Journey through Del LaGrace Volcano’s archive

Thirty years after Volcano had her 15 minutes of fame as a feminine lesbian with a ‘tache, she was back talking to people the age she had been, about being trans-identified.

Strap yourselves in

Two hours. Two hours of Del LaGrace Volcano (formerly Della Grace but Deborah Diane Wood originally) talking non-stop. You would expect an artist looking back over her massive oeuvre to spend at least some time speaking eloquently of her interest in portraiture and composition but no, all we got were anecdotes about all the people she had known. Artistically her approach is obviously point-and-shoot and this was reflected in her utterly unremarkable, occasionally mediocre, back catalogue, which didn’t draw a single gasp. Not even for the close-up of her own clitoris. If you want to see a sample of her work click here for photos from her most recently re-published work. You will shout bad swears very loudly, so please do make sure you aren’t in a public place. Also, genuinely embarrassed for anyone who thinks doing ‘half and half‘ is in anyway original or creative.

The lecture theatre was full with some sitting on stairs, as King’s College’s blue rinse brigade turned out in full. Mostly young trans-identified female students but there was the odd man dotted around, including a few TIMs. In addition, Del’s own little fan club, lesbians she had befriended over the years, and shot, showed up. I even recognised a few, utterly deluded scene queens, still convinced everyone was looking at them because of their beauty, rather than their big stupid 1980s hair. How ironic then, some thirty years after Del had her 15 minutes of fame as a feminine lesbian with a ‘tache, she was back talking to people the age she had been, about being trans-identified (okay, intersex-identified) and the joys of heterosexual sex.

Introducing Del to us …

… was Dr Zeena Feldman, head of King’s College ‘queer research centre‘. Of the universities in London, King’s is up there in pushing trans activist content and making everything lesbian and gay, ‘queer’. Feldman described her guest as ‘internationally renown’ but in reality Del has only ever been a very small fish in a very big pond. A tadpole, in fact. She also referred to Del as per her preferred pronouns (currently they/them). Building the archive was the theme, and a recurring meme amongst trans activists, though to be fair Del does at least have fifty years of crap to go in hers. It was claimed that she had just started to digitise her work but one suspects this was undertaken many years ago, when digitisation services first became available. Feldman told us the work was a ‘tenacious resistance to the demands of heteronormativity’ (snort) and the ‘radical politics of empathy’. The work also demonstrated a ‘deep reverence for subjects’ identities and embodiments’. With a straight face, she also referred to the ‘queer fucking archive’. The acronym FLINTA, newly on the UK scene, was also deployed.

We were also promised that the work had never been seen before, that it was ‘uncensored’, that it was ‘not safe’, we could leave the room if we wanted to (and believe me, we wanted to) … yet nothing remotely controversial ever materialised. Not really. The evening would end with a screening of Del’s pornographic short Pansexual Public Porn, made in 1997 (whilst she was presumably still married to the gay porn performer, Johnny Volcano). Unfortunately I was too tired to stay for it but we learned that Princeton University had purchased the rights and that it involves ‘gay men’ fucking ‘lesbians’ for the first time (and there I was thinking John Waters’ joke in 2019 about the same was prescient).

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A few days after the event, Feldman posted her own reflections on the talk.

Clunky but revealing joke

Just a few days earlier Sweden had experienced its worst ever mass shooting*, which also happens to be in the town that Del lives in. This made Del sad because she had hoped the town would become famous because of her. Obviously she was joking (she was a good joker) but it underlined that Del suffers from main character syndrome and it set the tone for the next TWO HOURS.

*The victims are apparently mainly from the Syrian Christian community, with the suspect being Rickard Andersson, a Swedish man, with no apparent political motivation.

Next she worked the audience, wanting to know who was there who had appeared in her photos and who wanted to appear. She also read out a dreadful piece of poetry about being on the London Underground, in which she imagined fellow commuters wondering what her sexuality and sex might be, which allowed her to explain that she doesn’t identify as male or female because, of course, she is intersex. Another ongoing theme was her professional jealousy towards the award winning photographer Nan Goldin, who appears to be very much the same type of photographer, yet has received so much more limelight. She had also publicly slammed Del for not understanding lighting or composition, so a bit of a pot and kettle situation there and I do understand the rancour.

Back story

As Del revealed her back story, going back and forth, a number of inconsistencies arose for me.

For example, Mum had abandoned her aged sixteen at a witches gathering in Sante Fe and she was left without a sleeping bag or anything. Del didn’t tell us what she had been abandoned in favour of, but presumably it was sex or drugs or both. But then she claimed that she had left home at the age of fourteen, which made me wonder why she would have cared about being left behind at a party when she was legally adult.

Del also claimed that she was treated as the ugly duckling and dubbed ‘Cinderdella’ by her sisters. But then it turned out she was the first born, so this seemed a slightly unbelievable dynamic between an older and younger sisters (the number never being specified).

When she was eleven, her mother, who was above average in looks (as was Del in her younger years and prior to testosterone) told her she was never going to make it on her looks and needed to develop her personality instead. Thus, Del claimed, she found looking at photos of herself difficult, especially because of the pressures capitalism put on ‘people with female bodies’, yet her chosen career and work suggests the opposite.

She also dedicated the talk to her mother, who she had a complicated relationship with, but also had gotten so much from. She showed us several photos of her mother taken at Democrat Conventions, including one with Julian Bond, surmising that her mother had had a relationship with him because, well, they were stood next to each other and looked relaxed. Apparently mum was a regular at the DNC, jarring with Del’s claim that she came from a long line of ‘waitresses and Avon ladies’ and that the family were ‘white trash’ adjacent.

In fact, she was ‘off white’ (they all say this) because she had a Native American great-great-grandmother and showed us a photo of this alleged matriarch with the family. Given it would have been turn of the century, it occurred to me though that the Native American woman only featured because she didn’t need to be hidden, i.e. the family wasn’t boasting about their brown family member but merely the indentured servant (‘look, we’ve got one’).

Early life as a artist

At art college she didn’t fit in because it was all rich kids, so discovered a working class lesbian bar instead, where she felt at home. She lusted after various women there, some she was turned down by because she wasn’t butch enough (alternatively she was ‘too butch’, she couldn’t really make her mind up on this matter). Others she did ‘have’ and we heard about various unexciting liaisons. She also went to sex parties and learnt about ‘S&M practices’. Previous to that she claimed she had been a ‘bi activist’ (as no one was back then*) but after her first orgasm with a woman, several bed-notches in, she decided to cross over. She thinks she takes photographs of people in toilets because the first photo she ever took was of mum in the toilet (which does seem significant).

*And a friend who was on the scene with Del during the 80s, also has no recollection of bisexuality ever being a talking point from her or the scene in general.

Only half-joking, Del claimed that one of her early photos, taken when she was living in a squat of the Goodman Building, of a man in drag pushing the hoover was ‘probably’ the inspiration for Queen’s I Want To Break Free video (famously an attempted pastiche of Coronation Street). Again, the photo in question was just ordinary. A snap of a pal by another pal. How on earth would Roger Taylor’s girlfriend have ever seen it?

Political revisionism

Throughout Del very much wanted to emphasise that she was anti-terf and had always held the views that she now holds: that gender, sex and sexuality are completely fluid. I have no idea what she really believes and it occurred to me that she is probably not really a political person at all, more of a magpie who falls in with whatever narrative gives her a platform. However, it is clear in the past she had held the views of the lesbian separatist, as she told us she used to read The Lesbian insider, insighter, inciter magazine (published in Minneapolis, 1980). She was also a contemporary of feminists like Kate Millett and visited Womyn’s Land, one of the lesbian separatist communities based in the US. She assured the assembled blue hairs that Womyn’s Land ‘wasn’t terfville’ – why they even allowed male children there! (One just knows how that went down with the real separatists.) Alternatively she told us that she had only been a separatist for six months. We also saw a photo (I think of her) with the words ‘keep the resistance’ with the ⚢ symbol on the wall behind. (As with many of the photos, she was often the subject, meaning someone else was behind the camera.)

Her origin story also suggested at revisionism too, as she had claimed she was always a ‘spunky’ girl: the first time the cops bought her home she was five years old. Her first staged protest was when she was denied a job as a paperboy, aged ten. At eleven she wanted to become a scholar on a particular academic programme, only eligible to males. Seventeen saw her arrested on a beach when she refused to put her top on unless the men did, so she was arrested for obscenity. Clearly she was very much aware of the limitations put on girls and women growing up, very likely as a result of her mother’s Democrat and feminist activism.

Some anecdotes and name dropping

Del told us she sold a work to Lilly Wachowski claiming she had no idea who the famous Matrix director was, even though she has a sort of friendship with Wachowski’s trans-identified female partner. Click here to see a photo of Rachel Maddow, taken in the studio they shared together in Highbury. (Maddow recently claimed that the Stonewall was a ‘riot by trans people’.)

Del was involved in the inaugural meeting of Chain Reaction (a lesbian S&M club, just more aping of gay male culture during the AIDS pandemic, I’m afraid) and also took photos there. Name checks were also given to those who attended the same and of some of the people (one now a top academic) who had appeared in her more risqué photos. In more recent times she had been commissioned by Galop, the LGBT+ anti-abuse charity, to help out on a campaign around sexual consent (not found on googling, the photos were shit and included two men stood at the urinals).

Other sort-of famous people she knew and snapped included Johnny Volcano (the porn star ex-husband who I can find nothing about) and gay journalist Paul Burston, who was now a ‘fucking terf and G.A.Y. asshole, you can tell him I said that’. Burston was the person who introduced her to Johnny Volcano and at the time she and others were into ‘watching gay male porn’, which explains a lot. The BBC apparently covered the wedding as a load of drag kings turned up (could believe if this had happened post-2015).

Another journalist at TimeOut was accused of transphobia in the period 1995-6 and that Del had been identifying as intersex since nineteen-fucking-five, thank-you-very-much. Fortunately (for her) the internet doesn’t stretch back that far but I found two references to Del dating from 2012 – both of which are bereft of the terms intersex or even transgender.

Del also allegedly got a snog from Deborah Orr, who was kind of her ‘maid of honour’ at her wedding. Orr was bad because Orr had referred to Del as being male.

Other name drops/anecdotes included Derek Jarman, the trans activist Kate Bornstein and his ‘ex-girlfriend who became a boyfriend’ (nothing found to corroborate that). Neil Bartlett introduced her to Kim Cattrall, the photo of whom gave her her first mainstream coverage and was way above average for her oeuvre. However, Del wasn’t entirely happy with the photo of Cattrall, feeling it was ‘too staged or something, I don’t know’, which made it sound as if she wasn’t in the driving seat at the shoot. In Berlin she connected with Leslie Feinberg and is still friends with Feinberg’s sister and even knew the mother. And of course she returned to Nan Goldin.

More on being intersexy (phnarr narr)

Del has had her chromosomes tested three times as she wanted to know how and why she was intersex. The third karotype test performed in Sweden revealed that she was XXY. Del’s response: ‘Oh shit, another fucking doctor who doesn’t even fucking know what he’s talking about.’ Why? Well, because XXY is Klinefelter’s, dummy! And Del doesn’t have Klinefelter because she isn’t six foot five and wasn’t assigned male at birth. No, her XXY status was due to ‘vanishing twin syndrome’ thereby making her a ‘chimaera’ (the main threat with vanishing twin syndrome is to the mother during pregnancy, with the surviving child typically having no health risks). It all made sense because she had always had a fascination with twins.

She also showed and discussed her work Herm Torso (herm as in hermaphrodite), taken from her Transgenital Landscapes exhibition. Clarifying it was actually a photograph of a ‘trans man’ (who had clearly taken testosterone given the enlarged clitoris), it seems she has been happy over the years to let people think the subject was an actual hermaphrodite (see this article where the work is described as a ‘close up of an intersex body’).

The first article I can find of Del stating she is intersex is this Guardian article dated 15 August 2019, i.e. well post the Trans Tipping Point.

I was born with an intersex variation. For years I hid it. Then I went to Italy and let my beard grow. It was intensely liberating.

Del LaGrace Volcano’s best photograph: my blue mascara masculinity, Guardian, 15 August 2019

It all makes sense because …

… Del is really into astrology and describes herself as ‘super Leo’, having an imbalance of fire and born in the Year of the Rooster (or ‘cock’, as she preferred). She is also superstitious about numbers, claiming that a number of family members had died at the age of 67 and a number of associates shared the same birthday.

Her strangest foible though was an obsession with tracking people, even if they were no more than a fleeting acquaintance. For example, she once snapped two young black women on the off-chance outside the Lesbian Insider magazine office. She said they were lesbians but the photos we were shown didn’t confirm an entanglement. Curiously she had tried in vain to track them down, over a number of years it sounded, trying to cajole local newspapers to take up the story with the express purpose of identifying them, so that she could contact them. She didn’t share the other methods but I’m guessing sharing on Facebook, that type of thing. This desire struck me as fanatical. Why couldn’t she just look at the photos (which were okay, nothing special) and just wish them well? It was like she was reclaiming personal property.

Q&A

A separate Q&A has been also been published by King’s. The only interesting points of the publicly held Q&A was that Del had children late in life (her kids are currently 10 and 13 and she is 67, but she never clarified if she is the birth-, biological- or adopted-mother) and is now getting serious about making money, presumably to pass onto them. She had also done a slew of interviews recently, in which she felt she had said too much, one with Interview magazine (where she talks about her hopes for gays and lesbians to have more sex with each other), one with AnOther magazine (in which she claims she still goes out cruising for anonymous sex with men), and finally one with Cultured magazine (barely even a piece of blurb).

The only interesting question raised related to her ethical practice. Del said that she wanted subjects who were ‘out’ because she wanted work which could be seen. Other efforts went on ‘decolonising’ language, e.g. not ‘shooting’ people and using ‘photo sessions’ rather than ‘photo shoots’. The camera had been used as a weapon of violence and patriarchy, she said. She also doesn’t like taking commissions, just to work with people she wanted to work with. She had photographed thousands of people … and if you ever wanted to track her down, you could, if you were queer. The two unpaid black women from Minneapolis were on my mind though, their right to privacy not yet a twinkle in her eye.

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What the Del!

On the morning that I was finishing this piece, trying to work out what the hell to say about Del, I stumbled upon an annoying twitter thread, written by a longtime gender crit, in which young trans-identified people were characterised as difficult and obnoxious, whilst older trans-identified people were relaxed, kind and in touch with reality. Apart from the obvious, that older people generally-speaking are more comfortable with their station in life, what actual chance do the kids stand? Seriously.

For example, with Del, none of the young people in the room that evening would have any recollection of her on the scene and the internet doesn’t really stretch back that far. Furthermore, she was backed up by the very visible presence of her lesbian friends, who damn well knew otherwise.

One thing was I was able to dig up though, following up on her fawning anecdote about Derek Jarman, was an ITN interview from 1991 (here). She was still Della Grace then and clearly a femme lesbian, lesbian-identified and basically only produced art for lesbian consumption off the back of being lesbian. (There is also a hilarious clip of her at work, cajoling a twerking dyke, fiddling around with cables with about as much confidence as my elderly mother.)

I also found an article by Deborah Orr, which confirmed that she was maid of honour at the fabled wedding, but it also reveals something else; Del’s marriage to Johnny Volcano was probably a publicity stunt to promote the legalisation of same-sex marriage, an active campaign at the time.

Obviously, due to the then-illegality of the girl-girl or boy-boy combo [in the 1990s], this one was gay-lesbian, and a political statement as much as a nuptial gathering. The bride’s preparations had gone well, so well that she had managed the notable feat of growing a beard prior to the big day. But she fell back on convention nevertheless, by calling a couple of evenings before the great event in pre-ceremony meltdown. She couldn’t find an open-topped car, so I co-opted my friend Sam, who had a soft-topped 2CV.

The great day saw us dressed in black, maids of honour no less, sitting up front while Della Grace and Johnny Volcano stood proudly behind us, shouting at the top of their lungs: “We’re here, we’re queer, and we just got married.”

In a romantic postscript, Della eventually became a man named Del LaGrace Volcano. It’s nice that the law caught up with him and Johnny.

Deborah Orr writing in The Independent, 9 December 2006 – https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/deborah-orr/deborah-orr-there-are-times-when-the-reader-knows-too-much-about-the-writer-427701.html

And whilst searching for the Orr reference, I also came across this interview (well worth a read) with Del back in 1999, in which it is clear that she is simply ‘transitioning’ with the help of testosterone, not quite confident enough to claim ‘male’ (like most trans-identified females today) and felt safer ‘passing’ than presenting as a butch lesbian (ditto). Again, no mention of chromosomal aberrations or bisexuality; she was still a lesbian photographer aping gay masculinity for a minute audience.

Del accepts that he is not quite a he, and although he is taking testosterone he is not planning a full sex-change. “I don’t identify as a man or a woman,” he says. “But I don’t want to be called `it’.”

Maketh the Man, The Independent, 15 May 1999

Seriously, what chance do young people stand when the academy presents to them a charismatic ‘queer elder’, who has self-deprecation down to a pat? No chance, that’s what. And the irony of her batting again ‘cishet normativity’ whilst elevating heterosexual sex and female irrelevance is just so confusing.

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