Queen of the Scene

Don’t be surprised if you meet Ladyfag and she stares at your throat. Most likely, the up-and-coming nightlife titan is checking for an Adam’s apple. “I sometimes will see a drag queen and check,” she admits from her perch on a wobbly wooden stool in the funky basement of Woody’s. And why wouldn’t she? Dealing with drag queens—in addition to musicians, artists, performers and go-go dancers—is what she does. As the mastermind behind weekly parties like Family Function at Woody’s in the East Village and Clubber Down Disco in the basement of the Chelsea Hotel, Ladyfag is known for her Frida Kahlo-inspired eyebrows, daring fashion and towering heels, but she’s also responsible for expertly wrangling all sorts of characters to create the kind of alternate reality that keeps fickle night crawlers, freaks and club kids entranced. It’s not an easy job.

“Nightlife can be a hard, cutthroat business with intense late hours. People are always coming at you, getting drunk, taking drugs. It’s a small world. It’s political. I feel like I’m a bit of a social worker,” she tells me. “I have to be there for everybody and can’t ever be sick or sad.”

My own first glimpse of Ladyfag was at the opening night of Vandam in December 2008. Susanne Bartsch introduced us, and I was immediately impressed by her radical, sexy outfit—or lack of one. Ladyfag’s tousled mass of black hair was accompanied by synthetic strands falling from her shoulders to her knees, leaving bare her breasts, bush and thick, hairy underarms. She cavorted like a wild beast, doing the tango with a man wearing a zebra’s head costume and dancing through the tangled bodies that packed the club. Who was this exotic creature, totally immersed in the vibe, ignoring everything and everyone? Her powerful persona was so striking, I couldn’t look at anyone else.

The 34-year-old, who identifies as queer, doesn’t quite sport a unibrow, but her eyebrows are thick and dark and she isn’t ashamed to show off her luxuriant and often-visible armpit hair. Not only does it complement her outrageous outfits, it demonstrates her iconoclasm, disdain for bourgeois conventionality and utter confidence in her own unique style. The armpit hair also gets her harassed on the street.

“People are always bothering me, especially in the summer,” she says. “I can’t believe it, but it’s made me even stronger.” Do people ever take m’lady for a man? “All the time,” she says. “I’m tall.”

Ladyfag was born with the slightly less colorful name Rayne Baron into a middle-class Jewish family in the suburbs of Toronto. “I was a teenage rebel, but now I’m really close to my mom, dad and brother. The rest of the family has rejected me.” Although not a total outcast in school, she was always on the fringes and didn’t care about being “one of those popular girls.” It’s no small irony that now that’s she’s all grown up, she’s a very popular girl in a far more sophisticated world.

During her twenties, in addition to doing work as a visual artist, dancer and performer, she also ran a vintage clothing and antiques company. “I had a vintage store in the Kensington market for 10 years. I have an eye for using fashion creatively and cheaply and can find weird things no one else would use. Back then, I wore a lot of figure skating suits.” But she doesn’t even skate. “My whole life is one big performance,” she confides.

In 2006, shortly before she moved to New York, the Toronto Star named her—along with the usual society mavens—as one of the 10 best dressed in town.

Her father has a business designing closets, and she’s always had an elaborate dressing room to concoct her signature looks. These days, Ladyfag devotes an entire room of her Greenpoint apartment—located in an old mortuary—to what she calls her “office,” a dressing room full of her clothing, shoes and accessories.

It’s the same apartment she rented when she first came to town. The trip here was intended as a small vacation she was taking prior to the opening of another clothing store in Canada. “I wasn’t planning on staying or getting into nightlife here,” she says. “I came for a few months and sublet an apartment but never left. I love Toronto, but it’s not New York!” Her Madonna moment came when she went out to Duvet, a now-defunct Chelsea club, and began crawling on the floor in a leopard-skin suit. “Kenny Kenny came up to me and asked me to come to his and Susanne’s party at Happy Valley,” Ladyfag explains. “When I arrived, I was kind of nervous but just went into the go-go cage and started dancing. Everyone was looking. Afterward, Kenny came over and said, ‘You’re hired!’” Kenny Kenny recalls their first meeting in a similar, if more flamboyant, fashion. “I saw this woman wearing a swimsuit with all this hair, dancing up a storm. She looked like that woman in the Almodóvar movie, totally glamorous with those huge hairy armpits. I was like, ‘Wow!’ After she did her dance routine at Happy Valley, someone asked me, ‘What the hell was that?’ I knew right away she was an incredible Amazon woman.”

Shortly thereafter, the future nightclub star began getting hired as a dancer. “Within a month I was working at four different parties a week.” Although she cites mentors other than Kenny Kenny and Bartsch—such as Josh Wood, Larry Tee and the numerous DJs and drag queens she’s worked with—the mentor who made her what she is today was the late Will Munro, the biggest party promoter in Toronto.

“I worked with him at Vaseline, the most famous queer party in Toronto, which was around for a decade. I emceed and was a go-go dancer. I would never have gotten Lady Bunny to the party if it wasn’t for Munro.” She’s had her share of bad parties, too, however. “I hate it when the DJ just plays Top 40. I worked at the gay table in bottle service clubs for two years because I was paid a lot of money. I hated it. It signified everything I’m against in an awful, ugly business, and I’ll never do it again.”

In a world where friendships and partnerships come and go faster than the nightclubs where they play out, Ladyfag has continued to work with Kenny Kenny and Bartsch at the perennially popular Sunday night party Vandam, although she hosts in the basement, which is wilder than the main floor.

Kenny continues to speak about his employee with admiration, and he’s not one to compliment lightly. “I love Ladyfag. She’s a kindred spirit. I see myself in her, but she’s got something of her own, something fresh. She’s a cool chick. Women in this scene have to be major to make a gay man respect you. Some woman coming in with a Chanel bag isn’t going to make it. Ladyfag is fierce: ‘I’m doing it my way, end of story, period!’” he says.

Still, she wouldn’t be where she is without making friends and fans. “What I love about Ladyfag is that she’s always been welcoming to women, back at her parties in Toronto and here in New York,” stylist Rachel Singer says. “I like going to her parties because she likes girls.” No less than drag messiah Lady Bunny has described her as a female female impersonator. Even in the backbiting world of nightlife, at times it was difficult to convince people to speak on the record about Ladyfag because she’s become a powerful presence.

“She’s OK, but I wouldn’t say she’s that nice,” sniped one source that insisted on anonymity. A couple of her former employees spoke respectfully of her, despite being chewed out for not getting things done to her liking. “She’s tough, but she’s not mean,” another commented, refusing to give details.

In my own experience, Ladyfag has been polite, and almost everyone I asked agreed that her sense of style was inspirational and daring. “I think a lot of people, especially women, are jealous of her,” artist and performer Gio Black Peter tells me. It really doesn’t matter what people say, though, because what matters is that everyone in town seems to know her name.

Indeed, it seems that Ladyfag is the logical successor to Bartsch, her mentor and the ultimate party monster. Though the 60-year-old promoter is hardly ready to turn in her high heels, her protégé is nonetheless gaining exposure and leading a pack of new nightlife habitués.

“What makes this work great for me is that I care. I really believe in New York City and everything I do because I want to do it, not because it’s a job, but because I believe in working hard doing something special in nightlife.”

Ladyfag’s currently gearing up for fashion weeks in Paris, Milan and then in New York, where she’s planning a big bash. She’s just returned from being flown down to Miami Beach twice in two weeks, once for the opening of Lords South Beach, a new gay hotel, and a week later for Art Basel.

Ladyfag describes nightclubs as a space where magic is made. “People forget there’s a lot of effort behind the scenes. Between the artists and designers, along with the loud music of the DJs, the performers and the lighting, all combine to make it an unforgettable experience,” she explains. “It’s a subculture. It’s my community. I’m not just a dumb girl. I’m very feminine and I’m queer. I don’t fit into the straight world and never have.”