NO NEW YORK

A Cleveland-born musician who came of age in the late-1970s New York underground art scene remembers the women who “lit the fuse” of the No Wave movement.

Bertei arrived in New York City in 1977, a 22-year-old Midwestern queer woman who “took cover behind a boyish pose and swagger” and dreamed of joining a band. Her inspiration to leave Cleveland had come from photographer Nan Goldin, whom she had met in a gay bar. In this memoir, Bertei chronicles her experiences as a queer artist in a vibrant cultural underground that centered around the East Village, the Strand Bookstore, and clubs like Max’s Kansas City and CBGB. From her first days in New York, the author was drawn into a No Wave musical scene that reveled in fluidity, the danger of living in a city that resembled “bombed out Beirut” and assaulted audiences with a kind of “Dada brutalism.” Moving between female—and occasional male—lovers, Bertei mingled with underground cult singers like Lydia Lunch and more pop-oriented ones like Blondie and Madonna. At the same time, she drew inspiration from brilliant experimental filmmakers like Vivienne Dick and artists like Kiki Smith. Her own star rose in the years that followed. Starting out as a singer for the Contortions, Bertei moved on to work with the Bloods, a band that made history as the first out-of-the-closet, all-queer band and later recorded tracks with New Wave star Thomas Dolby. Interspersed with black-and-white photographs from an era defined by radical creativity but overshadowed by AIDS, drugs, and commercialization, Bertei’s book offers a distinctively feminist twist to the gritty rise and fall of a groundbreaking movement.

A love letter to a punk/post-punk era and the female creatives who transformed gender and genre defiance into art.