Justin Vivian Bond

[Editor’s note: In this week’s cover story, five NYC icons look back on their first year in New York City. Here’s alt-cabaret star and artist Justin Vivian Bond on moving to the city and throwing sex-positive parties.] I moved here in June of 1994. I had a great life in San Francisco, but I had bigger dreams, so I had to be in New York. I was basically couch surfing for almost the first year. I spent quite a bit of time with my friend Victoria Leacock in her duplex on 9th between Fifth and Sixth. A friend joked that I was the only homeless queen she knew who was staying in a duplex off Fifth Avenue. But such is my life, you know? It was pretty glamorous, looking back on it. I tried to get a lay of the land, because I didn’t want to get sucked into the wrong scene. Finally I started to vibe in the East Village with people like Mistress Formika and Sherry Vine. I liked the stoner queens as opposed to the ecstasy and cocaine queens you would find in the big clubs. I went to Jackie 60 quite a lot, where I met a lot of my friends. And my favorite party was, of course, Squeezebox at Don Hill’s. It was drag queens singing live rock & roll music with a band, and that was my fantasia. Mario Diaz asked me to host a club called Cream at this bar called Cake on Avenue B. The first night we had a Big Load Contest where we had everybody go into the bathroom and jack off into condoms. We numbered them and weighed them on a drug scale, and at the end of the night, whoever had the biggest loa