A Decade of Bitchf*ggots, Camp Monstrosity, and Genderbent Drag: House of Larva at Ten Years.
- maxyeshaye
- Mar 14
- 5 min read
“You are chosen. You are a feast for gods… Vivere est esse martyr vitae. To live is to be a martyr to life!” – House of Larva, “INSECT-A-DROME,” in Controlled Burn produced by 20% Theatre, 2020.
Fall 2014. We stared at the mirky, stagnant water of a puddle. Worms crawled at the edge of the smelly liquid, where some insect’s eggs had been laid beside the shell of a cicada. We looked up at one other and said, “This is it! This is the look!”
A few months later, at Beloit College’s first drag cabaret, I entered, unshaved, amateurly made up, in a peplos made of trash bags, a boa around my neck. I lip synced to Carmen’s “L'amour est un oiseau rebelle” and Q Lazarus’s “Goodbye Horses,” the song Buffalo Bill dances to in Silence of the Lambs. Enfanga Sphinx played opposite me in fishnets, panties stuffed with plastic bugs, gauze around her breasts, fake nipples glued above. As Sphynx belted to punk rocker Jayne County’s “If you don’t wanna fuck me, baby, baby, fuck off,” she removed the bandage, revealing a second (real) set of nipples. The audience roared. House of Larva was born.
In 2015, we produced three midnight drag cabarets—Carnal Instinct: Dinner for One, L’Amour des Toilettes, and Slut Shaman, and the piece “Strawberries and Créme,” a bonkers retelling of Adam and Eve and a crémeunion ritual, involving whipped cream.
Our drag was a way to respond to people pitying us for being queer. They’d talk as if we were helpless, needing administrators, politicians, or allies (“real adults”) to advocate for us… even without us. It wasn’t just because we were young and in college. LGBTQ people are treated as less mature than straight peers, because maturity is aligned with stages of life that are complicated by queerness: aligning with gendered activities, puberty at a certain age, a first kiss, first date with the opposite sex, loss of virginity, marriage, children, grandchildren, and the fruit of your loins to bury you when you die. The state bequeaths rights and privileges to people who follow this trajectory, and we become further disadvantaged. Outside sexual, gendered, embodied norms, we become dehumanized, often through hyper sexualization or desexualization. Through drag, we’d exaggerate these dynamics to shine a light on them. We’d take a stance against “normal” and “just like you,” and invite audience members to feel how they’ve been alienated and alienated others.
Big things were also happening around us. On June 26, in a 5 to 4 ruling, the Supreme Court decided marriage was a fundamental right for same-sex couples. I remember feeling joy for so many in our community, yet a kind of sadness too: would those queers like me, who didn’t live, look, and center this culturally acceptable lifestyle be abandoned by the greater LGBTQ movement? Days earlier, President Obama had met with LGBTQ activists, community leaders, and journalists to celebrate Pride. His address was interrupted when activist Jennicet Gutiérrez, a founder of La Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement, protested the deportation and confinement of undocumented LGBTQ immigrants. It was painful hear Obama say “You’re in my house,” and “It’s not respectful when you get invited to somebody. […] Shame on you, you shouldn’t be doing this.” It was more devastating to see Gutiérrez booed by the LGBTQ attendees and their clapping at her forced removal. Were we really debating if a Pride event was appropriate for protest, as if Pride would exist without protest, as if detention and deportation of humans was an equal or lesser offense than interrupting a party?
Gutiérrez showed what kind of queer lives mattered to the biggest LGBTQ orgs and mainstream Democratics. Homonationalism was alive and well. Then, a year later, we saw one of the worst backlashes to LGBTQ progress when Omar Mateen killed 49 people and injured 53 others at Pulse, a queer club frequented by Latin American patrons and performers. In the Wake of Gutiérrez’s shaming, and the horrors of Pulse, House of Larva had to find our voice. How queers suffer under imperialism and participate in it became central to our oeuvre. Like with “queer,” we reclaimed monstrous, dehumanizing slurs. We named our characters Bitchfaggots, mutated humans who split off from the Breeders, an imperial upper class that became enslaved to an alien sex drive implanted in them by evil demiurge, Benwa Breedwinner. Bitchfaggots were given a sliver of freedom in exchange for perpetuating Breedwinner’s empire in other ways. The Bitchfaggots relished in violence. They didn’t romanticize monsterhood. Monsters may be wronged by societies that create them, but naming that doesn’t soften our scales or dull our fangs. We can’t sweep complicities and hypocrisies under the rug with #girlboss or #fabulous.
When Enfanga ended up in Chicago and I in Saint Paul, our future was uncertain. But then, McKay! McKay was another Beloit alum, an accomplished dancer, an incredible thinker. In 2017, she debuted as drag king Pouchet Pouchet, and she and I have been our most consistent ever since, performing at Intermedia Arts (RIP), Patrick’s Cabaret (RIP), 20% Theatre (RIP), and Pangea World Theater (alive and strong!). With Enfanga, we made our first short film, “Jizz Lips,” and we were flown to Boston for Lowlands, a parody of Golden Age Hollywood sword and sandal epics. In 2019, we produced medical horror drag show, Viral Liaisons, in which the world’s elites exploited a global pandemic and its cure to control the public. A few months later, Covid-19 plunged the real world into lockdown. Fictitious horror and our reality blurred. House of Larva closed shop. Beloved queer art organizations shut down. We experienced health scares, career challenges, all amidst a rise of anti-trans and anti-immigrant actions from our government. Worst, we experienced deaths of beloved family members and friends.
In ten years, we’ve seen the Muslim ban, children in cages, pandemic, SCOTUS overturning Roe v. Wade, Putin invading Ukraine, and a genocide livestreamed from Gaza, and Trump is president again. No we are crawling back out of (or into?) the gutter, because when fascism is on the rise, degenerate art must answer! Perhaps you saw us at Weird Stuff Only, Queer Prom, Black Hart, Queermunity” LGBTQ theatres and bars, punk spots, out of the box incubators, and brave religious communities are our homes. In turn we try to give back, hiring local guest artists and weirdos at our full length shows. In our upcoming show, Incident at Peckerpah Ridge: a Western in Drag, we are proud to announce our biggest cast of nine amazing queer and trans artists. Like a worm grown fat on RFK’s brain, we have been nourished by our fans, friends, collaborators. After ten years, we would not be here without you. You are the lifeblood that we humbly, earnestly, and gratefully suck. Thank you. We love you. — Çicada l'Amour.
See House of Larva Perform at our show, Incident at Peckerpah Ridge: a Western in Drag on March 21 and 22 in Minneapolis:
(I've censored the word Bitchfaggots in the title, not because I think it shouldn't be spelled out, but because I'd like to share this on some social media spaces, and it could get flagged and taken down for that language.)
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