Li: The Nomi Song

me·te·or (noun)—a transient fiery streak in the sky produced by a meteoroid passing through the earth’s atmosphere; a shooting star or bolide.

-from Dictionary.com, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary

“What the fuck is that? … People said what is that, not who is
that?”

-Alan Platt, Journalist

Roll call. Calling all outsiders. Drag queens, transvestites, the androgynous, those who dare to be different. The Them. Protesters who stand up to fear and authority. Those not afraid to exist within the shunned minority. Those not embarrassed to be the last ones picked in the game of life.

“We were misfits. And the only place where misfits could go was New York City. We were fueled by Andy Warhol.”

-Ann Magnuson, Performance Artist

What a beautiful thing it is to have a place to call home, surrounded by walls that are not constructed by a moral majority, a place safe from the contamination of urban sprawl, far far away from the disease of contempt.

It’s a story that will never grow old. The story of the individual. He who is not afraid to shake up the seemingly unshakeable norm. The visionary. The poet. The leader. He or she or it who is seemingly not of this place. The alien. The artist. Ahead of their time. In their presence, we are speechless. Confused. Maybe even dismayed or disgusted. But unmistakably, we are changed because of them.

Who are these mascara splashed starry-eyed dreamers who dare to walk among us?

“When I was a kid, I stole money from my mother—I think she’s still mad at me—so I could buy a record of Elvis Presley’s King Creole. And she was really angry. She hated rock and roll … so she took it away and got me Maria Callas instead. And there I was, caught between two extremes.”

-Klaus Nomi

The Nomi Song touched me on many different levels. Most obvious was the portrait of the freakish misfit who found, in New York's underworld, not only a place to belong, but moreover a place in the spotlight to be the belle of the ball. The Queen. He was a robotic creature seemingly plopped down from Mars and he was here to save us.

“Well, when I first met Klaus, the first thing I was really impressed with was his level of androgyny. Not just the androgyny of sexuality but the androgyny of whether you’re human or not. I mean, this is an androgyny beyond androgyny where he became robot-like.”

-Anthony Scibelli, Photographer

But if the story simply ended there, happy but one-dimensional, I would not have been so affected by Klaus Nomi. It is simply impossible to get the film, the man, or the artist out of my head. His appearance, so visually striking. His music—those breathtaking tenor soprano falsetto arias that blended seamlessly into a rock aesthetic—as unclassifiable to record store bins as Klaus himself was to the world around him.

But most of all, what moved me so definitively was the portrait of the human being and the fragile power that one life—that every life—possesses. Tapped or untapped. The loneliness of the outsider, especially tragic in the face of a secluded death. And the immortal glow of life that shines on, well after the final notes have faded.

“But then, after talking to him for awhile, the overwhelming feeling was that you realize, what a sweet person. What a nice guy.”

-Alan Platt, Journalist

Stripped down to the core of any story of human existence is the bare bones reality that we are all impossibly the same. No matter how different we appear on the outside, no matter how different our backgrounds or foregrounds, no matter how different our opinions, values, or beliefs, there we all are, sharing the same old story. We are all a bunch of freaks. Each and every last one of us, freaks. In the end, perhaps the only discernable difference is in the few that actually have the courage, grace, and pride to expose the face behind the mask. How much richer the whole is because of it.

-G