THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2019 17
1
HAUNTEDHOUSEDEPT.
DEMENTED
T
he artists Allyson Mitchell and
Deirdre Logue were in Philadel-
phia last week, at the Icebox Project
Space, staring up at the “Non Binary
Goddexx”: an eighteen-foot inflatable
Tyvek sculpture with one massive breast,
a hairy nipple, a slight mustache, and
inconclusive genitals that, at regular in-
tervals, released a gush of “fluid fluid”
into a bucket. Mitchell looked concerned:
“They’re not spewing enough!”
“We may need to top her up,” Logue
said. She smirked, and clarified, “The
Goddexx goes by ‘she’ or ‘they.’ ” The am-
biguously gendered giant is one of doz-
salination, stem-cell-grown leather. “I
identify with the philosophy of Smash
it, Reassemble it,” he said. “I have met
some genuine people trying to help the
planet. They see a problem, and a way of
fixing it. Surrounding them are these Ma-
chiavellian corporate giants, the Vander-
bilts and Carnegies of our day! Their for-
ward-facing P.R. is ‘We’re the good guys,’
and in the end they’re absolutely not.”
But would he invest in a revamped In-
ternet like the one Hendricks wants?
Middleditch grinned and said, “A decen-
tralized, non-monetized Internet—how
am I going to get my return on investment?”
—Dana Goodyear
ens of pieces that Logue and Mitchell
created for the latest iteration of Killjoy’s
Kastle, their breathtakingly elaborate, im-
pressively deranged, and surprisingly pop-
ular lesbian-feminist haunted house.
More than five thousand people saw
the version they erected in West Holly-
wood in 2015; every night, a line of eager
hipsters waited for the chance to be led
through the spectacle—past the cave of
the “Polyamorous Vampiric Grannies,”
through the “Riot Ghoul Dance Party”—
by one of the “demented women’s-stud-
ies professors” who serve as guides. (In
Mitchell’s new book about the project,
this character is described as “precari-
ously employed, hairy lipped, overcar-
ing and oversharing, and she sweats in
her perimenopausal silk shirt, angry, out-
dated.”) Like the TERFs—trans-exclu-
sionary radical feminists—who are con-
demned to spend eternity mopping
up the Goddexx’s excretions, “the de-
menteds,” as Mitchell and Logue have
nicknamed the guides, are undead: all
the characters in Killjoy’s Kastle hover
in an eerie afterlife, a perverted purga-
tory of women.
Logue and Mitchell were inspired to
make the first Kastle in their native To-
ronto, in 2013, after seeing a documen-
tary about evangelical Christian Hell
houses: fearsome enactments of the pun-
ishments that will supposedly befall
sinners who engage in homosexuality,
suicide, abortion, and so on, which pa-
rishioners spend months developing, in
order to scare the public straight. “We
were really blown away by how a com-
munity comes together to articulate an
ideology through visual art and perfor-
mance,” said Mitchell, who has long sil-
ver hair and was wearing purple jeans
and burgundy sneakers. “We started won-
dering, What would a lesbian-feminist
back-to-school-themed window display
look like at Staples? What would a les-
bian-feminist Santa Claus parade be?”
A haunted house would give them
the chance to manifest the culture’s most
frightful ideas about lesbians and fem-
inists—that they’re killjoys or “happi-
ness murderesses”—with humor and
wild abandon. Killjoy’s Kastle in L.A.
featured the forge of the “Ball Bustas”:
a pair of tough dykes whose perpetual
task was smashing plaster casts of “truck
nuts”—the ornamental rubber testicles
that people hang from the backs of theirvehicles—with hammers, in an endless
simulation of busting up the patriarchy.
“We loved it,” Mitchell said with a sigh.
But there is no nut-bashing in Phila-
delphia, owing to complaints about “trans
misogyny.” Mitchell shrugged.“We have
creative minds; we’re flexible,” she said.
Next, they stood in front of the
“Graveyard of Dead Lesbian Feminist
Ideas and Organizations,” a group of
surprisingly realistic Styrofoam head-
stones for bygone institutions like the
Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, the
gay gene, and the Lexington Club (a
now defunct San Francisco bar), all
perched on a lazy Susan. “We’ve made
fifty-seven new graves just since we’ve
been here!” Logue said. They went to
Philadelphia in August, and have been
working on the Kastle ever since. Mitch-
ell said, “We miss our cats.”
Logue and Mitchell met twenty-five
years ago. “It was love at first sight,” they
said in unison—though another decade
went by before they became a couple,
and then a few more years passed be-
fore they started working together. “I
swore I’d never collaborate with a lover,”
Mitchell said. “But then we had a con-
versation where we decided that we were
just going to be all-in—and there would
be no separation between our home, our
studio, our practice.” They opened FAG—
Feminist Art Gallery—at their house,
in the Parkdale neighborhood, in 2010.
“We said we would only have four shows
in the first year,” she continued. “We had
something like thirty.”
Even with grants from the Pew Char-
itable Trusts and the Canada Council
for the Arts, both women have day jobs:
Logue works for a video-arts-distribu-
tion organization, and Mitchell is a “real-
life demented women’s-studies profes-
sor.” The previous evening, she had filled
in as a tour guide. “We always ask our
dementeds to come up with a character,
but I hadn’t had time,” Mitchell said.
“Then I was, like, Wait a minute. I run
one of the largest graduate programs in
gender, feminist, and women’s studies in
North America: I don’t gotta make shit
up! I’m fucking me.”
A line was forming by the door. There
were only a few nights left: they dis-
mantle the Kastle just before Hallow-
een. “The ultimate killjoy,” Logue said
with pride.
—Ariel LevyThomas Middleditch