Sheree Rose – Interview for Staging Decadence

Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose on the anniversary of their weeding, 1995. Photo by © Michel Delsol, all rights reserved. Courtesy of Sheree Rose and ONE Archives at the USC Libraries.

Sheree Rose is a performance maker, photographer, and a pioneer of BDSM subculture based in Los Angeles. She is best-known for her collaborations with Bob Flanagan during the culture wars in the 1990s, all of which explored Flanagan’s experiences of living with cystic fibrosis by riffing on the ‘double edge’ of sickness as an affliction of the body and as a metaphor for abjection. Rose’s relationship with Flanagan was professional, personal, romantic and unconventional. They lived together in a full-time Mistress-slave relationship, they made art about that relationship, they performed sadomasochist scenes in spaces ranging from BDSM dungeons to museums and galleries, and they played a key role in establishing a BDSM community in Los Angeles in the 1980s. Rose has continued her work as a photographer and performance maker since Flanagan’s death in 1996, although its extent and significance both before and after the culture wars has gained relatively little attention until recently (Yetta Howard’s recently published Rated RX: Sheree Rose with and after Bob Flanagan (2020) marks a rare exception). She has since forged another, ongoing collaboration with the live artist Martin O’Brien, who, like Flanagan, ‘fights sickness with sickness’ by drawing his experiences of living with cystic fibrosis into dialogue with sadomasochism. Rose also occupies a compelling place in the orbit of queer performance as a mother and grandmother at the threshold of becoming an octogenarian – a position that underpins and informs much of what follows. 

How does it feel reflecting back on your ‘sick’ collaborations in February 2021?

In the early 1980s, if you were ‘sick’, you didn’t want to talk about it, and you didn’t want to be seen in public, especially around matters of sex. It was taboo, and we were asking what it means to be ‘sick’, and ‘to fight sickness with sickness’. So instead of being ashamed of not being the perfect person, and conforming with clean living, we were thinking about what we could do to change the culture. We were really naïve about what we could do though. I was coming from a very straight background – married with children – but that was my political agenda. I thought hard for the right to abortion. But we were being honest, and we never proselytized. We just presented who we were. For a while I think we were important in the culture, but now I’m not so sure. The world is not the way I thought it would be as I’m approaching eighty years old!

‘World-building’ has become quite a fashionable turn of phrase, but it strikes me as being particularly relevant and layered in describing your personal, social and professional relationships with Bob Flanagan.

Bob lived until he was 43, which for someone with C[ystic] F[ibrosis] was amazing, and in all his work about that subject he said it was because of S&M, and because of me, that he lived that long. So that was on a very personal level, but we didn’t really ‘change’ society in ways that I thought we would.

But what about your influence on Los Angeles subculture – for instance, through your work with the Society of Janus, and the influence it had on the L.A. BDSM scene?

Oh, I think we were influential there, yes. I knew nothing about S/M until I met Bob. I’d come from a very traditional marriage. I was a child of the 1950s, so I missed what was going on in the ‘60s. I lived a very conventional life, but had this feeling that there was so much going on out there… But me and my ex-husband remained friends! In fact, he was good friends with Bob. When Bob did Visiting Hours (1994) at Santa Monica Museum of Art he would drive down there and spend afternoons with Bob when Bob was in the show. So it was an interesting time, and we were breaking boundaries there – but it was done idealistically. At the time I knew nothing about S/M, and Bob taught me. He’s the one who brought me out, but I felt it was important for women, especially me, to assert myself as a dominant woman. There were plenty of women who were into S/M, but they were closeted, much like gay men. There was a whole subculture. And now I have daughters and granddaughters! I love people like [the sex-positivity advocate] Annie Sprinkle, but that was never my thing. She was never married and never had children. So my position in all that is much more tenuous. I tried to straddle both worlds: of being a sexual revolutionary, and a nice Jewish wife and mother! [Laughter].

The thing about the Society of Janus, the only criteria – this is before the internet – was to have a sincere interest in S/M. We didn’t care what your orientation was, or what your gender was, or any of that stuff. We didn’t care if you were a top or a bottom. In that sense it was quite revolutionary. There were groups, but they were very segregated, and they didn’t mix. I wanted a movement, but people being what they are… The West Coast S/M lesbians did not get along with the East Coast gay men. So we started an organisation called the National Leather Association, and we actually had a meeting in Dallas in the ‘80s. It was like the Republicans and the Democrats! The lesbians on the West Coast had their ideas, the gay men on the East Coast had their ideas, and it just fell apart. We couldn’t get a national movement going. Maybe it’s not so surprising…

Some people might find it strange for us to be talking about S/M in these terms on a blog about theatre and performance. How does S/M connect up with theatre and performance in your own thinking, if at all?

S/M has always been about spectacle. In S/M you call things ‘play’, and you do a ‘scene’. At parties, where you have maybe 100 people in a huge space, you would block off a certain area with a rope or something, and you would invite people to become voyeurs. Voyeurism and exhibitionism is a big part of S/M subculture. It just is! People like to show off what they’re doing, and people like to watch. It’s not like an orgy; orgasm is not the ultimate act. It’s how beautifully you can do something, or how perverted dropping hot wax on somebody is, or cutting someone with a razor. There were very bloody things going on, but they were all done with an eye on aesthetics. The aesthetics of S/M. At the time I was photographing travel, my children, but I just loved the way S/M looked, and I started documenting it for that reason. Not to get turned on by it… I really wasn’t. It was more of an aesthetic enjoyment. I found it so beautiful, and scary of course. But there’s something so beautiful about something done consensually. I loved that fact of it, that people could get pleasure out of these incredibly weird activities. There was hardly ever any alcohol or drugs at our parties. I don’t know what’s going on now, as I’m out of the scene. But there was a reason, aesthetically, to capture it, knowing that it’s something that doesn’t usually get photographed, and I wanted to bring it out into the open. I was one of the first people in Los Angeles, maybe 1981, where we’d go out with our friends and have Bob wear a dog collar – and people were shocked by that! I had many friends who weren’t in the scene. Was I showing off a little bit? I thought Bob was the funniest, the smartest, he was just wonderful to be around, and I wanted to show him off! He was very well-trained. [Laughter].

If I could go back in time, one of the spaces I would have loved to have gone to before it closed down was Club Fuck! What are your memories of that place, and what significance did it have for you as an artist?

Well, there’s a story here… One of our friends in the 1980s was the director Stuart Swezey. He was doing something called Desolation Center. We would go out into the desert, and he’d have all these wild groups like Einstürzende Neubauten, Survival Research… That was part of the impetus for Bob and me. We were part of this very loose group. People would take acid, go out into the dessert, wild things would happen – not orgies, but performance art. Anyway, Stuart’s a good friend of ours, alongside Andrea Juno and V. Vale. Stuart owned a book store, the hippest book store in Los Angeles, and he asked Andrea if they could recommend any photographers for a book they were working on called Modern Primitives (1989) – so Stuart recommended me. So I have several photographs in that, including one of Genesis P-Orridge and his then wife Paula. The only thing that’s mentioned in there is ‘my slave Bob’, with pictures of Bob in the book. So, there’s going to be a publication party for the book, and Bob and I did a performance called Nailed (1989). Everyone who was part of the underground scene was there… It was a very small club. In this performance there were my slides, there were the dances, a performance with me cutting a woman on her breast – there was blood everywhere – and the best bit was when Bob nailed his scrotum to a board. It was quite an evening! [Laughter]. Everybody who six months later started Club Fuck! was in the audience. The audience, by the way, was not a S/M audience. It was hipsters, and many of them fainted when they saw the blood dripping everywhere. So Bob and I were like the godparents of Club Fuck! I did many photo shoots there, and Ron [Athey] was of course a big part of it. I performed there, a lot of our friends performed there. It didn’t last that long, and it wasn’t a big fancy club – it was in the back of a Laundromat on Sunset Boulevard – but it was an amazing time. I remember those days very well. A lot of people got their start there. We wanted to spread the word! We thought what we were doing was fun, and wanted to have a good time. We weren’t ashamed of what we did; we did it with humour. Bob had the best sense of humour… He always made me laugh.

By the way, RE/Search’s Modern Primitives is like a textbook for this movement. And then there was another book that came out later called Bob Flanagan: Supermasochist (1993), also from RE/Search. And in that are my photographs, Bob’s interviewed. Things happened after that which were maybe more important, but this helped to get people thinking in a wider sense. Any movement starts small, it gains momentum, then it flourishes, but what happens after it flourishes…? Decadence! [Laughter]. It’s just the way of the world. And I think we’re in a decadent period now. Society is falling apart; it’s decaying. That’s why I think Martin [O’Brien’s] work with zombies is so brilliant. It’s true!

Could you say a bit more about this process of societal decay? There was a book published last year by Ross Douthat called The Decadent Society (2020). I mention it because decadence, as an idea, has traction on both the political Right and Left. So you have conservative diagnoses of the decadent society, like Douthat’s – he’s a right wing Catholic who thinks that the problems of North American Society will be solved if everyone gets married, converts to Catholicism, has kids and dreams big – which complain of political and economic sclerosis, corruption, moral bankruptcy, and being ‘sick’ in the sense of pursuing unconventional desires, but then you also have commentators and practitioners who appropriate and queer this kind of diagnosis. This makes me want to hear more about what the term ‘decadence’ means for you.

Well, I studied archaeology at UCLA before I got divorced. Archaeologists talk about the stages of society. There’s the beginning part, when it’s growing, then there’s the part when a society flourishes, and then there’s the part where a society decays. It’s generally a 300-year cycle. Maybe not in Europe, but it is in the Americas… The Aztecs, the Incas... They all last about 300 years, and then they disappear. It’s like a flower. It begins as a bulb, it grows into a beautiful flower, and then it decays. It’s a cycle of life, and I think we’re in it right now. We’re in that decadent period, at least in America. I can’t talk for England; you’re a lot older than 300 years! But it seems like in the Americas, things can’t last more than 300 years. There’s a sadness to it, but there’s also an inevitability. So a decadent period is nothing to be afraid of. It’s a natural part of what civilisations are.

I don’t mind being old. I’d love to be around to see what happens, but I don’t think things are going to get better. In [Elisabeth] Kübler-Ross’s work on the stages of grief, the last one is acceptance. So I think in order to live any kind of a life, you have to accept that you’re getting older, that you can’t do the things that you used to do, and accept – otherwise it’s just madness, and I don’t want to be mad. I don’t mind being angry! But I hold on to my sanity as much as I can.

It makes me wonder not just about acceptance, but transformation. I’m thinking of a book that Barbara Spackman published the same year as Modern Primitives, called Decadent Genealogies (1989). She talks about the ways in which decadent writers of the fin de siècle approached sickness not just as something suffered, but as ‘the ground of a new consciousness, and a new interpretation of the body’s relation to thought’.[1] I think this resonates much more strongly with the work you were doing in the 1990s with Bob than it does with the literary imagination, and the work you’ve been doing more recently with Martin O’Brien. It also invests the idea of decadence with something more than a sense of just falling apart.

Yea. In western civilisation, especially America, we don’t like the idea of people being old and sick. You have to be young and attractive and fresh. Look at Ancient Greece; their idea of perfection was the young male. It’s not a new idea. But American culture, in terms of advertisement, sell us ideas of the new, the beautiful, the wonderful. In the 1990s, when Bob would cough, people would get scared. That was also the time of AIDS, and I think a lot of people thought bob had AIDS because he was skinny, and he coughed, and people were very frightened of that. But I find it interesting that the mask in the present moment has become a symbol of who you are. They’ve even made it into something you can monetise! I find that funny, in a sick way. Commercials will outlive us all.

What do you think would have happened to the art that you and Bob were making in light of everything that’s happened – not just the pandemic, but other events that have happened since then? For instance, I’m thinking of Eric Garner being murdered by police in 2014 after being put in a chokehold, and especially his dying words: ‘I can’t breathe’.

Even if you were a liberal white person in America in the 1990s, you knew what was happening in the ghetto, but you didn’t have to see it. It was kept on the down low. I didn’t have to fear the police. Bob didn’t have to fear the police. That’s a part of America that we’ve never really grappled with until now. Maybe it’s time for America to go down. We’ve fed our children lies. Some of us realised the lies earlier than other people did, and we tried to do something about it. Most of the people in Congress aren’t good, but that’s not always their fault. That’s just the way the system is, and if you want to exist in the system you have to follow by the system’s rules, or else you’ll be taken out of it.

As for the pandemic, people aren’t necessarily understanding what it really means to be a ‘sick’ person. People are frightened of it, of course. Humans are also fragile. They have fragile egos, and they fear death. The thing about living with Bob all those years, and being good friends with Martin… It’s not that we should embrace death, or that we’re looking for death, but we know it’s inevitable, and we don’t run away from it. Culturally, that’s pretty brave. Of all the traits that I admire most in Bob and in Martin, it’s bravery. I’m also facing death now. I had a heart attack two years ago, and I recovered. I mean, I’m fine, more or less. I have a stent in my heart. But I’m going to be eighty soon, and I understand mortality in a way that I didn’t in my 30s and 40s. I would look at Bob and know that he was going to die, but it was a different relationship to death compared with what I have now.

What Bob did and what Martin’s doing now is staggeringly brave, but from the perspective of someone comparatively able-bodied, which is worth stressing, they also seem to mock that bravery, and point fun at it. I’m thinking of Bob wrapping himself in a cape as ‘Bob Flanagan: Supermasochist’, as well as Martin’s brilliant sense of humour.

You have to take it seriously when your body is falling apart and you know it. The ageing process, for me… I’m understanding it on a level that I never understood before. Until you reach your 70s, 80s or even 90s, you don’t really grasp it. You might die of a heart attack, an accident, or some cancer, but you don’t ‘get’ it until it’s upon you. So humour is a way of coping with that seriousness. There are so many ways of coping that aren’t ‘healthy’, to use a funny word!

As my life now ebbs and flows and slows down, I reflect a lot. So many people have written things about me, and I’ve written very little about myself, and my journey, so I’ve planned to go to Mexico in June for a month, and hope to write my memoirs. I’ve had my first [coronavirus vaccine] shot, and will have my second shot next month. And I’m not afraid! If I die in Mexico, well, that’s interesting. I really don’t want to have a funeral. I hate funerals! People who hated you, or were mean to you, they come up at your funeral and say how wonderful you were and blah blah blah and everybody cries. I don’t want that! People who love me, well, I know that they love me! I don’t need to them to say that when I’m dead! [Laughter].  

[1] Barbara Spackman, Decadent Genealogies: The Rhetoric of Sickness from Baudelaire to D’Annunzio (Ithaca and London: Cornell, 1989), ix.