Episode 4: Tom Keegan and Davidson Lloyd

In this episode of Rainbow Records, artists Tom Keegan and Davidson Lloyd, also known as Keegan and LLoyd, discuss how they began creating art and how they met, and their early performance pieces.

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Created and edited by Analisa Venolia 

Transcript

0:13

Welcome to Rainbow Records, a show about the stories of queer people who lived through the AIDS crisis in Los Angeles. Stories of resistance, resilience, and a community that refused to be erased. I'm your host, Annalisa Vinolia. This episode, our guests are artists Tom Keegan and Davidson Lloyd. Tom and Davidson, also known as Keegan and Lloyd, got together in 1977 and have been partners ever since. They have created award-winning pieces and were at the forefront of the fight for marriage equality. While their story began in New York, they moved to Los Angeles towards the end of the 80s. They shared what their lives were like as a committed gay couple and as artists during the AIDS crisis. So let's get right to it. And I grew up, I was born in New York City, and I grew up in the greater New York area. I'm Davidson Lloyd. I was born in Texas, but basically grew up in Manhattan. When did you first know that you were gay? I had inklings of being gay when I was kind of pre-adolescent, right? Like 10 to 13. And I remember at that time that it was just a horrifying thought. That I just thought I'd end up like an old man in a in a bus station toilet, you know, cruising there. I couldn't see any, you know, respectable life for myself. Um but when I got older, I when I was in high school, I was in a theater troupe and there were a couple of gay people in that. And um when I went to college, when I went to drama school, I'm like everybody was queer. And then I came out and I kind of came out to my mother as bisexual when I was in college. And after college, I just decided I'm gay. And then I had a steady boyfriend soon after that, Davidson Lloyd. Well, that's a really good question. And the thing is, um I came out basically being gay when I met Tom Keegan. I I want to say, and I I believe strong it was love at first sight, and it continues to be love at first sight all these years later. How did you two meet? And how did you get together? Well, we have a little bit of a difference of opinion about it because I say that we met at the audition, and I was um this was right around the time that my my mom and and my stepfather, John, got together, and in fact, the audition for this place, the yard, was happening in New York. And I briefly was living in Boston, working with uh some people that I'm still friends with today, some dance theater stuff in Boston. And I came down to New York and the audition for this summer place, the yard, happened to be the same weekend that my family was having this sort of like meet the other family weekend. So it was pretty, it's one of those times in life I call the page turns. And we got to this loft in um Soho really early in the morning, and everybody was there. It was mostly young women dancers, a couple of men, and I was more in the dance theater part of it. And everyone was sort of stretching and breathing, and all of a sudden somebody yawned, like there was this big yawn, that's like, oh, and all these dancers kind of went, oh, and this person popped up their head and they said, yawning, it's very good. It opens the throat. And I just thought in my head, I got to meet that guy. And he led the theater part, and so I was very excited. I went up to talk to him at the end of the thing, and I said, Oh, I'm an actor too, and I love what you're doing, and blah, blah, blah. And we had this whole conversation, and he was looking to the right, and he was looking to the left, and he never looked at me the whole time. And but when I got the gig, I remember thinking, I wonder if that guy's gonna be there, and I hope so. And Davidson, what's your side of the story? Well, the story was, I mean, that audition, like I said, I had worked with a group called the the Medicine Show Theater Ensemble for three years. And at the end of three years, I said the dream is over. So I announced to them at the end of the production we're doing, I'm leaving. Well, the two artistic directors did not take it well. Uh one of them only spoke to me on stage during performance, the other one only spoke to me to give me directions on stage for the performance. So that audition day, that night, was the last performance. So that's where my mind was. Could I hold myself together for this last performance and end this thing? And then when when I went to the vineyard, this is the way I describe it, because it was like um I was at the top of the stairs, and he was at the bottom of the stairs, and something happened. Yeah, he was like, it was like, you know, in the movies when the when the saxophone play I looked up and he looked down and was like, Well, hello, you know, and uh it was like then he saw me, you know, and then um we had this kind of romance. It was the this was in 77. We took it slow, meaning we didn't have sex for a week. And that was you know, that was like let's let's not jump into anything. There's a facility in New York called Manhattan Plaza for artists. The week that a housing housing process. It's a housing. It's a uh what is it, something eight? Section eight. Section eight. And it was uh eighty-five percent performers and then ten percent people connected to the business, you know, ticket takers, people like that, and ten percent people that had been displaced when these two towers were put up in Chelsea Clinton. I got very involved. I moved in the first week it opened. And by the end of the week, they had 5,000 applications. And so I had this great apartment, and I said to Tom, you know. We met, he had just moved in a week before when we met, when when when when he came up to the vineyard, and so we had this hot romance, and um I was like, okay, I'm moving back to New York. Also, I'd made all these connections here, and I feel like I could, you know, have a professional life. He says, and rightly so, that he was like, You'll come and live with me. And I was sort of took it like, I'll stay with you till I find my own place. Because I didn't know if it was gonna work out. But as I say, he moved in with his Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, the Bett Middler albums, and never moved out. What were your family's reactions to you two being a couple? My family has always been very much in the picture as part of my life. But Davidson's family was really we weren't really connected with them for for many years, the first 12 years maybe of our relationship. But uh Davidson was like an outsider boyfriend. Like the first Christmas that we were together, we took family photos and he kind of stood off to the side. And um it took about really 10 years for him to be fully accepted into the family. My parents were divorced, and my mother married a wonderful guy. There were five kids in my family, and she married a wonderful guy who had four kids, and so we had this big put-together family, and we were mostly grown up by then. When our parents had been together 10 years, we hosted just a family get-together in the Hamptons. We were living in New York at the time, and we just put on the dog. I mean, we we got these houses organized, we cooked the meals, we worked our butts off, and it was that, you know, we try harder mentality that many gay people have. And uh at the end of it, our parents were like, okay, you know, you're in, right? Like they just they couldn't keep us as outsiders any longer. But it really took a lot of work. What led you to begin creating performance art? My background, my first professional job was in dinner theaters in the South. And I've been on Broadway, I've been off Broadway, I've been off off Broadway. And then I I got involved with people that were creating work from the body of the group. And I like that idea because it was a lot of a lot of improvisation and then putting together a piece, a story. And I did that with a number of groups. There was a group called the Medicine Show Theater Ensemble, which I spent three years doing. And it seemed like when Tom and I got together, that performance art for the two of us is something that we we really understood and could do together. Tim Miller and John Byrnd were sort of role models for us. They they did some pieces together, and I I was part of that scene, the East Village open movement scene, along with Ellie Kovan, who went on to found Dixon Place. And Tim Miller, I went over to his apartment and he had a calendar there, and he was like, Okay, when do you want to do something? But also before that, at this same place where we met, the yard, there was opportunities to do more kind of movement-based or dance theater type stuff. There was room for the performers to try out some stuff if they wanted to. I was a drama major in college, but I switched over to directing and I created a couple of original theater pieces in college. Describe for me how you began creating art together. I'm not sure. We were together. It was like, well, what shall we do? And let's let's create a piece. So we were in this company called Nimbus. It was sort of a dance theater company that that there were several choreographers and there was some theater and movement together. And I think that was we had an opportunity to create a piece on a program. And so we made this piece called Continental Drift. You know, was what was happening at the time? It was not so expensive to be living in New York. You could rent spaces cheaply, there were grants for stuff, and so that's why a lot of what was going on in the 80s and the late 70s and the 80s in New York was, you know, very seminal. We did this piece called Continental Drift. And then after I got kind of involved at PS122, and I saw what John and Tim were doing, I was like, let's come on, let's do a piece. We can do a piece about our relationship. And we did this piece called I'll Love You Forever. Or at least until Friday. It was like a movement, it was visuals, it was fruit, it was uh uh spray paint. You know, we were kind of part of this community. We did it at PS122. I think the you know, the reason that we titled it I'll Love You Forever, or at least until Friday, because during that time, and this was before AIDS, there was the warm impermanence of male relationships. And, you know, you have a boyfriend one day and you break up the next day. And we were trying to sort of say that from the very beginning, that two men can be together and have a life, have a good life. Describe what your life was like in the time before AIDS was discovered in the U.S. Tell me about your life as young gay artists. You know, we weren't on the forefront of gay liberation that already had started. So we were sort of standing on the shoulders of the early gay liberationists, right? And we were in the in the theater and dance world where it was very safe. And with places like PS122, all the lofts and Soho, space was available. And, you know, having a space is something that for performing artists means everything. We didn't have anything like TikTok or YouTube. We didn't have the kinds of media tools that people have now. You know, we had our bodies and we had space. In the early years, we used to say, like, it was very safe at PS 2022, and we had a loving audience. Outside of there, we called it sex education. When we would tour, not in London, we did some stuff in London, and that was very receptive as well. But if we would tour somewhere, we'd always feel like, okay, the queers are coming out, the actual queers are coming out, and we would the audience would sort of gasp when we came out, and we'd sort of go, like, it's sex education, man. We're just giving them, you know, we're just being ourselves. And we we sort of had this kind of mantra. Before we went on stage, we would say, basically, to ourselves and to the audience that was waiting, we'd say, We're here, we're queer. Now, will you go on a journey with us? There were two things that Tom and I were always promoting was coupledom and marriage. And we did that from the very beginning. And in the gay community, gay men and lesbians, they didn't want to hear that. They didn't want to know about couples, they didn't want to know about marriage. It wasn't as cool. It really was not as cool. But that was always our thing, right? Like, hey, we're a couple, we're a committed couple, maybe someday we could get marriage. It seemed like a far-off pipe dream. Yeah. But it was reflective of our lives. We felt that if we just came on stage and normalized our lives and the lives of people around us and the stories that we told about the people in our lives, those stories were authentic and they could be theater. And by coming on stage with a kind of authenticity and physicality, we would just normalize our we we were visible. We made our life visible. At times it was very challenging. Tell me about your initial reactions to AIDS. Well, in our piece, I'll Love You Forever, we made fun of AIDS because it seemed at that time like there was What do you mean we made fun of AI? We had a joke about it. It was called Grid. We had a joke about it. Like it was just, it was another thing they were trying to pin on us. It was a gloom and doom thing that, you know, the queer dies in the third act. It seemed like something far away that, you know, was in the press. It was this thing we read about, and then it began to hit home. But it always was something like it's another thing they have against us. It's another strike against us. We've been swimming upstream for so long, we're not gonna take this laying down. I mean, I was in the room when Kramer, what was his first name? Larry Kramer. Yeah. When and this was a meeting about AIDS and what we were gonna do about it, and he stood up and screamed, it's a plague. We were all in a rage. And I suppose that's when we all took to the streets. This is just part one of the conversation with Tom Keegan and Davidson Lloyd. In the next part, you'll hear them discuss their experiences during the height of the AIDS epidemic and their life in LA. This has been Rainbow Records. Until next time.