When Antony Hegarty, the British-born singer-songwriter of Antony and the Johnsons, picked up the U.K.'s prestigious Mercury Music Prize for his album I Am a Bird Now, beating platinum-sellers Coldplay and breakout sensation M.I.A., he famously announced, "I think they must have made a mistake!" His humility did not discourage the audience's cynics -- notably, fellow nominees the Kaiser Chiefs -- who whispered that because Antony had spent more than 20 years of his life in America, he did not qualify as British. Antony was unruffled. Sitting in an East Village tearoom nine months later, Antony, 34, admits that the experience left him unexpectedly elated. "Knowing all my family was watching [the ceremony] on television, thinking about my story there... It was very emotional to come back to a place 20 years later, and they say, 'You're home. This is your home!' I wasn't really ready for it."
From his performances at the Pyramid Club on Avenue A to his triumphant sold-out show at Carnegie Hall, which included walk-ons such as Lou Reed and Jimmy Scott, and had David Bowie, Bette Midler and Richard Gere in attendance, Antony has emerged from the far margins of New York City culture and risen onto an international platform. Next, he is preparing to go on the road with a much more concrete slice of his New York with a show called "Turning," which he and co-creator Charles Atlas see as their "New York ambassadorial project." While Antony and the Johnsons perform, Atlas films the faces of 13 of Antony's favorite downtown beauties as they stand on a revolving platform; Atlas simultaneously projects the images onto a giant screen. In a time when homosexuality has been accepted -- albeit in the most rigid of forms (flamboyantly gay, or not at all) -- Antony's soft, androgynous look, outspoken desire to become a woman, and operatic, feminine voice exist outside traditional pop formats. Unlike most underground New York artists, who historically need at least a decade to find their success, Antony has found his in real time.
Like his music, the notion of home to Antony is transgressive. When he was 11, his family moved from the south of England to the Netherlands before settling in Santa Cruz, California. Growing up, Antony listened to Marc Almond and Boy George and watched Mondo New York. That film is an outrageous camp journey into the dark performance side of Manhattan, featuring, among other nightlife luminaries, Joey Arias performing as Billie Holiday singing the Beatles' "A Hard Day's Night." At UC Santa Cruz, Antony staged "John Watersesque" plays. One day a professor took him aside and said, "There's a whole lineage of this kind of work you may not be aware of, and it all comes from New York," remembers Antony. In the early '90s, the then-19-year-old Antony -- along with his friend Michael Cavadias, who would eventually become the performer Lily of the Valley -- packed his bags. "I was at that age where I just wanted to be utterly immersed in some kind of dream," he recalls. Arriving after dark, the two went straight to the Pyramid. Performance artist Hattie Hathaway was onstage. "I knew I'd arrived home, come home."
Enrolling at NYU to study experimental theater, Antony became a regular at the Pyramid, which was still riding the wave of the richly creative '80s, when stars like Lypsinka, Phoebe Legere and John Sex tramped the boards. Deeply inspired by those who had come before him, Antony was intent on resuscitating some of the city's ghosts but found many had been lost to AIDS. "It was a strange period to come of age, because it felt quite dark in a lot of ways," he recalls. "As a young person arriving, you sense these black holes where all these people had recently been. I think I was searching to attach myself to some kind of cultural line I felt a part of, somehow." One of his teachers at school, who had been an assistant to Flaming Creatures director Jack Smith, told Antony that he would have been the perfect intern for his deceased boss. Another professor was Martin Worman, who was writing a PhD dissertation about his defunct performance troupe the Cockettes. "He really took me under his wing and gave me a breakdown of what I describe as 'transvestism and the avant-garde,'" says Antony.
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