Claudia Wonder: Sao Paulo’s First Queen Of Club Culture (R.I.P.) (interview)
Claudia Wonder
Brazilian civil rights campaigner and transsexual performance artist Claudia Wonder started her nightlife career in Sao Paolo in 1975, performing alongside iconic Brazilian drag queens including Andrea May, Thelma Lipp and Brenda Lee.
Running round Sao Paulo’s then tiny after-hours gay scene, she routinely faced arrest from the police controlled by Brazil’s then notoriously brutal military dictatorship and became an ardent activist in the campaign that lead to democracy in 1985.
Also championing gay rights and later on, HIV and AIDS awareness issues, she became a national celebrity around the same time when she fronted Brazilian punk band Dirty Trick. In Sao Paulo meanwhile, she became even more infamous for her show ‘The Vomit of Myth’, which she regularly staged at the Madam Satan club, stripping off naked in a bathtub full of blood.
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Moving to Europe in 1989 (where she worked as a cabaret artist and make-up stylist) she came back to Sao Paulo in 1999, returning to music in 2007 to record on a number of electro albums. She also became a columnist for GQ magazine the same year and in 2008 was the subject of a documentary “My friend Claudia’ directed by filmmaker Dácio Pinheiro.
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My Friend Claudia
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Continuing to fight for gay rights and AIDS issues, Claudia died of an AIDS related illness of November 26, aged 55. She chatted to Jonty Skrufff and Benjamin Ferreira several months before, in her flat in the centre of Sao Paulo close to Avenue Paulista (Benjamin acted as a translator).
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