Nelson Sullivan Conquered the ’80s Downtown Scene With His Loving Lens
This is PAPER 1984: a celebration of the year we were born, edited by Mickey Boardman, in honor of our 40th anniversary. This series looks back on the important cultural forces at work in 1984, many of which are still reverberating today. The club, music, food, fashion and gay scenes all produced future legends that year, despite the creative community being decimated by AIDS.
“You created me!” RuPaul’s Drag Race season four winner Sharon Needles excitedly exclaimed to me when we met in 2013. What? I nearly fell over my hanging tongue. I mean I’ll gladly take credit, but… huh? What exactly was this about? “I’ve watched you in all the Nelson Sullivan videos,” Needles explained calmly. “They have truly inspired me.”
Wow. Who would have thought it? Nelson was my old pal who moved to New York City from South Carolina and got a job in a midtown music store, but he was mainly interested in documenting club regulars and other fabbies with his clunky video camera. This was way before cell phones and the internet, so Nelson’s body of work ended up becoming a semi-exclusive look at club events, drag shows, Pride parades and other edgy happenings that defined the big-haired, over-the-top 1980s.
Nelson routinely shot me spinning around the room at clubs, performing gigs with my flamboyant Motown band, and sharing my mother’s lasagna at holidays with the folks in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. I also corralled him to shoot me reciting T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” as well as an elaborate gossip piece I’d scripted — and it turned out he was shooting some of our phone conversations, too! (Thank god I never said anything too cancellable. It’s a fucking miracle!)
While I fantasized that Nelson was my own personal videographer, he was also obsessing about German trans diva Christina (played by Marilyn Manson in the 2003 club kid killer movie Party Monster), Vegas satirist John Sex and basically anyone else he felt was doing — and seeing — it all. Nelson’s goal, as he expressed in footage used in the fab documentary Nelson Sullivan’s World of Wonder, was summed up when he admitted, “I don’t always know what to think of my life, but at times it’s interesting and exciting, and I want to share it all with you!” At times?
A letter written from Nelson Sullivan to David Letterman about why he should invite Michael Musto to be on his late night show.
A letter written from Nelson Sullivan to David Letterman about why he should invite Michael Musto to be on his late night show.
What makes Nelson’s videos so special is the fact that he intuitively knew where to focus his lens, capturing the spiciest action happening in the room while also zooming in on fascinating minutiae that someone less observant might have missed. And since he never had screenings of his work, his subjects never tightened up for his camera, feeling that we were all in some kind of protective bubble and this was all “just between us.” After the fact, he would give me videos of what he shot — and I’d watch them alone – but basically, we were performing for an audience of one (Nelson) and loved turning it on for him while exhibiting an unselfconsciousness that would have been hard to affect if we knew millions would be scrutinizing these tapes on YouTube years after his death (of a heart attack in 1989).
Nelson could talk a blue streak, but the truth is he was a little bit shy and awkward and his camera made him feel more popular. I loved having him as part of my entourage as we traipsed through mega clubs like Limelight and Area; it was good for my ego and I enjoyed the idea that my gallivanting was being documented, even if just for myself. In 1987, Nelson had a hernia operation and ditched the bulky camera for a more manageable one. He also started gabbing more to the camera, unleashing his appreciative thoughts about all the colorful crazies around him, while addressing asides to his faithful dog, Blackout. Nelson always acted as if Blackout might actually answer questions like, “Are you tired?”
Nelson lived in the Meatpacking District — before it was cleaned up for tourists — and played host to rising star roommates like RuPaul, drag performer Lahoma Van Zandt, DJ Larry Tee and hot guy Trade, so that any visit to that apartment could turn into a Warhol version of a Fellini movie, especially if you breathed in the pot.
Sadly, Nelson died three days after quitting his day job to do a public access cable show that would spotlight his work. It was a moment he had long been angling towards, and it was abruptly taken from him. The party was over. The camera was paused. We all went into shock and didn’t know how to process his absence. Without him chronicling our every move, did we even exist? Fortunately, his work has kept him alive. As I wrote in an obit in OutWeek magazine, “Thanks to his scrupulous attention, Nelson’s left behind a treasure trove of late-night videos that, even more than the Warhol diaries, trenchantly capture the party years in all their gleeful, decadent fun.”
Nelson’s most frequent shtick to me was that he didn’t feel appreciated, and though he made it a joke, it seemed like he really meant it. He felt he wasn’t lauded enough. He wasn’t invited enough. He was being used. I wish he was still around to see how appreciated he’s become. Thank you, Nelson. You created me!
Photography: Paula Gately Tillman
This is PAPER 1984: a celebration of the year we were born, edited by Mickey Boardman, in honor of our 40th anniversary. This series looks back on the important cultural forces at work in 1984, many of which are still reverberating today. The club, music, food, fashion and gay scenes all produced future legends that…