And the other drag queens who danced there embraced him. Butterick recalled, with his bald head bobbing as he tried to avoid smacking into the ceiling fans. “Got the best job I’ve ever had in my life go-go dancing on the bar at the Pyramid,” he wrote in a diary entry for 1984. He shaved his head and began wearing cocktail dresses, huge sunglasses and drop earrings. “He had long red hair, like this Renaissance beatific child,” Mr. The doorman, Brian Butterick, was in a Mohawk, combat boots and a kilt, and would later perform as the drag queen Hattie Hathway. Johnson was waiting in a long line that snaked from the Pyramid, a dingy Polish barroom on Avenue A where gay promoters were throwing parties. But it was in downtown clubs that he found his calling. Johnson recalled liaisons in a warehouse, in front of a crowd, on a rooftop on Hudson Street and hidden in a dorm room while the Beastie Boys rehearsed nearby. In a diary that he later posted online, Mr.
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Johnson wrote in an e-mail message, “like he had finally found his way home when he went to New York City.” In the city, he reveled in the sexual liberation and subversive flamboyance he found. STAR POWER Dean Johnson promoting his party at CBGB. He had been H.I.V.-positive for 20 years, dabbled in mescaline, smoked copious amounts of pot, took antidepressants, kicked heroin and popped Viagra when hired for sex. Johnson could be felled by a sleeping pill. Johnson once partied with, among them Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol. Saleh, a former Commerce Department employee who is hobbled by chronic pain, could not have been less like the downtown luminaries Mr. Johnson died in was at the end of a nondescript hallway on the second floor of a stately building - a distant cry from the East Village nightclubs where he and the naked go-go boys under his command once reigned. Conklin had been pronounced dead at a nearby hospital, said Inspector Rodney Parks of the Washington police.įor Dean Johnson, whose heyday in the 1980s mirrored the rise and fall of New York’s bohemian downtown club scene, and who rarely kept the salacious details of his life private, it seemed an inconceivable way to go. Four days earlier, the police had found the body of another man, Jeremy Conklin, 26, at the same apartment - that of Steven S. Johnson’s body was in the city morgue it had been there for a week.Īs details of his death surfaced, the mystery around it grew. 27, his friends called the Washington police and finally got an answer. Johnson did not show up for band rehearsal on Sept. Pollock called hospitals and morgues in Washington and Baltimore, only to be told that no one named Dean Johnson was there. Desperate for clues, two friends gained access to his e-mail account. Maybe his computer was still on the fritz from the coffee he had spilled on its keyboard the previous week.īUT their anxieties grew as the days passed. Knowing him, his friends reasoned, he had forgotten his cellphone charger, or dropped his phone in a toilet. Yet he always returned phone and e-mail messages. Johnson, who was 46, knew people all over and often traveled to visit them. After 25 years as a club performer, sex party promoter and gay escort, Mr.
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Johnson had told them that he planned to visit someone in Washington for a day, though they did not know whom. Johnson had not replied to messages she had left all night.Īt first, his band mates were not overly concerned.
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Johnson’s band mates, telling them that a stranger had called and that Mr. She had no idea who the man was, or where he was. Pollock said she told him, her stomach churning, before the caller hung up. He had taken a sleeping pill, the man said, and was not waking up. Pollock said he asked her if she was close to Mr. Johnson’s band, the Velvet Mafia, had seen him 12 days earlier, dancing and singing at the Howl Festival in the East Village, where an adoring crowd greeted him with roars.īut the voice on the line belonged to a stranger and sounded tense. It belonged to Dean Johnson, a 6-foot-6 gay performer and stalwart of New York’s underground music scene. She was delighted by the number displayed on her phone. 20, a warm, sun-filled Thursday in New York.Īmanda Pollock remembered rushing about her fourth-floor walk-up on the Lower East Side, getting ready for a noon writing class while tending to her colicky year-old son.