“At Home with Ethel Dull: Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Street Culture, and Queer Value”

In 1968, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt created the performance character “Ethel Dull” as a parody of celebrity collector and taxicab heiress Ethel Scull. Welcoming visitors to a tenement apartment filled with treasures made from tinfoil and rubbish, Dull led melodramatic, wordless tours accompanied by grandiose music. As a working-class teenager, Lanigan-Schmidt had been introduced to the New York art world by Henry Geldzahler, the influential Metropolitan Museum curator. Dull’s “Sacristy of the Hamptons,” as he called his collection of tinfoil and cardboard relics, was a critique of what he saw in the homes of collectors—the worship of wealth and art’s relationship to it. These performances made him an early paragon of queer art in the time just before the Stonewall uprising (in which he was a participant) and in its wake (evidenced by the important article Charles Ludlam wrote on him for Gay Power in 1970). These performances and environments were not just mockeries, however. They were also the product of Lanigan-Schmidt’s celebration of practices often disregarded as “kitsch” and “camp.” He believed that street queen culture was the authentic folk art of his day. Inspired by composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s incorporation of peasant songs into his works, Lanigan-Schmidt celebrated the vital and inventive aesthetic of queer poverty developed by him and his friends. This was signaled most directly through Dull’s “scare drag,” as they called their protective form of aggressive drag. For Lanigan-Schmidt’s Dull, drag operated in relation to class, more than gender, as a mode of resistance for the disenfranchised.