Rose Wood (image by David Edwards)
I first met Rose Wood when I was still living in New York, in 2008 or 2009. The drag historian Joe E. Jeffreys introduced us and I was quickly smitten. I think the first time I saw Rose, she performed a murder on stage at the Box; the second time, she fucked a slice of pizza and threw shit at the audience at the Slipper Room. Then, when the Box sent her to help open its London venue in 2011, we got to start hanging out over here. It was a privilege and a pleasure to write this profile of her for Homoculture, the new publication from the fantastic team behind OutThere magazines. And I love the portraits by David Edwards, which appear below and capture Rose’s strength, beauty and sometimes unnerving directness. Enjoy.
It’s an off night at the Box nightclub above Walker’s Court in London’s Soho. A few feet in front of the stage, surrounded by piles of bedding required for a private party later that night, sits Rose Wood, whose short, dramatic performances – extreme in content, sophisticated in execution, electrifying in effect – have made her the venue’s star turn.
She wears a flowing maroon ensemble of a V-neck top, knee-length cardigan and to-the-ankle tartan skirt above black sneakers. A stylishly side-parted chestnut-brown wig cushions her face and teases her collarbone. Beneath the hairline, a pronounced bruise bulges across the left of her forehead.
‘I got a little bump in rehearsal,’ Wood says. ‘Yeah it hurts but it’s just injury number 852 of this year. A month ago, I fell down the stairs from the stage at the Box’s New York venue. And, let’s see, two months before that I cracked two ribs and dislocated at least one more. Before that there was a sprained ankle. Oh and I’ve been punched twice here in the last six months.’
In person, she’s polite, soft-spoken, thoughtful and gentle, but Wood’s art hurts. It provokes, and she accepts the consequences. Those who attack her at work may not be prosecuted but ‘usually are shown the door in due course’, she says. ‘Every single night I put people on the spot in some fashion and it’s my business, really, to field their responses. I have to just play through, to incorporate it. If I’m playing somebody who’s in love and is rejected, I can’t strike back in anger when I get punched in the mouth.’
Unrequited love in a Rose Wood performance doesn’t look like unrequited love on television or in the movies.
During the act in question – the act that has got her punched more than once – Wood presents as an attractive woman ‘at the end of her tether with men. She’s yelled and screamed at everybody, kind of rampaged a bit through the audience showing her body, tearing off her clothes. Tears off her wig, wipes her ass with it, tells everybody to fuck off. Then as she’s about to stalk out of the club, in the height of her meltdown, she has a moment where she falls madly in love with someone.
‘I focus on a member of the audience and she has a complete switch. She tries to put herself back together again and become attractive to that person. So she wants to put the wig back on but it smells funny. What’s that on the wig? Oops! It’s shit. She remembers she wiped her ass with the wig, and checks her butt, and sees that – oh, my God! – she’s had a leak. Anal leakage.
‘And she drops the wig – okay, that’s not going to work – so the shreds of her T-shirt that she tore up she wipes her butt with. And as she’s doing it, she realises her armpits don’t smell so good. She wipes her armpits and scrubs her penis – none of which is appealing to the apple of her eye sitting across the room. I’m trying my best to be sweet and beautiful but they know that underneath is a monster.
‘So I’ve got my bald head, my shit-smeared rear end, my awful-smelling pits, and then there’s a moment where I can’t hold it in any longer and I take my purse and I shit in it. And with the other scrap of T-shirt I clean myself up but it’s even worse.
‘And then I let go again and there’s more coming out of me. So I kind of give that up and reach into my purse and I put my lipstick on but I’m so transfixed by the person that it’s all over my face.
‘And so there is this nightmare of a human being, naked, smeared with shit and lipstick, and bald, with tits and a penis, walking towards this person like, “Come to Mama!”
‘And the person generally runs away and then the rejection is complete. Sometimes they’re like, “Get away, get away! I’ll hit you, don’t come near me!” And then I’ll back away from them.’
Sometimes, they don’t give warning but sucker-punch her anyway. ‘She loses, she loses, she loses and she loses. In case you haven’t guessed, it’s entirely autobiographical. That character on stage is me. That character is entirely me.’
Wood seldom puts as much uncomfortable pressure on a single audience member as in this act, which is just as well for her personal safety. But in other ways it’s pretty typical of her routines, of which there are now more than 60, going by such names as Pretty Pussy, Shit Pizza, Orgasm Addict, Serial Killer and Rabbi, the last being one of the few pieces that makes explicit use of Wood’s Jewish background.
Each act establishes a character and takes it on a clear three-act journey told not through dialogue, of which there’s rarely more than a line or two, but through the body. They are calculatedly transgressive tales of sex and violence, frequently including penetration, dismemberment, death and bodily fluids of every imaginable kind. These elements are simulated but in the shock of the moment the audience can’t always be sure.
The pieces last no more than a few minutes and come on like a roller coaster, the impact of their graphic content compounded by frequent direct engagement with the audience and the frisson of carnivalesque confusion provided by Wood’s liberal use of her naked trans body – taut, athletic physique, big tits, swinging dick.
Some of the acts are pure, defiant, genderfuck punk. There’s certainly plenty to feed on if you’re looking to be scandalised – as was, for instance, the Daily Mail on the occasion of the Box’s London launch in 2011. The paper’s reporter was shocked by the appearance of ‘a transsexual named Rose’ as part of the venue’s cavalcade of ‘hard-core pornography of the most repulsive kind.’ He spluttered, ‘I can barely contain my horror when he proceeds to perform a sex act on himself with the neck of a vodka bottle.’
This is actually Wood’s signature routine, known simply as the Bottle Act. She comes on in a blonde wig, short shorts and a torn-off Hooters T-shirt to the strains of Muddy Waters’ I’m a Man. She then takes a swig from a bottle (typically Jack Daniel’s, not vodka), spits it over the audience, strips to reveal her tits, pulls a used condom out of her ass and empties it into the front row, reveals her cock, picks up the whiskey bottle with her asshole, sprays another swig of booze over the audience and departs, middle finger held high.
To the observant rather than prurient eye, even ostensibly outrageous acts like this open up plenty of conceptually fertile territory – around unabashed gender ambiguity, the power dynamics of live performance in a high-rolling venue like the Box, the very particular set of advanced bodily skills required to do something as gloriously sickening as picking up liquor bottles with your asshole on demand.
The rectum is a kind of backstage for Wood, host to anything from condoms full of fluid or pills to tampons to two-metre-long flags (the last for a number in which she’s a dead ringer for Elizabeth I). ‘I can now shit on command’, she says.
‘Truly. And you have to see it to realise what that means. It’s like fire-walking – you have to have a level of mental preparation.’
It’s easy too to overlook the expertise necessary to execute professionally a spectrum of shit-themed performances, from the preparation of the material (mostly ‘combinations of chocolate, oatmeal and peanut butter’) to the body control required to maintain it in position until show time (‘I have quite a background with yogic fasting, cleansing, enemas and so on. I can do things that would cause some people to be hospitalised’) and the stagecraft necessary to ensure that nothing that’s been deep inside (either end of) Wood’s body comes into contact with the audience.
An occasional exception is made for piss, which is also ‘generally fake’ but put to delightful effect causing rows of fashion-conscious Box patrons to scatter like frightened pigeons.
However, what’s truly striking about Wood’s work is the emotional heavy lifting accomplished by her short, intense performances. These can be deceptively underplayed.
In one of Wood’s most moving pieces, inspired by her experience with her mother’s dementia, she gently smothers a fellow performer to death. In another, based on her pre-performance routine, she calmly shaves her face, then her pubic hair, then puts on lipstick and a wig and sits on a huge dildo – not for gratification but to open herself up ahead of the show.
The night I saw that piece, a 23-year-old straight trainee solicitor who happened to be standing nearby told me ‘it sounds pretentious but I thought that was really beautiful. Not erotic but I just loved looking at it – like a piece of art.’
But it’s the pieces in between that tend to provoke the strongest reactions – the ones that are really extreme in content and strike an intentionally emotional nerve. There are murder scenes that draw both satirically and resonantly from reservoirs of hypocritical religious mania, or from the vulnerability of the trans sex worker – these yield complex responses of revulsion, sympathy and exhilaration.
In one, Wood walks through the crowd as a blond, white-shirted male missionary who chloroforms a planted member of the audience, dumps her in a bath on stage and proceeds to carve out her genitals and use a staple gun to fix them over her own penis and scrotum – which we have just seen being stapled into a ‘tucked’ position. This, Wood told me, darkly reflected her own inevitably complex feelings about gender reassignment. And we’ve already heard about the act based on unrequited love, also containing elements of less-than-flattering self-portraiture.
It’s a compelling empathic jumble, with the violence embedded in the storytelling inseparable from the performer’s own vulnerability.
‘Concern is part of what I do,’ Wood says. ‘A clown or circus performer elicits concern for their safety. When you see a tightrope walker, you worry what would happen if they fell. Or a lion tamer. You identify with that body.’
Even if, in Wood’s case, it’s a body like few others. The pieces in which Wood is most merciless towards herself, the ones that get her punched, are also the ones, she reports, that have the power to change people. ‘Some people will come in and absolutely nothing is going to open their mind. Their cork’s not ready to pop. For others, it’s transformative.’
By way of illustration, she tells me about a number she did the week before. ‘It’s about somebody who just wants to come home, masturbate, and then drop off to sleep. But it’s not working. They’re not getting an erection. They try drugs, they try a dildo, they try a bigger dildo – and between the drugs and the dildos, the frenzy and the desire to get off, they masturbate until they’re bleeding. Not to be defeated, the character puts on nipple clamps and wraps the bloody appendage in paper towels and, as a last-ditch effort, lights it on fire in the hope that the sensation will drive it up to erection and orgasm.
‘A woman came up to me and said, “You know, my husband has that – sometimes he can’t get an erection, and he doesn’t want to talk about it. And he may try to smoke a little, or have a drink and try again, and it doesn’t work. So he won’t talk about it, and he won’t go to therapy, and I know when he gets together with his friends they’ll just talk about the baseball game or soccer game. He saw what you did and he freaked, and we both knew why he freaked. But look at him: he’s dancing like a madman.” In other words, something had released for him. That was just last week.’
It’s by telling the truth about her own experiences, Wood believes, that she can help others to see the truth about theirs. ‘This is my life. I’m giving it to you to look at. My addictions, my fears, my pains. I’m going to share them. And in my lack of fear, my trust for you, hopefully I’ll give you that freedom.’ She once told me she thinks of her performances as ‘more than theatre’, in the way they can catalyse fellow feeling. ‘The identifying is amazing,’ she says.
‘Almost nightly, someone will acknowledge I’ve touched something vital in them. I consider it one of the most positive things I can offer. It changes people’s perspective on what the other is.’
And there’s no doubt that Wood has her own unique and powerful perspective on otherness. Hers has been a truly remarkable life, as I discovered when I asked about the origins of her distinctive mode of performance. ‘I started doing things in this format, shockingly enough, at about age ten,’ she tells me – though the material was very different.
At that age, Rose Wood went by the name Jon Moskovitz and lived in suburban Somerville, New Jersey. Born in 1957, Jon was ‘a little Jewish boy, dreamy, introverted, disconnected,’ with an averagely happy family home and a growing passion for performing magic and mime. In 1967, a director from New York City, an hour or two away, came to town.
‘This woman decided to put on a vaudeville variety show at the local community centre and she gave me two three- or four-minute slots. One I did magic in – I still remember some of the tricks – and the other I did physical comedy. Both of which are virtually what I do today. Some people call it “body magic” – something gets pulled out of somewhere, objects are produced or disappear, things happen that are outside of ordinary reality.
‘Pooping in your purse the moment you need to in front of a room full of people – it’s like magic.’ To which the only response is, that’s some turtle dove.
Roles in school plays followed, alongside studying with magicians and gamblers, developing skills of misdirection, sleight of hand, mental calculation and shrewd assessment of an audience. ‘When I was in high school, I did volunteer work in children’s prisons doing magic. I discovered very quickly that the prison population had another way of using their minds and were not fooled by magic for one moment.
‘The same thing that would fool a doctor or a lawyer did not fool a prison kid, because they had become used to thinking and being clever in another way. They spotted everything. I learned that the only way to entertain them was clowning. It was my first experience where you go into a different environment and what that audience wants in terms of entertainment – how they think – is very different from the way you think and the way your world thinks.’
Such skills would prove invaluable to Wood’s performance career but were also crucial for a young suburbanite who looked different – who looked queer. ‘I had pushed that as far as I could in my hometown without getting beat up – with my long hair and clothing that was all wrong. I guess I looked like a glam rocker, rock ’n’ roll. It was the 1970s and to be openly gay was practically unthinkable.’
And gender nonconformity? ‘Far more so. There was a man who carried a purse in my hometown and it was an absolute scandal. I was frequently harassed and threatened for being gay though I wasn’t acting on anything.’
At the age of 18, Jon Moskovitz became Jon Cory – a middle name given by his mother with the intention that it replace Moskovitz as a surname in adulthood – and moved to Manhattan to study mathematics at New York University (NYU). Soon after, he got work as a gambling spotter, scoping out games for potential cheats.
‘I was interested in the arcane and skilled side of it,’ Wood says. ‘It’s all romantic until you see someone stealing, then it’s scary. I said to myself, “You or someone here is going to get shot. What are you doing here?” One occasion was enough.’
It turned out there were better ways to get your kicks in Manhattan in 1975. Sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll? ‘As much as one could possibly imagine’, Wood says. ‘New York was so juicy. The disco world and the drugs and the beginnings of punk and Studio 54 – that whole world for me was just so compelling.’ Finally there was freedom to live a queer lifestyle – ‘though, through the aid of drugs, I would have to say I was more of an omnivore than a gay man’. And about those drugs?
‘From 1975 to 1979, I was high. I woke up and went to bed high’. On? ‘Everything. I sold marijuana, I sold cocaine, I sold acid, I sold peyote, I sold psilocybin mushrooms. Nothing injectable though.’
The main motivation for this epic binge, Wood says, was one of exploration. ‘It’s hard to say what is it all about, but I was reading Rimbaud and he viewed drugs and sex as a kind of deconstruction so that you could find out who you were underneath society’s expectations. Philosophically, at the time, I felt there was some merit to it.’
And deconstruction certainly did result. ‘It was just a revolution all across the board for me,’ Wood says. ‘Everything was coming apart. My whole gender thing was untenable. I began to cross-dress and also to dress more openly female than before. I did a lot of writing too, a lot of introspection, some performance stuff – you know, card and close-up magic.’
Wood transferred from mathematics to the art department at NYU and then, one day knocked the sex and drugs on the head. ‘New Year’s Eve 1979 was when I kind of stopped everything – alcohol, drugs, everything.’ She has been basically teetotal and celibate ever since.
Self-exploration now took a back seat to self-restoration. ‘I did my best just to be like a guy, be as unassuming as possible, and focus entirely on my repair, as I was aware I was damaged. There’s no doubt about it. From sex and drugs and everything else, I was bleeding from every opening. Allergies and weight problems. I looked like a concentration camp survivor.’
Despite working around food, as a pastry chef, Wood found eating a deeply problematic issue. At the same time, Wood was training intensely in martial arts, eventually bulking up. ‘Some said it was male anorexia, and for me there was a gender question in that. Not wanting to be in that body, not wanting that body, and not knowing what to do with my identity. It was a dark, rough period.’
Even so, 1979 turned out to be a good time to stop having gay sex in New York. Wood hasn’t been tested for HIV but has shown no signs of infection. ‘The things that have kept different people alive…’ she ponders.
‘I have friends who were never welcome in sex parties because they were in drag. They’re alive. Their friends who were welcomed are not. I’m very grateful that I crashed when I did.’
As the 1980s wore on, AIDS laid waste to queer and creative New York. ‘Around me, it began in 1982, ’83, ’84. The deaths began to hit very heavily in the mid-1980s. A lot of my friends were falling like flies. It was raining men. I would be at sick beds and in hospital rooms all the time.’
As time passed, Wood gradually became more balanced. Her martial-arts practice led to an ongoing engagement with Zen meditation and yoga, which she says is indispensable to the work she does now. In 1988, she responded to the AIDS crisis by starting the One Foundation, an organisation promoting awareness and providing support. ‘A lot of people really needed a change of lifestyle if they were going to survive,’ she says.
‘Philosophy’s great, medications are great, but when you’re a bartender in a gay bar then you’re in a hazardous environment. There are alcohol, drugs, and sex around you all the time. You’re at risk. Other people were almost living rough on the street or escorts or addicts. So I invited them into my work world.’
After NYU, Wood had been to art school and trained in etching, calligraphy, bookbinding and illuminating. Some gallery shows of representational work followed and, by the late 1980s, she was restoring antiques, musical instruments and decorative objects, developing special expertise in wood refinishing.
She found herself moving for the first time among the very rich. ‘They were far more clever with money and tricks and business than I was, so of course I suffered’, she recalls. ‘Getting paid was a challenge. Some played games that I didn’t know how to deal with.’ Others proved more honest, however, and Wood developed enough professional standing to parlay this business into the One Foundation’s outreach work.
‘It’s not rocket science,’ she says of art restoration. ‘You can learn enough to have work. So I gave vulnerable people a stable environment and they learned skills from somebody who was of their tribe. Some moved on, some dropped out, all different things happened. But I put a lot of people into their own businesses.’
Under NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a crackdown on queer social spaces made it harder for outreach projects like the One Foundation to connect with at-risk people. But by this stage, the restoration period of Wood’s life was giving way to a renewed appetite for creativity. During the 1980s and 1990s, she had taken classes in dance, movement and clowning. Now, ‘my creative pursuits became another way of interacting with the community which I had become accustomed to’, she says. ‘Performance came back heavy-duty around the year 2000.’
The form it took was stripping at a club frequented by ‘transsexual prostitutes and people who were cross-dressing. Not so much heterosexual cross-dressing – it was people who were in a gender-questioning place.’ In that context, Wood proved popular as an erotic dancer. ‘What I did was less important than what I looked like… The escort bars were largely black and Hispanic and the owners felt the more ethnic variety among the performers, the better for business.’
So Wood found herself in demand. ‘After a while, I thought there had to be more to the art of striptease.’ Through a dance-class friend, Wood met the legendary Dirty Martini, one of the pioneers of New York’s neo-burlesque scene. She helped Wood develop an act in around 2002. The only other male-bodied burlesquer at the time was Tigger! and he made no attempt at female impersonation.
For her burlesque debut, however, Wood delivered a ‘straight, glam strip to lounge music, in a mauve dress that came off in pieces. Long zippers, feather boa, red hair – classic burlesque strip.’ A queen was born, and she needed a name.
‘As myself, I’d spent more time in drag in black and Hispanic clubs than on the East Village scene, one of the common black ways of taking a drag name was from the wood family – Miss Ebony Wood, Miss Mahogany Wood, Miss Cherry Wood. Now in the world of woods, ebony is known as the king. And the queen of woods is rosewood, so I used the name Rose Wood because it tied together my wood world and my drag world.’
At first, Wood’s unusual form of drag-burlesque went down well. ‘Early burlesque audiences were a very openminded bunch.’ But as the scene grew more popular, the atmosphere changed. Wood, of course, knew how crucial audience expectation is to performance.
‘You go into a prison, you go to a prostitute bar, you go into a club where it’s predominantly wealthy and theatre people – each wants something very different’, she says.
‘There’s a need that they have that you’re there to fill. In the rougher places, they just want you to make them smile. In a bar that is for transsexuals, they just want you to be attractive. Now, as neo-burlesque audiences changed, suddenly it was a scene where they were saying, “You’re a freak”. None of my things that were glamorous or seductive were of any interest whatsoever. So I became a clown – I suppose it was kind of, “OK, if you think I’m a freak, I’ll give you a freak. I’m going to give you more freak than you bargained for”.’
Wood developed a different kind of act – the first in the mode that has since become her signature style. ‘I started off virtually passed out, with my clothing laid out in front of me, naked on the stage, and little by little got dressed. And then, once I was dressed, I was ready to be a showgirl and take it all off again. But when I “woke up”, there was a used condom stuck to my rear end, and I would take it off and look at it and throw it into the audience. The reaction that I got was priceless – condoms were not a part of polite, classic burlesque. I even got an award from one of the HIV magazines for promoting condom use!’
For a couple of years, Wood created acts in both modes – some traditional burlesque, some much more ‘of the shock variety’ – performing at a range of venues including iconic burlesque joints the Slipper Room, RiFiFi and Le Scandal, and gay bars such as Eastern Bloc, Splash and the Cock. A busy night might include four or five different venues, finishing up with the late-night show at the Box.
At that self-styled temple to sybaritic excess, where Wood debuted soon after it opened in 2007, they only wanted the freaky shit. And they wanted six shows a week. So Wood began developing work that explored darker parts of her identity, often using realistic prosthetic breasts as a way to open up the subject of gender ambiguity – an element of her life she was also exploring off the stage. In 2010, she got top surgery and has since undergone other medical procedures as part of her ongoing gender reassignment.
Wood had a busy few years gigging, but venues continued to close, rules started to tighten and the scene became more conservative.
Her acts were getting more complex, more theatrical and more extreme, but were rarely presented with much care by the venues where she appeared. At most places, she says, ‘you were like a hotdog or a scoop of tuna fish thrown on a plate’.
At the Box, however, they took care, they had money, and their high-rolling patrons wanted as much Rose Wood as they could get. ‘Here I was, this creature in every way at odds with the audience from an economic standpoint, yet being presented beautifully. Perhaps I was being exploited, but I was being exploited in the nicest possible way.’ She signed an exclusive contract and has been developing work there ever since.
Wood’s relationship with the Box – and particularly with its creator, Simon Hammerstein, grandson of musical lyricist Oscar Hammerstein – is truly remarkable, somewhat akin to the patronage arrangement between a Renaissance potentate and a court artist. It has afforded Wood a more or less unique opportunity to evolve her practice, honing individual pieces with high production values while continuing to develop her physical capabilities.
Thanks to Hammerstein, who has been closely involved with producing the Box’s floor shows, Wood enjoys material, technical and artistic support that few queer performance artists could dream of – and, she insists, valuable ongoing artistic input.
Yet, like all the best artist-patron relationships, theirs has been fractious from the start. Wood says she auditioned with her bottle act, and earned herself a standing ovation from most present, while Hammerstein snidely asked, ‘Can you take a string of Christmas-tree lights out of there?’
Still, in 2008, when Hammerstein faced accusations of sexual harassment at the Box’s New York venue, Wood was one of his staunchest supporters (the case was later settled out of court). And when the Box launched its London venue in 2011, Wood was installed as an integral part of the line-up – she now divides her time between the two cities.
However, in 2012, Hammerstein crossed a line during a performance by yelling insults at Wood from the audience while under the influence. Abuse from customers is one thing – from the boss another. The club’s board took practical steps to reprimand Hammerstein.
By 2013, Wood says, he had cleaned up his act and they were back on friendly terms – so friendly in fact that Hammerstein reportedly refused a request from a Saudi prince to remove Wood from the line-up on the night he visited. The prince came anyway and, without knowing the backstory, Wood emptied a condom all over his shirt. Apparently, the prince loved it.
The Box’s clientele ranges from club kids and performance junkies to the nouveaux riches and celebrities. You probably wouldn’t have to look too hard to find a dealer or hooker either. Wood’s regular admirers include the likes of Snoop Lion and Jude Law but she also has to deal with audience members who are flat-out obnoxious.
‘But realise that it’s usually the most obnoxious – the least integrated and socialised – that stand out the most’, she says. ‘They’re not the majority but they just gum up everything. In a way, they steal from everyone else.’ And, she grants, the club’s indulgent set-up enables such behaviour.
One of Wood’s most recent pieces explicitly holds a mirror up to the Box’s obnoxiousness. Deploying the venue’s real-life furniture, staff and guests, she takes on the role of an over-indulging party girl who marauds through the venue, gets messy as hell and winds up dead as the party roars on around her.
But it’s all part of the equation, and Wood is a past master at negotiating ambivalence. She learned to deal with wealthy art collectors, whittling her art-restoration practice down to a few trustworthy clients for whom she still works. And she continues her gender transition, recently enduring painful procedures to soften her jaw and forehead, as well as levels of public hostility that seem, if anything, to have increased of late.
‘If I walked for 15 minutes on Oxford Street, I’d probably get accosted five times,’ she suggests. So dealing with wasted audience members on her own turf is something she can handle – especially when the risk of getting punched is offset by the possibility of touching someone’s heart.
‘These kids are very worried about how they look,’ Wood says of the Box’s clientele. ‘They’re very much involved in beauty culture.’ On the other hand, the message of that outrageous unrequited-love act – that one that sees Wood looking like crap and taking a dump in her handbag – is that ‘you don’t know when you’re beautiful. Everything you think is making you beautiful is often just making you look more ugly and foolish. In your attempt to give, that’s when you’re looking beautiful.’
When Rose Wood stands before the crowd naked and smeared with shit and lipstick, pleading for a connection, some people get it. ‘There’s a moment when they’re afraid, and then they’ll open their arms and run right to me and give me a big kiss. And the audience loves it because it’s just like… love is love.’
This profile first appeared in Homoculture, which is now available.
