOGIES, NO REGRETS." It was this really wild, good-looking, sexy, performative group of people that were very irreverent. The humor was really gallows humor. For myself, I was 18, and knew "that’s my people."
Pitchfork: How was she involved in the scene you were performing in?
SH: Bambi was part of that [cabaret] scene and she was older, which, in that age, that era, anyone over a certain age in that scene was a rare thing, because so many people died. People I met that were a little bit older than me, they were like, "Just take your 20 friends and leave two, leave one." It was this mind-blowing thing that we were in the wake of. I feel like that informed all of our activism and urgency. Like, hey, you wanna have a queer punk band? Well, start it now. I opened a cafe with friends, it was the size of a bowling alley, and we pirated our electricity. We did scams to get money. We did a thing where we got bakery samples and we sold them. We had no money. But we stayed open for seven years. Kathy Acker performed there, and Kate Bornstein, Jill Gomez and Greta Schneider showed films there. Justin Vivian Bond came. It was a hole in the wall but a lot of stuff happened.
Bambi would come and hang out at the cafe as well, and because I was in Tribe 8, we played in the same world as Bambi. So I got to know her more as a personality first. And, you know, it was a big personality. And then Justin Vivian Bond covered this song "Golden Age of Hustlers" when Viv moved to New York. Bambi’s work is going places still. Whether or not she’s leaving San Francisco, that song in particular really captured this mixture of the realistic portrayal of a hustler, but also this bravado and poetry that could only come from an insider's perspective as an artist. That’s why I wanted to do this. It’s almost like a short character piece because when we did the music video for "Golden Age of Hustlers" with Justin Vivian Bond, my co-director Aaron Greenwald and I had archival footage we pulled in of Bambi, but I wanted her voice to talk about the song. So that’s what inspired going to get those two interviews.
Pitchfork: How are those two projects related? Because the music video has footage that’s also in the documentary. Was it done at the same time?
SH: Yeah. I’m obsessed with lineage, especially when there’s an interrupted narrative, which the AIDS epidemic certainly interrupted the narrative of queer history and also created a lot of things out of that interruption. When we were doing the song I wanted the idea of past and present in the same room because I feel like I hear a lot of people who are in their late twenties and downtown and in the queer and performance world of New York covering songs from people I knew in the last few years of their life. So rather than nostalgia, like "Oh, you kids don’t know," it actually felt like this attitude was still in the room. It was still part of a lot of younger people who are curious or are artists and activists. So it felt really connected. When we did the video we got this archival footage of Bambi, thank God, because Oddball Films, which is the San Francisco archival film place, is run by Stephen Parr who used to book all of those shows. So he happened to record Bambi performing.
Pitchfork: Have you shown any of it to her? Did she like it?
SH: Oh, yeah. I showed her the whole doc. She’s very out, as she says in the movie, about dealing with homelessness and health issues and addiction and stuff, but when I was getting ready to screen the short doc I couldn’t find her. I screened [the documentary] in San Francisco, screened it in L.A. at the Hammer Museum. I was like, God, I want Bambi to know this but also to see it before. So I got Birdie Bob, who I also knew. He’s such a great companion, he’s like her music husband. He’s very gentle, he understands, and places her in a way that she can’t do for herself. But I finally did find her. At the end of last summer I found her and we sat down and we watched it like three times in a row. She was really happy with it. Thank God.
Pitchfork: What is the atmosphere of Polk Street like now when you visit it?
SH: So, Grubstake is about to get closed and turned into condos. I’m really glad that even though it was windy and messy and cinematically it wasn’t the best frame, there was something about sitting right there in the front of the Grubstake. I just got a link sent to me that the new owners are gonna put a bunch of condos. Polk Street, I mean, she says it when she’s on the street, "It’s real sad." [laughs] I feel like my editor always talks me into keeping the pan to the old lady because it’s so not intentional but it does fit. It just happened. So Polk Street still has that roughness. San Francisco has been changing for a long time, and it’s really such a small, 7x7-mile city. It happens quicker than New York even, when it goes.
Pitchfork: I was actually thinking about that. There’s such a huge gentrification conversation happening right now, especially in San Francisco. Were you thinking about that when you were walking around shooting?
SH: As the city changes so much, there’s no place for people like Bambi. I think gay marriage is important and should happen, but what happens is it sort of steals the focus. Even with all the exposure around trans rights and this and that, there are still a lot of people that fall off the support network. I like that Birdie Bob says that, I know it’s a progressive time but in a way it’s also about making it and money and visibility for yourself.
Pitchfork: That was kind of shocking to me, that Bambi can’t stay in women’s shelters as a trans woman.
SH: Yeah, that’s really common. I’ve had friends from both gender spectrums [say that]. My friend who identified as female but she looked like a crazy mountain man, she was butch, and she couldn’t stay at women’s shelters even though she didn’t identify as male, she wasn’t male, she wasn’t on any hormones. It was pretty tough.
Pitchfork: I was wondering, what was the total output of Bambi’s work? I know she was recorded and put on records.
SH: Yeah, there’s a CD. She and Birdie Bob did Broadway Hostess. She put that out and she performed a ton. And she put out a book, The Unsinkable Bambi Lake. That was on all of our bookshelves. Everybody had that book. It was just her gossiping, who she slept with, who she was in love with. There wasn’t as much recording. There’s another recording besides Broadway Hostess. But she’s an amazing storyteller and singer and she’s never stopped performing. She’s never really totally disappeared. She has the book, a couple CDs, and then there’s a zine in the library in San Francisco that has a few copies, it’s like this long, epic poem.
Pitchfork: We kind of touched on this, but Bambi to me kind of represents this punk ethos of a fringe, trans, female person being given a voice. Do you think there is room for those artists anymore?
SH: I think there’s huge interest. But I think we need to be careful. I don’t know, I guess it’s a tricky thing. I know that grabbing these stories, like what you’re doing, putting this story out there, I’m so excited it’s going to be on this kind of site because she is a musician and a poet and a writer. And I love my LGBT support as a trans person, but it’s nice to have her regarded as a performer in the canon of influences of badassness. That kind of stuff really helps to show in a different light that people could have access to her.
Pitchfork: Did she influence your own music in any way?
SH: She did in that she’s in that scene. There was this spontaneity. There was this thing in the air, people looking around in a way that I think is true of anybody’s journey to a city in some aspect. You move somewhere, especially New York, you try to find your people. Keep in mind, back in that time there was no subtlety of hatred for the LGBT community. It was Jesse Helms, it was quarantining, teachers being fired. It was so not subtle. You had a lot to be angry about. It was angry, but it was also really exciting because we were very united. There’s always someone fighting but we couldn’t afford a lot because there were too many really strong enemies that just wanted us to go. And Tribe 8, we played punk shows and there’d be skinheads at the shows. I got gay bashed several times in San Francisco. So it was like Hothead Paisan, that Diane DiMassa cartoon where it’s this angry dyke walking around. It’s true as you were walking around San Francisco, people would yell dyke, faggot, this and that, which is why everyone reclaimed those words. So Bambi really influenced us in that she was this very authentic voice unlike anybody else around her and we were all trying to do that, trying to do our own weird thing because, again, nobody was gonna succeed. There was no thought of trying to make a penny. It was really like we were practicing and trying shit out and just doing things completely out of any kind of tradition. I just think she was really part of that group of people who were such beautiful nonconformists. Like really sexy nonconformists who were role models for us, for sure.
Pitchfork: Do you still follow queer punk?
SH: I do. Not so much. Tribe 8 just had a lifetime achievement award from this very amazing festival. It was in Austin, this really great group of people that run the Austin LGBT Festival, and they started a new one that’s performance and academia. The award was a gold dildo, in a glass case. That was amazing. And then the other amazing thing was all these bands did covers of our songs. So we got to watch Gretchen Phillips, and Christeene—I love Christeene. Christeene’s an amazing artist on the heels of Bambi and Justin Vivian, totally in that lineage. I love her.
Pitchfork: You also recently directed an episode for the upcoming season of "Transparent". How was that experience?
SH: It was great. The team is amazing, and Jill Soloway, the creator, she’s such a badass feminist. She’s really taking risks and doing it different. Not just in talk, but bringing people in the writers’ room who are friends of mine that I’ve known since the '90s from San Francisco from this whole era of spoken word and queer punk. So Ali Liebegott, one of the writers on the show, and then Our Lady J, who I know from New York and Justin Vivian and tons of friends who all performed in the same cabaret scene together. She’s on the writing team.
And even on the set, my two location guys, they just look like regular guys, but they’re East Bay punks! They were like, oh, I saw Tribe 8, I used to be a riot boy, I had clips in my hair. I felt like all of us weirdos were accidentally on this really big ass studio lot. It was a great vibe, it had a lot of support. And I actually got to bring in weird little talismans kind of in line with Bambi Lake and people from my music past. There’s this really amazing singer and visual artist, Chloe, who passed away a few years ago. She was in this band called Transistor, she’s a trans woman, she played through the '90s and stuff, [Tribe 8] played CBGBs with them. She set up all these organizations around HIV and trans activism. Anyway, I put up a photo of her in one of the characters’ houses, right above Jeffrey’s character, as a little history easter egg for those that know her.