A St. Louis Magazine Must-Read for 2021!
WELCOME TO THE “ornate but rickety” Villadiva, whose stained glass windows and uneven floors house more than a century of St. Louis’s queer culture and drama. In a city where “ambition and history and activism and machinations mix with scandal and sex and ghosts and murder,” it’s beneath Villadiva’s crystal chandeliers that secrets are revealed and stories come to life. You’ll feel you’re in the room with provocateur Andoe and his riotous, multigenerational tribe of eccentrics, socialites, drag queens, card-reading witches, psychic mediums, addicts, and promiscuous extroverts--as well as the stalkers, liars, and felonious, headline-grabbing sociopaths who are determined to destroy them.
House of Villadiva reveals the heart and heartlessness of urban queer life in the 21st century—and the secret to living through it.
A St. Louis Magazine Must-Read for 2021!
WELCOME TO THE “ornate but rickety” Villadiva, whose stained glass windows and uneven floors house more than a century of St. Louis’s queer culture and drama. In a city where “ambition and history and activism and machinations mix with scandal and sex and ghosts and murder,” it’s beneath Villadiva’s crystal chandeliers that secrets are revealed and stories come to life. You’ll feel you’re in the room with provocateur Andoe and his riotous, multigenerational tribe of eccentrics, socialites, drag queens, card-reading witches, psychic mediums, addicts, and promiscuous extroverts--as well as the stalkers, liars, and felonious, headline-grabbing sociopaths who are determined to destroy them.
House of Villadiva reveals the heart and heartlessness of urban queer life in the 21st century—and the secret to living through it.
Adorning the grand stairway at Villadiva—the deliciously pretentious name for the historic St. Louis home I shared with my husband Kage, our burly young rugby coach roommate Marcus, and our witch-in-residence Zeeke—were framed articles and magazine covers.
When the discussion of Out in STL, the glossy magazine where I served as editor in chief, inevitably turned to print being dead I would often reply, “But you can’t digitally replicate the gravitas of a cover.”
Print’s decline is not where I took the conversation, but there was always someone who felt compelled to alert me to that reality.
Of course, print wasn’t practical, but neither was the ornate but rickety 110-year-old Villadiva, with its stained-glass windows, scalloped arches, uneven floors and questionable wiring. Practicality had never been high on my list of priorities. It certainly wasn’t practical to leave financial success in the Bay Area or all I invested in my longtime marriage, but we’ll get to all that soon enough.
My favorite Out in STL cover was in a position of honor, eye level near the base of the banister. For our “Where We Live” issue, my beautiful friend Cody, who like Kage and Marcus was Black, is pictured in aviators, sitting shirtless with a local celebrity on the windowsill of a glorious ornate turret looming over one of the city’s queer intersections. You can’t tell from the photo but the shadow of Bastille, the LGBTQ bar across the street where a group of regulars stood watching our spectacle, was ominously creeping up the face of the building. The iconic image, snapped when the brilliant golden sunlight magically glistened on Cody’s muscular chest, was captured in the nick of time, minutes before the turret was eclipsed.
I showcased my twin Riverfront Times Mardi Gras covers. St. Louis had the second-largest Mardi Gras in the nation and for years I hosted parties during the celebration in the turret mentioned above. Riverfront Times, commonly referred to as the RFT, was the city’s dominant weekly paper and a sister publication of Out in STL. The 2019 cover was “The Mad Beader of Mardi Gras” and 2020 was “The Maven of Mardi Gras.”
Another RFT cover was for my feature on the provocative internationally-known blue-faced queen who was a constant irritant of the queer establishment, including the owners and drag queens of Grey Fox Cabaret, the bar five doors down from Villadiva.
Lowest on the wall was “Meth at the Melrose,” a story which centered around the ten-unit apartment building two blocks away where me and Kage, along with a big group of friends, lived before Villadiva. Just two of the original cast remained, one being Jordan Jamieson, who I took to calling “Ms. Jamieson” after telling him that underneath his manly exterior he’s essentially Thelma Harper, a southern grandma from the 1980s sitcom Mama’s Family. The other remaining tenant is a story for later, and what a story it is, but I can tell you he was disgruntled about the magazine piece.
The low wall position was appropriate considering the Melrose sat at the base of two hills.
This book is a collection of stories about the colorful characters I’ve covered and cultivated, and the ones I feuded with. It’s a tale of a complicated city of houses, and by “houses” I mean tribes. A metro built atop the ruins of North America’s largest prehistoric city north of present-day Mexico where the continent’s two mightiest rivers converge. It’s a story of my tumultuous relationship with this place I couldn’t stay away from.
The long table in Villadiva’s mahogany-trimmed dining room was where I conducted interviews and where I wrote. There, beneath the coffered ceiling and ostentatious crystal chandelier, I learned of the inner workings of St. Louis, particularly Queer St. Louis. Topics like ambition and history and activism and machinations mixed with scandal and sex and ghosts and murder.
From my preferred spot at the table, I faced the arched entrance to the largely-unused (except for parties) parlor. Left of the fireplace was a gold-framed poster for my 2015 book Delusions of Grandeur. Opposite that was my most prized possession, a dreamlike oil painting of my dog Brawny by my brother Joe. On the imposing mantle was a framed movie-star quality black-and-white photo of my late dad in his early twenties, circa 1956. Dad manages to become part of these stories himself.
I sat down at the table to brainstorm on how I would even open such a saga, or such a hodgepodge of intertwining sagas. So much stems from the Melrose, that building down the hill, nestled in the shadows of the valley where an audacious social experiment went awry.
“I know how to open this story,” I thought to myself.
Standing before the judge in a packed Downtown St. Louis courtroom as my neighbor stood defiantly nearby, I began explaining the severity of his obsession.
“Your honor, on October 14, 2017, the respondent admitted in writing to cutting open his flesh, bleeding onto the scraps of a shirt we’d given him, and summoning Satan to curse us.”
But no, let’s instead start at the beginning.
Andoe's House of Villadiva is at once light-hearted and incredibly poignant. A collection of 298 vignettes over 700+ pages, this book is a personal memoir about Andoe's many moves back and forth to St. Louis which catalogs of the many unforgettable characters he found there, and pays tribute to his beloved house, a "villa" that overlooks a diva-filled drag bar. As someone who has yet to explore St. Louis, I appreciate the tidbits about the city and its history, and in some sections like "Where We Live: Presenting the St. Louis Area's Top LGBTQ Neighborhoods" which originally appeared in Out in St. Louis in September of 2018, Andoe serves as a city tour guide, offering up a history of specific parts of the city.
At various times the book maps out the city, Andoe's romantic relationship with his husband Kage, his past lives in St. Louis before he bought the house he would name Villadiva. On page 78, Andoe mentions when writer Robert Julian Stone read his manuscript for his first book, Delusions of Grandeur, he suggested that there "are way too many characters here" and that Andoe should "cut all the pre-St. Louis stories." For me, this book reads as an effort to save a lot of those stories he cut from the first book, rather than a true memoir of the house and their time within it. It isn't until we get to vignette 125 that we hear of the purchase of the house, and only six of the 298 vignettes mention the house in the title. While the house is mentioned in a variety of places, the collection's title leads the reader to expect a far more focused narrative about the house and its inhabitants.
The author's bio compares his work with that of Maupin and Sedaris, but we shouldn't expect a full story of the house in a way that we get with Mrs. Madrigal and her family of Mouse, Mary Ann, Brian and Mona, nor do we get as in-depth introspection as we get with Sedaris. While the tone is certainly humorous and sarcastic in a Sedaris-like fashion, and the book breathes life into memorable characters and a locale in a way similar to Maupin's work, this collection is far looser and the narratives less-developed than the Tales of the City stories.