Imagine flipping on the TV and finding a debate about what’s in your pants. That’s what happened to former drag king Cooper Lee Bombardier, when an episode of Sex and the City opened with the cast discussing the nature of his package. “It was bizarre,” says the trans artist, performer, musician and writer.
Bombardier initially garnered attention in the late 1990s when he shouted punk lyrics, spit mad rhymes, displayed his art and warbled country in a myriad of San Francisco locales. He even scored a spot on the original Sister Spit tour and was featured on subsequent albums, I Spit On Your Country and Greatest Spits.
“I still really feel a bond with the people from those tours,” he reminisces. “It was such an eye opening and life-changing experience. It really was a shoestring operation and it’s hard to imagine touring like that now. Back then, it seemed like this fun adventure my friends had created. Now it’s kind of crazy to hear people talk about how influential Sister Spit was.”
Bombardier identifies as “a blue-collar, book reading, art-making, story-writing, queer transgender man who likes women but doesn’t freak out when he thinks a guy is hot. I’m a guy who values his past as a woman.”
He’s been featured in a number of anthologies—including the FTM collection, From The Inside Out. He’s taught creative writing to San Francisco youth and fronted bands like Dirt Bike Gang and Whiskey Dick.
Early drag king performances garnered Bombardier appearances on the covers of the Diesel Fuel and The Drag King Book, which led spots on Maury Povich Show, Strange Universe—and Sex and the City.
“[I] wasn’t on Sex and the City,” Bombardier clarifies. “But a larger than life portrait of me was. The show’s producers approached Del La Grace Volcano about using his Drag King Book photos for an episode. They blew them up larger than life, hung them in a gallery and featured them in the beginning of the episode called ‘Boy Girl Boy.’ I didn’t even know Del had let them use the photos.”
Bombardier also starred in several independent films, including the award-winning The Ride, and Blue Yodel, which he recalls, “was like the whole film was suspended in a jar of honey, kind of slow and amber and all wistful.”
For three years ending in 2007, Bombardier organized, produced, publicized and emceed the monthly, Santa Fe, New Mexico queer cabaret, LISP, which featured an eclectic line up of performers.
While he’s dabbled in nearly every medium, Bombardier (myspace.com/cooperleeb) insists, “I feel lucky that people had faith in me or responded to my art in some way that made them want to include me in their own projects. ”
He believes that people find trans artists both fascinating and repulsive because they defy societal mores about gender. “Gender is such a given for most folks…and when something or someone causes a disruption in that little halcyon dream, it’s like, ‘Holy Fuck!’ The rest of us, who think about gender all of the time, we…never take for granted what’s in somebody’s pants! Trans artists often play this tension like a violin. The blurring of the expected is our medium.”
Bombardier remembers daytime talk shows as, “incredibly draining. One hopes they’ll be an opportunity for understanding…or even just that bored housewives may find us sexy for a minute. But really it’s more like middle-aged and elderly tourists screaming, ‘It’s a man! No, it’s a woman!’ at you at the top of their lungs.”
Today, Bombardier admits, “I go in and out of cycles with my creative pursuits.” Now, he’s silk screening, sewing and hoping to finish a novel in 2008. He promises, “I’ll be out on the road again…[performing] and [singing] karaoke with the fine queers all over America!”
Trans author Jacob Anderson-Minshall examines his transition from lesbian feminist to straight white guy in the anthology, Men Speak Out: Views on Gender, Sex and Power.
