At 60, trans cabaret legend Justin Vivian Bond is celebrating survival

HUDSON VALLEY, N.Y. — On a perfectly blue upstate afternoon, Justin Vivian Bond is telling me about one of the marvelous perks of turning 60: becoming invisible.

For many women, it can be a dispiriting time, that liminal state between being catcalled and people giving up their seat for you on the subway — when all the attention, both wanted and not, that came flooding toward you in youth suddenly dries up and it feels as if you’re wandering the world as a ghost. No more getting hit on in bars. People (it’s always men) walking into you as if you don’t exist.

But for Bond, an internationally renowned cabaret performer originally from Hagerstown, Md., who has gone through a lifetime of gender fluidity, being ignored like any other lady of a certain age feels like a blissful victory.

“No one sees you!” says Bond, who goes by “Viv” or “Mx Viv” and uses they/them/she pronouns, chuckling. “I felt like I got more grief and harassment when I was perceived as being a gay man. Now I just basically look like a middle-aged lady when I’m walking down the street. Fortunately, knock wood, that’s pretty much my experience now, being invisible. That’s fine. I like it.”

There are certainly worse alternatives for someone like Bond in this deep red part of New York state, where Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) lost by 24 percentage points and where I saw a giant “Trump 2024” flag covering an entire barn — just minutes from the queer enclave of Hudson, N.Y., where Bond recommends I get dinner at the LGBTQ+-friendly tiki bar Lil’ Deb’s Oasis, which sells T-shirts reading “Thank You for Being So Hot!”

But that invisibility cloak immediately self-destructs once Bond reaches the East Village, where they live part time with their cats, Pinky and Leather, who they co-parent with their ex-lover and best friend, DJ Sammy Jo, who lives upstairs. Bond is a legend on the downtown performance scene and has been ever since they moved from San Francisco to New York in 1994, as one half of the subversive musical act Kiki and Herb. Bond spent roughly two decades in elegant drag as Kiki DuRane, a failed, alcoholic nonagenarian lounge singer spouting searingly funny, politically incorrect truths and doing cabaret versions of punk songs alongside her long-suffering piano player, Herb (Kenny Mellman).

“It’s as if Viv were a Judy Garland, but alive,” says Mellman, trying to explain the fervency of their fandom. “There’s just an honesty in their character that I think shines through that people attach themselves to.”

Kiki and Herb graduated from dive bars to Broadway and Carnegie Hall before calling it quits on bad terms when Bond left to do solo projects in 2008. Then, about 10 years ago, Bond and Mellman made up, falling into each other’s arms during the devastating funeral of their friend, the queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz, where they performed Kiki and Herb’s heart-rending rendition of “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” They now do occasional tours, including a sold-out run of Christmas shows in several big cities last year.

“I think of Viv as one of the faces on the Queer Mount Rushmore,” says John Cameron Mitchell, co-creator of “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.” A Bond superfan since the ’90s, Mitchell says he still quotes Kiki daily. (Some favorites? When asked if you’re leaving a room: “I’m proud to say, I’ve never left anywhere without being told to first. It’s a waste of energy. They’ll let you know.” Or, to an audience, “If I could love, I would love you all.”)

After forays into albums, film appearances and a very funny, poignant 2011 memoir, “Tango,” about youthful sexual dalliances with teenage boys in Hagerstown, Bond has settled back into what they’ve always done best: live shows. A singular performer, they have a reputation for mordant humor, whip-smart stage banter and that voice, coupled with meaning-laden interpretations of songs such as Kate Bush’s “Under the Ivy” and Joni Mitchell’s “Woman of Heart and Mind.” Their shows consistently sell out, because, as loyal fans know, Bond never does the same show twice.

At shows in May celebrating their 60th, or “Diamond Jubilee,” at Joe’s Pub — the Public Theater’s cabaret and Bond’s third New York home — I met a hirsute math professor in a hot pink feathered headdress and halter top who sees Bond multiple times a year; a yogi from Arlington, Va., who’s a longtime fan of Viv’s but who hates Kiki; and a group of six gay men in their early 30s who’d learned of Bond when they were teens, watching Bond play the mistress of ceremonies in Mitchell’s orgiastic 2006 film, “Shortbus.” Justin Linds, a 33-year-old science historian who grew up in Toronto, told me that seeing Bond in that movie made him excited about the possibilities of a queer, sex-positive life. In many ways, Bond is an LGBTQ+ elder, but they hardly seem like it, prowling around Joe’s Pub, belting out Annie Lennox and declaring, “I’m a sexual-genarian!”

“She’s just a real force to watch onstage,” says Molly Ringwald, a close friend who used to take new friends to Bond’s shows as a litmus test to see whether she wanted to keep hanging out with them. “I can remember just having these experiences watching her and laughing harder than I ever laugh, or cry,” Ringwald says. “The way that she interprets songs, I mean, nine times out of 10, they’re better than the original. It’s like you’re hearing the lyrics for the first time.”

‘Hi again!” says Bond as we walk into their local coffee shop in the Hudson Valley and an employee immediately starts preparing Bond’s usual lemonade without sugar. Bond is in head-to-toe black and seems to go unnoticed, despite being a 5-foot-11 blond with a genteel Southern drawl and the kind of extreme Auntie Mame energy that makes you feel as if a spiral staircase ought to materialize every time they walk into a room, so they can swan down it in flowing gowns.

We’ll be eating the sandwiches we bought at Bond’s place, which has a pink-painted staircase and a doormat announcing it as “The House of Whimsey.” Every surface is covered with fabulous wallpaper or paintings or art books, and whole rooms are dedicated to housing wigs and costumes of feathers and silk. The house was a refuge for Bond and their friends during the pandemic. Bond wrote their celebrated show of duets with the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, “Only an Octave Apart,” at the piano in their living room. This is where Bond and Mellman put together their Kiki and Herb Christmas shows, which they’re trying to make an annual tradition for people who, by necessity, spend their holidays with chosen family.

The singer found the sweet historical gem near Hudson six years ago. Bond thought they couldn’t afford it, and “that made me sad,” Bond says, but their therapist and Rufus Wainwright, a good friend, told them to go for it. And Bond’s been splitting their time between upstate and the city ever since.

Just owning property makes Bond unique among their peers. “I mean, come on, a trans performer buying a goddamn house from doing shows? That’s amazing! I have a washer and dryer for the first time in my life, and I feel like I’ve made it,” says comedian Murray Hill, 51, who has gone from the downtown scene to HBO’s “Somebody Somewhere,” based on the life of series star Bridget Everett, another veteran of Joe’s Pub. Hill, who calls himself “a queer trans kitchen sink kind of person,” says that seeing his buddies from Kiki and Herb perform at Carnegie Hall in 2004 “felt like a religious experience,” and that it inspired him to keep going in showbiz.

The week before I visited Bond, four states were considering bills that would ban gender-affirming care for trans youth or measures to stop trans girls from joining female sports teams, amid a larger doubling of anti-trans legislation since 2022. The persecution of trans children is a large reason Bond decided to make a big deal of celebrating their Diamond Jubilee, despite a very tough few months of living in “a death vortex” and battling consecutive waves of grief. Bond’s 87-year-old mother, Lois, died of an extremely aggressive cancer in January, bookended by Bond’s Aunt Joyce in August 2022 and Aunt Sandra in February.

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When Bond took me on a tour of their house, every piece of art seemed to be a gift from a friend who had died, many during the AIDS crisis. “This lead-up to 60 has been a f---ing nightmare,” Bond told the Diamond Jubilee crowd. “I was kind of looking forward to a big celebration, but everybody keeps dying — which kind of makes me feel young! It’s like I’m in my 20s and it’s the ’90s. People are just dying right and left.”

Survival is something the singer has been thinking about a lot. “It is kind of like I’m a type of unicorn,” Bond says. “There are not a lot of trans women my age. And then most of the gay boys I went to college with or that I knew in San Francisco, some of my very dearest friends, they all died.” Heklina, a San Francisco drag queen who Bond grew up with on the dive bar scene, was found dead at 55 shortly before we met. Bond’s close friend Ian Falconer, writer and illustrator of the Olivia children’s books, died of kidney failure at 63 in March.

I told Bond I wanted to write about them to celebrate queer joy, but I’m the one who keeps bringing up depressing topics, Bond points out. “Just to be clear!” Still, Bond, whose mantra is “glamour is resistance,” doesn’t shy away, mentioning how trans women have difficulty getting jobs and health care, and how trans women of color are in particular danger of dying of suicide or violence. Bond immediately posted fighting words on Instagram in response to the Supreme Court’s decisions last week to strike down affirmative action and to side with a Christian graphic artist who refuses to work with same-sex couples. In 2019, Bond put their body on the line, getting arrested on the steps of the Supreme Court demonstrating for the protection of LGBTQ+ rights. (Bond’s Pride shows, also at Joe’s Pub, were called “What Have You Done for Me Legislately?”)

“There just aren’t that many people that are around that are able to celebrate turning 60,” Bond says, “and so I do that.”

Bond, who describes themselves as a “Reassuringly Expensive Mother Type” in their Instagram bio, grew up in Hagerstown, a small working-class, predominantly White town in Western Maryland, best known for having a minor league baseball team. Bond’s grandmother had nine children. The family were big churchgoers, with little understanding for a boy who started wearing his mother’s Iced Watermelon lipstick to school in first grade. Bond was 11 when classmates started calling them the f-word. Every night for years, Bond tells me, they would pray to just wake up one day and be a woman.

In the ’60s and ’70s, there was no mainstream vocabulary to describe being trans. “The matter of fact is, it’s better now. Not as good as it should be, obviously, but it’s better,” Bond says. “My mom said to me one time, ‘Of all the places you’ve lived, where did you think it was the most dangerous?’ And I said, ‘Hagerstown.’ I felt the most threatened and in danger there of any place that I ever lived. And it’s like any other small town from 20 miles of the coast to 20 miles of the coast.”

One beautiful memory Bond has from growing up came during a family trip to Walt Disney World as a kid. During dinner on the rooftop of the Continental Hotel, Bond saw the big-band singer Helen O’Connell perform cabaret. “She was in a beautiful bespangled dress with red lipstick and blonde hair, and I was like, ‘That’s what I want to do,’” Bond told the crowd at one of their birthday shows, prompting whoops and applause. “That’s all I really wanted out of life — to be a cabaret singer in beautiful rooms with gorgeous outfits — and that’s basically all I’ve gotten!”

When Bond left Hagerstown, it was to be a theater major at Long Island’s Adelphi University. After that came a stint in D.C., where they spent a few fun years working the dinner theater circuit, dancing the night away at Tracks or watching both drag queens and naked boys on the bar at Ziegfeld’s/Secrets. It wasn’t until Bond moved to San Francisco in the late ’80s, though, that they leaned into having sex and found a community. “I just did not like men, period, straight or gay,” Bond says. “I didn’t like men at all until I got to San Francisco and met all these amazing, wonderful queens. And then I was like, ‘Oh, these are my people.’”

Kiki and Herb rose out of the San Francisco dive bar scene in the early ’90s, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, pretty much by accident. Bond and Mellman, both in their 20s, were already performing together and had a gig booked the night of the San Francisco Pride march, but Bond’s voice was shot, so they drew exaggerated lines on their face and Bond vamped, blurting out funny truths about the death around them while Mellman pounded the keys. “It was a very easy way to say things that if we were just, like, 20-year-old Act Up members, it would have seemed strident,” Mellman says. When they moved to New York in 1994, hoping for a little more monetary success in a bigger pond, HIV/AIDS had been raging for more than a decade without a cure.

It was the last year before the AIDS drugs “cocktail” came in, and Kiki and Herb shows were where all the anger of the community coalesced and was released. Bond-as-Kiki crawled on tables, knocking over drinks, and commanded the audience members to lick her leg — which they did. Mitchell calls those shows some of the most moving, rousing performances he has ever seen: “It was just the ignoring of millions of citizens, and there was so much fury in the queer art of the time, and Kiki was the most powerful of all. It was truly punk and truly cabaret and truly super interesting, unlike anything I’d seen.”

The first time Wainwright heard of Bond was also in the early ’90s. He was 16 or 17 and in a complete state of anxiety during the two weeks it took to get lab results that would tell him whether he had what was killing everyone he knew. The guy he was dating was a friend of Bond’s and had a Kiki and Herb bootleg cassette in his car, which Wainwright stole and listened to on repeat. “I just remember listening to Vivian’s performance and it being this visceral, real illustration of the drama of the era and the excitement of being out in the gay world and also the fear and intensity of AIDS at the time,” Wainwright says.

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In many ways, what Bond did after retiring Kiki was become a younger, successful, nonalcoholic version of her — a woman who has been through it all and keeps on singing. “I think that maybe the most beautiful aspect of Viv’s adventure is witnessing the transition Justin made via Kiki towards Vivian,” says actress Tilda Swinton. “It made me think of Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘Little Mermaid,’ forgoing her undersea life and walking on her feet for the first time. Only, Viv did not sacrifice their voice with this step, but found it.” Swinton, who has known Bond for decades, says the two of them occasionally talk about doing something in which they play the same person.

It was during Bond’s long solo period, about 12 years ago, at 48, that they began taking hormones and transitioning. Throughout their long career, Bond has been the ultimate example of evolving identities, going from someone who was, as Mitchell says, “unable to hide their queerness, the most powerfully femme man I’d ever met,” to a kind of androgynous being who seemed to occupy their own gender category. A pioneer in this space, Bond was using the pronoun “V” in the early 2010s, and got the New York Times to print the honorific “Mx.” in 2012, three years before the paper wrote about whether it might add it to the stylebook. You can almost tell how long someone’s known Bond by the name and pronoun they use.

“It took me a moment to say ‘Viv’ and not ‘Justin,’ or ‘she’ rather than ‘him,’” Ringwald says. “But all it took was for Viv to say a little bit dryly over dinner, ‘You’re worse than my dad.’”

Back at Bond’s house, a four-poster bed was draped with costumes for upcoming shows. “I was having a little try-on session, because I’ve basically had the same set of clothes that I grabbed, you know, things to wear to funerals and to take care of somebody who’s dying,” Bond says. The singer went onstage at Joe’s Pub three days before Christmas last year, on the day they found out their mother had terminal cancer. She’d die five weeks later.

“Believe me, it was a hard-won situation with us, and there was a lot of pain on both sides,” Bond says of their mom. Over the years, the singer has managed to create a loving relationship with nearly every member of their enormous family, which has plenty of misfits who make Bond feel less alone. “My mom had the best line my sister told me about,” Bond says. “She said: ‘Well, I mean, compared to everybody else, I think our family’s very normal. We don’t have any drug addicts or anybody who gets in any kind of trouble. I mean, your brother’s your sister, but even that doesn’t seem that strange once you think about it.’”

With their father, the long-fought battle started again when Bond started taking hormones. For years until his death, Bond was no longer welcome in his house. “But I have forgiven him, which took a lot of work, and that’s when I discovered that forgiveness is a gift you give yourself.”

Before I go, Bond rattles off an entire year’s worth of shows they already have on the books. More touring with Kiki and Herb. Residencies in London. A Christmas show, of course. They’d started looking for sexier clothes, wanted to find someone to date or at least have fun with for a night. “We should all be having more sex,” Bond says.

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Bond takes me outside to their enormous hedged lawn. The previous owner planted a lovely garden of perennials, and, they say, it’s always a surprise to see it come to life. The lilies of the valley should be coming in soon, in purple and white. When I see Bond at Joe’s Pub weeks later, they tell me I’ll have to come up again; it’s gotten so beautiful.

Bond could have faked it as a man, they tell me. They probably could even now. But what would be the point, when the thing that brings you happiness is wearing pretty dresses and singing in front of people and being surrounded by talented musicians and friends who love you for who you are? “I realize how all of it is bulls---, so you might as well just do whatever’s the most fun,” Bond says. They pause and grin. “There’s some queer joy for you.”

correction

An earlier version of this story stated that Bond's height is 6-foot-4. In fact, it is 5-foot-11. Additionally, a portion of a quote by actress Tilda Swinton was misstated. “I think that maybe the most beautiful aspect of Viv’s adventure is witnessing the transition Justin made via Kiki towards Vivian,” Swinton said, not “the transition Bond made.” The story has been corrected.

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