Teenagers find reasons to live and die in popular music. The aging process grinds on our passion, as we become more cynical and cautious. But a former teenager never forgets her first, and my first was Jimi Hendrix.
Having Been Experienced: Jimi Hendrix, and Why the Little Dykes Understand
Hendrix is one of the most compelling legends of the sixties. He was a virtuoso musician, a “fuckin’ genius” as they say, and he died at the height of our country’s discontent, an estrangement he described many times in his lyrics. He didn't suffer society’s rules gladly or hold back the wages of war. He was an army veteran who wasn't a stranger to the term “imperialism.” I idolized him at the time, not only as a revolutionary guitarist, but as a revolutionary and an ax man.
But there was something about Jimi’s sound, rather than the lyrics, or the times he lived in, that made young people like me want to be free— in that classic sense of no inhibitions, no limits, no authority.
When I talk to men of my generation who revere Hendrix, they usually rap about his technical mastery and mysteries. But the biggest mystery to me about Hendrix was not how he achieved his outlandish distortion, but how he distorted my world— why my body responded to his voice; why “If six turned out to be nine, I don’t mind, I don’t mind.” I’ve been playing Electric Ladyland for decades now, but I didn’t examine what Jimi meant to me until I had a very weird flashback in the mid-’80s…
It’s hard to keep track of all the military actions the United States has engaged in post-Vietnam. Since Nixon, every Pentagon folly is an incident, a “war-ette,” and in that vein, perhaps you recall that in 1986, Reagan bombed Libya.
I remember the night the Libyan air strike was reported because I was at a lesbian strip show. It was a Tuesday, the night I helped host a women-only burlesque show. This was the first example of what later became ubiquitous, but at that time, it was underground and unknown to the mainstream culture. This evening featured our usual two hundred-plus crowd of leatherdykes, financial-district escapeés, and Midwestern dyke tourists. The strippers were all local girls who worked regularly in the Tenderloin.
The kind of erotic dancer who plays to a lesbian crowd tends to have a bit more spirit, a real desire to connect to the crowd. She's a feminist whore who's having a righteous moment with the girls. But her costumes and acts were rarely different from what she'd perform in at a regular porn palace, regardless of her sexual orientation.
They all danced to Top-Forty, which at the time was a string of tunes by Janet Jackson, Mötley Crüe, and Vanity 6. It was an ‘80s crowd with an ‘80s beat, and the last thing I expected to hear any Tuesday was the electrified rattle of a machine gun.
It was the “Machine Gun,” Jimi Hendrix’s song from Band of Gypsys circa 1970.
The first riffs erupted on a bare stage, and then a yellow spot came up. Out of the darkness, a stripper named Lupé crawled on her belly upstage, in a combat uniform and a gas mask. She was a death spirit; her body was contorted and furious, and her sex was driven by Hendrix’s ferocious rat-a-tat-tat.
She did her entire set, seventeen minutes, to Hendrix’s anthem, and the gas mask was the one thing that never came off.
I don’t know what the girls at the cocktail tables were thinking; I don’t know if cruising and foreplay came to a halt. Most of the audience was younger than I— I don’t think they remembered Walter Cronkite announcing the number of Vietnam casualties every night.
Some of these baby dykes may have been born the year that Hendrix played his disintegrated version of “The Star Spangled Banner” at Woodstock, which became the theme song of everyone—including myself—Who'd Rather Be Smashing the State.
Lupé was old for a stripper—almost thirty. When she came off the stage, she was so soaked I didn’t know if it was tears dripping off her face or sweat. But when she saw my own tearful face as I hugged her, she began to cry in earnest.
“You know why I did it, you know,” she said, and when she got a little drier, I asked her how she started listening to Jimi.
We had both listened for hours to Hendrix’s ”Machine Gun,” which was released during the most political and “Black” phase of his career. She and I remembered smoking a lot of pot to this album, chewing peyote, making love to men and women, and cursing the the stars and stripes. It was a time of inverted patriotism, where the very thing that made you hate LBJ, the Pentagon, Tricky Dick, and how-many-kids-he-killed-that-day, was the same thing that made you think that maybe this country had some greatness after all, if only we could get rid of... the pigs. I considered corporate greed to be a cancer on the body; I still trusted we were born clean.
I have one unusual clue to my feminine Hendrix fascination, which tied my revolutionary interest in him to my erotic interest. Everyone who has read the postmortem Hendrix biographies has heard tell about Jimi’s huge sexual appetite, his big cock, and his black erotic presence in a white milieu.
But in the middle of my lesbian strip show years, I found unexpected pictures and clues in the record of his life.
One of Hendrix’s closest running buddies had been a woman named Devon Wilson—his lover, roommate, pimp, dealer, and advisor. She was often called a “super-groupie,” linked with Mick Jagger and others. But the most interesting thing I read about her was that she was bisexual, which in the sex work world is a euphemism for a hooker who loves women exclusively, but fucks men for money and advantage. That would describe most of the women I met at our lesbian burlesque.
Devon’s bisexuality is not commented on very much in the typical Hendrix bio, except to say that Jimi “straightened Devon out.” I thought that notion was very funny, but my reading of a woman like Devon is that she "queered Jimi in."
Hendrix wrote a song about his muse, called “Dolly Dagger,” which one official biographer claimed was a mocking rhyme about Devon’s relationship with Jagger. But this rock journalist obviously didn’t know the biggest contribution Black English has made to the queer vernacular: bulldagger. Dolly/Devon was a bulldagger par excellence.
Been riding broomsticks since she was fifteen
Blowin’ out all the other witches on the scene
She got a bullwhip just as long as your life
Her tongue can even scratch the soul out of the devil’s wife
Well, I seen her in action at the player’s choice
Turning all the love men into doughnut boys
I wondered if “doughnut boys” meant guys who couldn’t wait to get Dolly’s cock up their ass. Instead of imagining Hendrix’s big dick, I saw his begging asshole in my mind, and Dolly taking him with her magic broom dick. After all, men who haven’t gotten down on their knees don’t say, “ ‘scuse me while I kiss the sky.”
I find it absolutely plausible to understand that Hendrix was a dyke daddy, a fellow traveler. The queer femme lacing to his soul was something I could anchor my militant teenage sexuality to. Of course, I am practicing the ultimate Spectator’s Choice, making my hero into me, believing that we shared a faith rather than just a good beat we could dance to.
Hendrix introduced me to the blues, to funk, and divine cacophony. If I hadn’t been fifteen at the time, I would have been unable to hang my political and erotic identity on his hook. But I was lucky.
Sure, lots of MTV stars are cute, but I don’t see them when I look out my belly button window. I’ve fantasized fucking many rock ‘n’ roll legends, but I’ve never again had the feeling like I got with Hendrix that I could fuck the whole wide world.
With Jimi you could love it and leave it; the two philosophies were not exclusive. He carved an axis bold as love and left me like he left so many others— spinning.
Photo of Jimi and Devon at LAX from the amazing collection at JimiHendrixOnline.com. Story first published in Sexwise. Dolly Dagger wasn't released before Hendrix's death, but you can find it on compilations like Experience Hendrix. He sang it as his opener at concerts in the summer of 1970. You can see Lupe in drag, stripping to Jagger, plus all the other original BurLEZk dancers (including "Sandra Dee" who later became "Tiffany Millions") on BurLEZk I, from Fatale Media. By the way, even if you've seen Woodstock on screen many times before, the Directors Cut DVD is mouthdropping, and I am so glad I stumbled upon it.
I recently got a nice note from Rick Turner, the legendary 
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