Is there death after sex? For kids who dream of nuclear holocaust. Maybe the ultimate orgasm is the last.
Sex Ghouls
You are standing in the hard green glare of the spots that light a downtown club in New York City. The place looks like it was decorated by heroin addicts on a rainy night. Streams of young suburban girls are pouring in. The fake-ID business must be booming because the entire crowd seems underage. Then, suddenly, the tedium is relieved. Through the tomblike door wafts a small swarm of vampirettes so sensually clad that they could make even the most jaded necrophiliac stalk them with an angry passion. They are the Sex Ghouls.
Petra Simmons, aka Petra Plasm, is one of them — a child of the night. She paints her face stark white, her lips bloodred. Black circles ring her eyes and her tangled mass of hair is dyed blue-black. Despite all this, she’s radiating sex. She’s dressed with the cold sensuality of Transylvanian high society, her breasts revealed through slits in her long formal dress.
By day Petra programs computers for a large office automation company in Manhattan. She sits at a terminal in a windowless office which she laughingly refers to as “my private tomb.” Her hours are flexible but she rarely leaves before dark, usually working until nine, then slipping into the ladies’ room to don her disguise. Looking at her tonight, at an hour when all but the hard core have given in to sleep, you would never suspect Petra’s occupation. And as she raises her leg over the barstool and rests her heel on the bar, you would be hard put to pin her down as a girl from a middle-class family in Peoria, Illinois.
“I’d make love to that man,” Petra says casually, pointing to a trendily attired young musician, “because he’s beyond the Fear. He wouldn’t get all offended if I wanted him just for the night.”
Who are the Sex Ghouls? Are they as kinky as their outfits would lead us to believe? And should you wear garlic when taking one to bed? Only one thing is certain: The streets that only a short time ago were patrolled by hard-core punks have been taken over by a new crew, and they’re looser and more decadent than the punks — closer in type to Morticia Addams than Nancy Spungen.
The Sex Ghouls are not a movement in the sense of being an organized group with common goals. The undead do not need goals. They’re young people who are up all night and often working all day. Beyond this they’re constantly searching for new and more bizarrely sensual characters to play. Petra takes an average of two hours to don her outfit, and once she’s done, she’ll remain in costume for days on end, eating, sleeping, and making love in character.
Tonight, after three vodkas, she is sitting under the ultraviolet strips on the fourth floor of this establishment. Her face is ghostly pale and serene in the strange light. She is talking quietly to another of her kind: a man fit to go down in the petty history of these streets as the Great Sex Ghoul Ideologue. His name is Sandar. He’s of East German extraction via Paraguay. He owns and operates the club. What’s more, he seems to have modeled his own style after the Gothic decor; he’s wearing an enormous red-plaid suit and has the aspect of a crazed scientist after he’s just inhaled mercury fumes.
“A club must have a soul,” Sandar announces in a grandiloquent tone. “The second floor of my club is the soul of the place.” He means it sincerely; you can tell. As he says it he flays his arms around and moves in front of a wall covered with Day-Glo paintings of skeletons and skulls. In this setting his face appears so intense as to seem almost comical. “Ja,” he continues, “here I give a home to the children of extremes.” Petra doesn’t react to Sandar’s statements. She sits and watches as if what Sandar is saying are her most basic assumptions. But the Sex Ghoul of indeterminate gender leaning on the bar beside her feels moved to talk. “Still in the Zone, Captain Mandrake?” it asks with a delicate thrust of its huge mat of hair. Sandar shrugs, unoffended. He’s used to being referred to as Captain Mandrake.
“Frankie described their lovemaking as ‘the dawn of amazing alien sex.’ He has now acquired the look of an up-and-coming vampire.”
Closer inspection of the Sex Ghoul and the deep resonance of its voice leaves you with the reasoned deduction that the ghoul is male. His name is John and he looks like a window display from Frederick’s of Hollywood after a night of nasty sex with a blender. His hair has settled into thick blue dreadlocks and covers one side of his face completely. His face is caked at least one-eighth of an inch deep with white base makeup. His eyebrows are shaved, his eye cavities painted, and his lips are bright red.
A huge crucifix hangs upside down from John’s ear. Earlier in the evening, when John was dancing, it swung over and hit him in the face with enough force to draw blood. John blithely continues to wear the earring. “I got too deep into the frenzy,” he says. His upper torso is wrapped in a corset/bra which shows off the tattoo of an angel on his upper arm. Besides this, he wears regular black jeans with frilly garters on each leg. But speaking to John you discover that, even with this elaborate guise, he’s an open and likable guy. “I’m heterosexual,” he says. “I have a steady girlfriend but I like to fuck around …. I never have any problem getting girls. They seem to like the way I dress, and my makeup.”
John, when he’s not gigging as a guitarist with one of the more extreme bands around, works in this club, taking tickets or cleaning up. He began dressing in costume for a band he was in. The goal of the band was, in his own words, “to recreate the sex show at Belsen.” His style won him the affection of so many women that he saw little reason to shed his androgynous vampire guise. So now, having grown up in New Jersey and having spent three years in London, he has returned to Manhattan — where he can literally live by night. He spends most of his time in clubs, allowing himself to be seduced by aspiring Sex Ghouls. “It’s all show biz to me,” he says, “but I’m a musician. You can’t dress one way for a show and another for the rest of your time. People would think you’re a phony. Besides, this planet’s not going to last too long, is it?” Like most other Sex Ghouls, John sees the future lit by a spectacular nuclear war, and claims that he is mentally prepared to live in post-nuclear conditions.
Psychologist Jane Fraser, whose 19-year-old daughter has taken to ghoulish guise, attributes the phenomenon to this belief. “We have an entire generation that has grown up convinced that our species will be destroyed by a nuclear catastrophe. It’s no wonder they’ve equated sex and death.” Fraser is quick to point out the irony of the attitude: “They’re all convinced we’re going to die, but it’s a romanticized notion of death.”
With a strange twist of logic, many Sex Ghouls feel liberated by the mushroom clouds on the horizon. It’s the ultimate excuse. In Los Angeles, a five-minute film is circulating in the art houses. The plot is simple. A woman stands in a second-floor window watching a man work on a car. The sky lights up with a distant nuclear explosion. The man rushes upstairs and he and the woman make love with animal passion. Sex is always more passionate under a mushroom cloud.
Another Sex Ghoul, Nancy Cameron, is sitting on a stiff-backed chair and talking grimly about her life. One of her breasts is exposed by a tear in her Victorian lace nightie. As Nancy speaks she strokes the exposed breast as if it were a pet mouse. “I never leave my apartment,” she says in a hoarse whisper, “unless I’m going to a club or a job. I meet a lot of men, but they come over here.” Nancy indicates her large apartment with a sweeping gesture.
Glancing around the apartment you get the sensation that you’re on the set of a European horror movie. All the chairs have high, stiff backs. A computer terminal sits in one corner with the screen displaying one of Nancy’s own clothing designs — which itself looks like a deliberately shredded Victorian undergarment. There are at least three expensively framed posters featuring mushroom clouds, plus a poster for the film Hiroshima, Mon Amour. When asked why she lives surrounded by mushroom clouds, Nancy smiles and tells you that she likes mushrooms.
Nancy’s hair is bleached platinum with blue streaks and covers her eyes. Her body is covered with hardware — skull rings on each finger and a belt that is so heavy that when she stands her posture is actually altered. Her face has a ravaged quality. She looks like Joan of Arc after a hard day leading the multitudes.
One year ago Nancy was 21 and, after a failed suicide attempt, decided she would “play possum.” She did all the drugs she could find and cultivated an immeasurable cool. She made sure that she never saw daylight, quit her job as a legal secretary, and winged it, living off men she met at clubs. She was spotted by a video director and asked to appear in an MTV commercial, and thus began her modeling career. Currently she earns an average of $700 a day for standing awkwardly in front of hot lights. As a result, whenever she speaks she does so locked in a seductive posture.
Nancy claims credit for beginning the Sex Ghoul cult. She talks about it as if it were a conspiracy. “You know how cults begin?” Nancy asks, revving up for a rhetorical onslaught. “A few people get an idea and live it out … then everyone wants to be in on it.” When questioned what “idea” she is referring to, a hint of anger creeps into Nancy’s voice and she begins singing Prince’s song “1999” in cryptic whispers: “Life is just a party and a party wasn’t meant to last.”
Whether or not Nancy is the source whence springeth this cult, she has a point. Rock-n-roll cults tend to begin at street level. A small group of people discover some new, outrageous territory — in lifestyle, attitude, or music — and adopt it as their personal identity. Others latch onto it and, finally, if the originators do not themselves form a band, someone else will and the style will hit the clubs. Then if the idea has some resonance, if it in any way articulates something that’s niggling the public subconscious, it will spread quickly, through print media, record companies, and, when it has achieved mass-market status, television.
In the case of the Sex Ghoul the means of transmission seems to be, at this point, primarily sexual. The way to become a Sex Ghoul is to sleep with one. Case in point: Anita Shuelberg started hanging around the clubs in her native Philadelphia at age 19. She became intrigued by the weird glamour of a guy she met there. His face was whiter than pale. One half of his head had been shaved clean and he had a Tibetan symbol tattooed on his skull. Around his neck he Wore a dyed-black surgical neck brace, for purely cosmetic reasons, and he was always dressed androgynously. Despite Anita’s blue jeans and “nice girl” attire, she succeeded in taking the Sex Ghoul home. “It was so calm and romantic,” she recalls, “that I knew I was going to be influenced.” Anita was struck by the man’s extraordinary calm and his self-confidence. “He never spoke, but he could dominate the attention of the entire room just by turning his head … and that wasn’t just because he wore the brace.”
They slept together twice. But it was long enough for the myth to flash like a thousand strobes in Anita’s 19-year-old eyes. She felt transformed. She felt eerie. “I feel like I have this weird glow,” she’ll tell you sincerely. Now, six months later, we find Anita standing in the eerie light beside the dance floor at the Garage Club in Manhattan. She has moved here following the call she heard in Philadelphia. “There seem to be a lot more people like me here,” she remarks.
Anita feels more comfortable when at least a hundred decibels of subsonic frequencies are making the dance floor vibrate and she is performing the myth of the vampire for her mind’s mirror, feeling herself being stalked by turned-on men. She is in on a secret; this she is sure of. It’s a secret that is dark and flashing and makes her feel invulnerable to the fear of being an anxious kid on the job market. And it makes her invulnerable to the fear that “our doom buddies” — Anita’s term for politicians — are going to destroy us.
Anita pumps Haagen-Dazs daily at an ice cream parlor. “I take a lot of flak from the geeks I work with because of the way I look,” she reports. “But for $4.75 an hour, I’m not about to advertise their corporate image.” After work she joins other young Sex Ghouls and vampirettes, and they either swarm over to club land or hang around in lofts all night. “It’s like a secret way of life. You’ll never understand from the outside. I paint my face and wear metal but that’s only the flag. It’s the feeling of living forever that attracts me, I guess.”
To find a Sex Ghoul you stand in the most crowded area of a late-night club and close your eyes. Then simply wait. When a wave of depression washes over your body, open your eyes, and there’s bound to be one standing nearby.
Peter Smadzinsky of Los Angeles tried this technique and it worked for him. Smadzinsky has been keeping the company of Ghouls for six months — since he began working the night shift managing a Hollywood recording studio. “I started going with bands from my studio to after-hours clubs and meeting these cute little vampires,” says Smadzil’lsky. As a devoted fan of Elvira, who dons ghoulish and horny disguises to host an L.A. television horror-movie series, Smadzinsky found himself turned on and began to date these girls. “They’d come home with me and fuck for fuck’s sake. It was refreshing, since I’d just got out of an intense relationship.” Soon two girls were crashing nightly at his studio. “It’s a whole way of life,” he reports. “You have to enjoy seeing dawn from the wrong end.”
Smadzinsky wears the eye of the casual observer. He appreciates the scene but is immune to its call by virtue of his 36 years on this planet. He claims his pallid complexion is simply a studio tan. But there are other, younger men who, once bitten by the wild and unnatural energy of these shapely Ghouls, have taken the attitude to heart.
Frankie Rex found himself attracted to a Sex Ghoul one fateful, eerie night in New York City. “I wasn’t sure I liked all that paint and Catholic shit she wore,” says Frankie, “but I was turned on.” Frankie worked hard to consummate his attraction. He asked her out to dinner and she told him to fuck off. This did not dissuade him; he simply got more excited. “Guess I have a pretty kinky streak,” he says. After trying five different ploys, and on the verge of going to a trendier place and looking for a woman who “looked like she was of this earth,” Frankie came out and said simply, “Look, the bomb might drop later tonight and I want to be fucking you if it does.” She laughed. “Okay,” she replied, “you can come to my place.”
Frankie describes the ensuing hours as “the dawn of amazing alien sex.” After this he began to find the world of the Sex Ghouls fascinating enough to inspire him to quit his day job and begin working as a barman in a club. “I just didn’t feel at home in daylight any longer,” he says. Frankie has acquired the look and manner of an up-and-coming vampire. He watches “The Twilight Zone” religiously and is constantly on the hunt for new paraphernalia to add to his perennial outfit: dreadlocks, Victorian suits, a cape, large crucifixes (always upside-down), skull rings, and high-heeled black boots. Frankie admits with a calm smile, “I’ve been won over. I’m a Sex Ghoul.”
The more serious and artsy Sex Ghouls have been recently making their presence felt on the airwaves and in movie theaters. Recent dance hits like “The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight” are the result of electronic musicians cannily picking up on the trend and turning out tracks to serve this new market. But the theme song of the Sex Ghouls is Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s single “Relax,” a high-energy celebration of sex as horror show, produced by the ingenious sound manipulator Trevor Horn. The film The Hunger has also been incorporated into the mythology. Catherine Deneuve plays an ageless, ancient vampire who lures the likes of David Bowie and Susan Sarandon to her home, seduces them, and turns them into vampires. Sex Ghoul bands, too, are springing up. The nightclub Dance-teria was recently host to a performance by a native Sex Ghoul band, Latex Sex Camp, and an English band, Alien Sex Fiends.
The fact that a Sex Ghoul might be mistaken, by the casual observer, for a punk is a thorn in the side of both Ghouls and punks. There is a radical difference between the two sets. The Sex Ghouls took the outrageousness of punk and romanticized it, by melding the style with the dark mythology of the vampire. Like the punks, every Sex Ghoul interviewed believes that humanity is due for a nuclear jolt. But unlike the punks, the Sex Ghouls accept it. Life is simply a party that’s going to end with a bang. It’s perpetual Halloween on the dark side of the dawn.
In a curious way, it’s fitting that rock should embrace the imagery of vampires. We’ve just about exhausted the lexicon of outrage. And for the thousands of kids who stayed up late to watch Bela Lugosi undead on television, the vampire became a sexual symbol — the symbol of romantic desolation. For a generation that has grown up with sex and nuclear doom, it’s the spot in our collective mythology where the two can fit comfortably together. Don’t bother wearing garlic. As Petra Plasm says, “We’re all going to die. Let’s make love.”
Probably more than most people we have met people who have given rise to the thought, “Having sex with that person might kill me, but then again, it might be worth it.” … Turns out, this can actually happen. Still doesn’t change the calculation, though.We learned long ago, the ghouls just wanna have fun. … Revel in la petit mort, y’all.
