ReDesigned and Still Relevant at the 55th Anniversary of The Peoples’ Flag Show 2025
The 55th Anniversary of The Peoples’ Flag Show (PFS) at Judson Memorial Church spired me to come up with a contribution. The original PFS was a statement about censorship. This anniversary celebration invited artists to once again interrogate the American flag and its meaning in light of the present day. I decided to shed additional light on a work from my past that is still very relevant. The Post Porn Modernist Manifesto was first published as a page in the original program for Annie Sprinkle’s Post Porn Modernist Show which debuted in 1989 at the Harmony Theater NYC. Throughout the entire decade of the 1980s Annie Sprinkle and I had collaborated on many projects. We made magazines together, held Sprinkle/Vera salon events at 90 Lexington which was Annie’s home. By the end of the decade, Annie and I, still best friends, were each beginning separate projects. Annie was moving from porn to performance art and I had just seen the first student of what would become Miss Vera’s Finishing School For Boys Who Want to Be Girls. In 1989 the world was still very much in the middle of the AIDs crisis. In the United States sexual freedom was under attack and anti sex forces were blaming gays and sex workers for the plague. The sitting president Republican Ronald Reagan, for too long a time, did not acknowledge the existence of the AIDs pandemic. He also scrutinized funding for the arts and as a result members of Congress put pressure on the National Endowment to censure art that was considered sexually immoral. The newly popular field of performance art was particularly vulnerable in this atmosphere of fear.
Annie’s show was a celebration of sexual freedom. I had seen the rehearsals and knew all about its contents. Scenes included “10,000 Blowjobs” and “A Public Cervix Announcement.” In the spirit of our collaborations, and true to our motto of “Document everything” I volunteered to create the “playbill”, a program for Annie’s show. I wrote Annie’s two page bio, a friend Craig Russell contributed Annie paper dolls and a list of credits. Because of the political atmosphere, I felt there needed to be something in the program that would support Annie and her bold work which celebrated the healing nature of sex. It was important she not stand alone. Besides me, there were others who would stand with her. We belonged to a community of erotic artists, idealists and entrepreneurs. A guiding influence was the Dutch artist Willem DeRidder. In the early 80’s Annie’s lover Willem DeRidder, a member of the Fluxus, an international art collective of the 1960s and 70s was a mentor to both of us. Fluxus encouraged art born of everyday life. It was Willem who exhorted us to break free of the porn ghetto and to think of everything we did as art, a concept that guided the three of us in the making of the magazine Love 83 Post Art Art in America, now an archival treasure. The Fluxus movement reminded me of the Dada movement which had so fascinated me in college that I had made it the subject of my final term paper. The Dadaists included Marcel Duchamp who put a urinal on the wall of a gallery and signed it “R. Mutt, 1917.” Dadaists wrote manifestos to accompany their irreverent art events.The point that Fluxus and Dada shared was that art was free-flowing not regulated by an establishment. I decided that a manifesto would add some gravitas to Annie’s playbill, so I created one, type written on letter size white bond.
My words flowed easily. I championed all of the things that were under attack: our sexual bodies, sexually explicit art and expression, sex as an artistic medium. This was a shorthand for what Annie was presenting on stage. The only thing I denounced was censorship. We were in “the rubber age” because safer sex, sex with condoms was essential. I asked Rene Moncado, an artist with a great sense of humor and devotion to female anatomy illustrate the manifesto, so he drew theater curtains made of focused on a vulva with penile support. The night before the official opening I invited a bunch of friends and colleagues all of whom were engaged in erotic enterprises to have cocktails in my apartment. I presented the manifesto and invited those comrades to sign it. Present that first night were: Candida Royalle, Eric Kroll, Johnny Science, Edie Solow, Monica Napoleon, Linda Mac, Frank Moore, Alexi Malenky, Jeff Diamond, Rourke Smith, Michael LaBash, Michele Capozzi, Tuppy Owens, Rene “IATBA”, Leigh Gates, Annie Sprinkle. Added a bit later were Ms. Antoinette, Viqui Maggio, Gloria Leonard, Willem DeRidder, Emilio Cubeiro, Betty Dodson, Spider Webb, Veronica Hart. At the bottom of the page, I left one space blank so a member of the audience on receiving the playbill could choose to sign the manifesto. The program was used at the Harmony performances and then again when Annie performed the show at The Kitchen in New York. It wasn’t until very recently that I realized the manifesto had made its way around the world. A few years ago the Brazilian-American artist Eduardo Kac came to visit me. He told me that from 1980-82 when Brazil was under a military dictatorship, he and his cohort performed naked in the streets of Brazil as what they called The Porn Art Movement. He knew all about the manifesto and treated it as holy. I understood that if I searched on sites like Academia.edu I would find other mentions of the manifesto in other countries. This was tremendously gratifying to me. I began to share the manifesto. As a recipient of a 2016 Acker Prize, the award created by Clayton Patterson to celebrate New York City’s downtown artist community, I made copies of the manifesto on parchment, rolled it up as a scroll and included it in the Acker box given to all 40 winners that year. The PPM is among my archives now at the Schlesinger Library of Women’s Lives, Radcliffe Institue,Harvard U. More recently, I was invited to read a piece at the launch of Dirty Magazine’s issue 7, for which I had modeled nude and was interviewed about sex work and activism by associate editor Brynn Michaels aka “Prom Queef”. I could think of no more appropriate piece to read to those gathered than the Post Porn Modernist Manifesto. Dirty Magazine definitely carries on the PPM tradition. I brought extra signed copies and the audience clamored for them. With the ongoing culture wars of today I think we are in need of still more manifestos.
The Peoples’ Flag Show runs from November 9-November 15, 2025 at Judson Memorial. Entrance, 243 Thompson St. NYC. Flag viewing 5-9pm all week. Full schedule of events at JudsonCommons.org/arts. Opening Reception 11/11 6p.