Spotlight Conversation: Judy Sisneros, east of Hollywood queer life documentarian (Part 1 of 2)

After two-plus decades of taking snaps of friends and queer art, performance and protest on the east side of LA, a lesbian activist-cum-photographer prepares to unveil her archives.

Hanna and Sky at Cruise, a weekend club for queer women and their friends at The Eagle leather bar in Silver Lake, May 2019. Photo: © Judy Sisneros.

On a late Wednesday night in early January, with the dawn of a new year still fresh, I caught my old pal and lesbian activist Judy Sisneros on Zoom for a sit down-catch up-what’s doing chat about all things Judy. She lives in Silver Lake, in an apartment a block from Sunset Boulevard. I lived two blocks away from her for my year of transition from New York to California in the early aughts, before shifting north to San Francisco, Judy’s prior 80s home before LA. That’s when I got to know her better. I’d often drop by, making my way carefully through piles of boxes that contain her sprawling archive of photographs and memorabilia, documenting over 30 years of LA queer and activist life, much centered on edgy art, performance, music and street protest.

            Today, the big piles are considerably smaller because she’s had a lot of time during the Covid pandemic to finally organize her photos in preparation for her first solo show. It was supposed to happen in 2020, but Covid kept delaying the event and now, it’s looming somewhere in the fall, assuming no more delays happen. During our call, she pointed back to several boxes of work that represented her photo archives, which are in pretty good shape, she tells me. That still leaves a lot of contact sheets to look through, then the task of printing. But it’s happening, albeit more slowly than she hoped. On top of that, she’s had a knee problem and is getting ready for surgery that will slow her down a little this spring. But no matter: she’s committed and if anything, is eager to get more wind behind her wings to publicly birth the archive, at last.

            As with Nan Goldin and other seminal 90s photographers, Judy began by taking pictures of her friends, and the places she liked most, including queer venues and her years of activism in Act Up LA, Queer Nation LA and, in the aughts Tongues, a Latina lesbian arts group. Wherever there’s been a cool artsy LA party, there’s a good chance Judy was there, or knew about it. Look over by the stage, or in the background, and there she’s been, quietly capturing the fun with a small camera, never seeking to interrupt the action, but intent on documenting the moments. It’s only in the last decade that she’s embraced her identity as a photographer, which began as a hobby but quickly became her passion – one of them. Her friends, myself included, have long pushed her to show the work, which is, in my opinion and theirs, vital and exciting and shows how rich and creative the lo-fi queer east side of LA has been all along.

            I was always interested in photographs and the way that they told stories, says Judy about her work. I’m just capturing things, she adds modestly. Part of it is not wanting to forget, but most of it is that I feel like this community deserves to be seen and preserved, because so much of LGBTIA+ LA is focused on Hollywood queers. The community she is talking about is hers: spaces where queers of color and allies mix, punks, leather queers, queercore bands, experimental filmmakers, trans artists, queer activists and musicians of every stripe. Before photography, and alongside image-making, music has been Judy’s long, deep love. When I think of her photographs, or envision a show, I can’t help but imagine the soundtrack that should accompany it, as well as the posters and DIY zines that also present a rich slice of this cultural history. All of that is in Judy’s boxes, too.

2014 Selfie. © Judy Sisneros.

Music has always been my touchstone, my addiction, she says. It’s almost the first thing I think about in the morning and when I go to sleep at nights. I mean, there were periods of time when it wasn’t, but for the most part, it’s always been my anchor to where we’re at, you know, on this sphere. Like many of her friends, Judy can track her own life and evolving interests by the bands she liked and concerts she’s attended, which remind her of who she was hanging out with and what was going on. When I would pull out a random record sleeve at her house, she could immediately tell me about the songs, the players in the band, their back story, who else was making music then. Now that I’m thinking about this, I’m going to urge her to curate a soundtrack to trip hop through the years with her pictures.

            Judy didn’t come to photography with a career in mind; it’s all been an organic flow, with the music pushing her along. As a child, and then again later, it was all about taking pictures with and about her friends. I have some blurry memory of having a plastic 110 film camera in my hand when I was 11 or something.  It was cool. You were supposed to put in in your pocket. Later, that’s what I’d see her doing, quietly slipping her little cameras out of her pocket, discreetly lining up her shot, capturing the intimate moments of a performance or two friends gossiping in the corner of a club. It’s all about the moment, she admits. Before the advent of digital photography, she’d have to wait to look at a contact sheet to see if she’d captured the moment. That was always the high that came in the darkroom. She’s proudly old school, so it took her a minute to shift to digital, but now she prefers that format shooting with a Leica rangefinder. Many nights after a club or event she arrives home to load and review images on her computer. The creative high is more instant. And sleep has to wait.

Judy was born in Bakersfield, in central California, and attended schools there. She was raised in a loving family. Judy’s father was a forklift operator in a lumber yard; her mother worked as a secretary in a bank, then stopped to raise Judy and her twin sister, and her younger brother. I grew up until age seven in a barrio, she adds. Bakersfield is not rural but it almost felt like it. I associate the city with agriculture and cows and dry, flat farmland, with temperatures soaring above 100 degrees in summer whenever I drive past it enroute to LA from San Francisco. Others might call her family Latina, but her parents preferred the term “of Mexican-descent”. The family spoke English at home, but Spanish and Spanglish were spoken at her grandmother’s house. When we lived in the barrio, we (my twin sister and I) went to a Catholic school that was very brown, even though we’re fair-skinned. No one thought that we weren’t Mexican because, you know, our last name, and my dad was very brown. They would see him. But it was always ‘of Mexican descent.’

            It was only when the kids shifted to a public elementary school with mostly white kids that racial remarks surfaced. You know, kids would remind us, ‘you’re Mexican, aren’t you?’ says Judy. But in her family, there was no racism towards others or feeling of being anything less than an ordinary middle working-class American family, she explains. We had three square meals a day; we watched TV together on Sunday. Her family split due to her parents’ divorce but she still felt close to her family and still does to this day.

            School was harder, mostly because she was a super-shy kid, a little pudgy and nerdy – her words. I was extremely shy. I wore glasses; I had acne, she recounts. I was teased by some people. My twin sister wasn’t because she wasn’t chubby the way I was. I always thanked whoever that there were always one or two girls that were even nerdier than me, who got more hell that I did. And you know what? I feel bad for those girls, even to this day. I always wondered if they survived their teenage years. When you’re in elementary school, you can be treated badly.

            At 12, she also had her camera, but it wasn’t something that stuck. Instead, she credits an even earlier seed of her visual interest in photography to subscriptions her mother had to Look and Life magazines when she was still in elementary school. That’s when I really got a good look at photographs, she explains. Of course, I could see the outside world via the TV. But to be able to go back in these issues and keep looking at the same photos and seeing Diane Arbus photographs of people on the streets of New York. I was thinking, ‘these people look so alien to me.’ I just kept looking at the images, most were the iconic photos that we all know from her (Arbus) today.

            Later, she got subscriptions to Newsweek, and then Rolling Stone, where Annie Liebowitz was a star photographer. I had no clue when I first looking at the photographs who the photographer was, Judy says.  I didn’t realize who took the photos until high school; the same thing for Mary Ellen Mark’s photos. By the time I got into high school and was figuring out who these people were, Mark was doing photo essays on different cultures and people, whereas Annie, it seemed to me anyway, was focusing mainly on rock photography.

Katie and her dog Spike, 2008 Los Angeles Dyke March in Silver Lake. © Judy Sisneros.

After high school, the bigger world was calling. Judy left Bakersfield for San Francisco but stayed in San Jose for a transition year first with relatives. Right away, music became the siren. It was the late 70s. Punk was exploding, with bands coming over from the UK. Judy began catching all sorts of shows, including three Patti Smith concerts in ten days – the Horses tour. She began to attend larger concerts in San Francisco.

            San Jose was also the place she began finally figuring out her own sexual identity. I think I was always queer, but I didn’t know how to self-identify, she recalls, coming from a repressed Catholic background in Bakersfield.  I did a lot of experimenting when I was in San Jose which pretty much confirmed my adolescence…you know, the sex dreams I had about women. She had fangirl crushes on female musicians and bands while girls kept her heart beating. I think I would tell people who asked me this, which was not a lot of people she adds, about coming out as lesbian. It’s not just ‘should I or shouldn’t I?’ I wasn’t sure how to do it (come out). In San Francisco, she says, it just seemed like everyone was queer.

            Judy arrived in the city of fog on July 4th, 1979 and quickly found an apartment and a lesbian roommate. Soon, they were regulars at two and three clubs where new wave and punk took over the music scene. The first thing I noticed was probably visible to anyone going to San Francisco around 1979, which was the visibility of the queer community—that was huge, she recalls. Queers were also part of the punk scene.

            She describes the scene she fell into as second-generation punk, the first being a wave of punk music and culture that began circa 1976. She preferred the dive punk clubs to the lesbian bars or spaces. I didn’t feel like I related, culturally, to the softball dykes. I’ve never been a sports person; all my friends know I hate sports. I think of sports as this patriarchal institution that needs to be taken down a few notches, which I think it’s starting to be, but it’s slow. I was not really into disco, which is what some of the clubs played. But believe me, there were women I was interested in there…there were hot women. But I was really into punk.

            In her mother’s home in Orange County, there’s a portrait of Judy that’s been hanging in the living room for forty years. In it she’s got a spiky haircut on top, with a classic dyke mullet in back, courtesy of her lesbian roommate in San Francisco. Who knew that mullets would later be viewed as a retro OG trendy haircut by today’s millennial generation? Not Judy. Even softball dykes had mullets in the early 80s, along with guy rockstars like Rod Stewart and many, many punk rock musicians and their fans, male and female.

            I was always a T-shirt and jeans type of person, but I kind of started to get a little more dressed up, says Judy. You know, I’ve got my white shirt and skinny tie…. I started to look a little bit more new wave, getting Doc Marten shoes. By the time I went to New York for the second time, which was between Christmas and New Year’s, in 1981, I was pretty much full punk clothing look. Not a mohawk but…. I had colored hair at one point; I can’t remember if it was blue when I went to New York….

            Judy’s look evolved with the music she liked. In the beginning, she recalls, punk and new wave were referred to in the same way. It was all a new wave of music, she says. Then new wave got more melodic and popular and punk evolved into a hardcore underground sound. I liked the original punk. I was getting into death rock too, which became goth. The most new wave I got would be, like Adam and the Ants. But then I was also listening to Flipper, which is considered the pioneers of sledge punk. I was also listening to The Specials and the local San Francisco bands like Tuxedomoon, which was more synth wave….

The Slits, 1979. Photo: The Slits.

In the late 70’s and early 80s, San Francisco saw an explosion of punk venues; clubgoers were out all night. The tech bros and Silicon Valley weren’t even on the future horizon. AIDS was already seeding itself across the city and state, but the death knell didn’t sound until later. Back then, it was fun and sex and wild play and drugs. Judy would go to clubs several nights a week, despite holding down her day job. Her go-to hangout was a Filipino restaurant that doubled as a late-night club, the Mabuhay Gardens; locals called it the Fab Mab. It was like the CBGBs of San Francisco, Judy notes. None of these clubs were fancy. She’d missed the heyday of the Deaf Club, which closed just as she arrived. Instead, she also hung out at The Sound of Music, on Turk street in the gritty Tenderloin neighborhood, the On Broadway (upstairs from the Mab), the Temple Beautiful, on Geary, and Roosevelt’s, on Market Street.

            When I ask about her favorite bands, Judy starts ticking off names that I’ve never heard, thinking out loud …The Avengers, The Nuns, The Mutants, Los Microwaves, Tuxedomoon, Crime, The Offs…. There are so many more. I never saw The Nuns live, who broke up before I moved to the city, but they are legendary and I heard their music. She reserves a special fondness for the early lesbian and all-women bands she saw in 1979 and 1980. The Contractions were one of the first bands I saw. They were pretty new wave, poppy…. Everyone knew they were dykes, and they were very popular. Later, she caught a show in Berkeley by the LA band Nervous Gender, featuring Phranc, a butch icon to many. That was very exciting, Judy adds.

Smells Like Butch Spirit: Phranc, JD Samson and Candace Hanson at The Smell for JD's Crickets' show, 2019. Photo: © Judy Sisneros.

She also wants to single out Olga de Volga, the bass player for VS., that started out as an all-woman band. She caught the great all-female Brit punk bands The Slits (initially led in 1976 by Ari Up and Palmolive -- Paloma Romero -- who later joined The Raincoats) and The Mo-Dettes, formed by Slits guitarist Kate Korris, bassist Jane Crockford of Bank of Dresden, and others. The bands traveled over the pond to San Francisco after Rough Trade Records opened their first U.S. record shop in North Beach. The Slits 1979 debut album Cut, is considered a classic of the post-punk era.

            Judy had found her community, and through it, an immersive introduction to DIY zine culture, with its graphic arts style and typography. She got an apartment in the Mission two doors down from a building that housed the Target Video punk collective, and punk record label Subterranean Records in the basement. Target Video shot videos of many bands like The Screamers who came in from Los Angeles to play and bands like MDK who traveled from Europe. The third floor housed Damage magazine, a punk music newsprint magazine. There, she worked on the production team for a few issues. She still has the whole collection of these zines, and in each, a different masthead pseudonym. I was Judy Dogbreath in one; Judy Garland was another. I didn’t care. I might have had my real name in one…I should look.

            Damage came out regularly, almost monthly. Another local punk rag at the time was Search and Destroy, a New North Beach zine named after a Stooges song that began documenting the fledgling West Coast punk scene in 1976, the brainchild of photographer Richard Peterson and writer and publisher Val Vale. All these magazines are viewed as subcultural classics by punk cultural historians, along with Riot Grrl zines that captured the explosive female music scene with bands like Bikini Kill.

            When I ask Judy how it felt to her, how life was then, she smiles, then laughs. It was amazing how, in your twenties, you could go out all night.  One of her favorite memories is of the walks she’d take in the middle of the night, walking home from the North Beach clubs with friends, often tipsy. They’d walk through Chinatown or the financial district, then down to Market Street, to South Market, then head toward the Mission. It was stunning a lot of times, Judy says. First, the lights of Chinatown, right? And if I went through the financial district, it was the fog. It would hit the skyscrapers, cause shadows….

[END OF PART 1 (of 2).

For Part 2, go the main articles page of Tell Me Everything.]

LINKS

Instagram: @ornelas_sisneros

ONE Archives Days of Rage video

Sisneros (Judy) ACT UP/Los Angeles records (cdlib.org)

The Los Angeles Beat: Five Mondays in December: Club Scum takes over the Echoplex/Echo for an epic close to 2018

'Alien She' Exhibit Explores the Connection Between Punk Rock and Fine Art | KQED