From kicking out the teeth of a dead cow onstage to popularising the prefix Mx, the performer has blazed a trail. Now 60, Bond talks about channeling rage into comedy – and nonconformity into revolution
‘When I was 12 or 13,” says Justin Vivian Bond, “my parents took my sister and me to dinner at Disney World where this performer called Helen O’Connell did a show. She was wearing a beautiful beaded red dress and I thought, ‘That’s what I want to do. I want to wear fancy dresses and sing songs in glamorous places while people are eating.’” The New Yorker magazine has since crowned Bond “the greatest cabaret artist of [their] generation”. Bond chuckles. “I guess you could say I succeeded.”
The transgender, trans-genre artist is speaking from their apartment in New York’s East Village, where the air outside is thick with smoke blowing over from Canadian wildfires. It’s morning there and, over the phone, Bond’s voice is luxurious and woody. “I don’t have a beautiful voice that makes people think, ‘That’s magic coming out of that person’s throat.’ That’s not what I’m about. I feel like I need to have a justification for asking people to listen to me. But I think, through the work I’ve done, I’ve earned that.”
