A week after Agosto Machado’s death on March 21, 2026, I stood in a Chicago basement for a one-night-only drag terrorist show. Chrissie Behynde—a queen self-christened for a lyric in Peaches’s “Fuck the Pain Away,” about the Pretenders frontwoman—performed a campy, loving homage called “Agosto Machado” sung to the tune of Rupert Holmes’s 1979 “Escape (The Piña Colada Song).” I don’t remember the exact lyrics or the venue’s temporary name (Unfound?), only that venue is an extraordinarily regal noun for that bombed-out roach motel with a single handheld spotlight and a tinsel backdrop demarcating the performance area from the rest of the sticky flytrap floor. Perfect. The type of place Machado would have performed at some point in his long, illustrious career, though career is the wrong word for someone who concerned himself with community and chosen family, with memorializing and celebrating his dead friends, their lives and art, between which there was no distinction. Life and art were conjoined.
When the news of Machado’s death broke, the outpouring was immediate. Grief and sadness, yes, but something celebratory too. The response was in the spirit of the artist, archivist, and activist himself: generous, expansive, spiritual. Many quoted a line from his Paris Review interview: “I want to be remembered as I was. I’m going to join all our friends.” (Machado never disclosed his age, but was believed to have been in his 80s.)
Linda Simpson, the publisher of the zine My Comrade, posted: “Agosto was so encouraging to all of us youngsters. Will miss her a lot.” Wigstock founder and filthy-mouthed icon Lady Bunny replied: “A saint in my book.”
How do you talk about a queer saint? Canonization can be dicey, turning a person into something both more and less than human, but Machado was universally beloved and benevolent, human and humane. His lifetime of activism, art, and caregiving to sick and dying friends was as saintly as it gets.
Machado referred to himself as a street queen, having grown up an “orphan with a sixth-grade education, and a degree from the university of the streets,” who “came into being” in 1959 when he assumed a pseudonym inspired by China Machado, the first Asian model to appear on the cover of a major fashion magazine. He landed in the Village in the ’60s and ’70s and fell in with Warhol superstars Candy Darling and Jackie Curtis, befriended gay liberationist Marsha P. Johnson, participated in the 1969 Stonewall uprising and the first Gay Liberation March in 1970. The next year, he made his Off-Off-Broadway debut in Curtis’s Vain Victory alongside Taylor Mead and Holly Woodlawn. The story goes that when Curtis asked Machado if he could act, sing, or dance and he replied no to all three, she said, “Would you like to be in a play?”
An avant-garde star was born. Machado went on to mingle with almost every performer and troupe in downtown spaces, theaters, and clubs: The Angels of Light, The Cockettes, Ethyl Eichelberger, Rumi Missabu, Jack Smith, Tabboo!, Stephen Varble, Ellen Stewart of the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, and John Vaccaro’s Playhouse of the Ridiculous. He also performed his own improvised, anecdotal solo shows Babbling in a Garden and Babbling with Joe in 1988 and Babbling with Imelda (as Imelda Marcos) at the Performing Garage in 1989.
All the while, he magpied newspaper clippings, notes, jewelry, high heels, souvenirs, props, fliers, posters, toys, collected his friends’ art, and snapped their photos with his Instamatic camera. You could pull a cheap pop-psych take that being orphaned inspired him to gather and save every scrap, to be keenly aware of the ephemerality of people and places. Or like the Maybelline ad said: Maybe she was born with it. Or, just as likely, the queer acquisitive gene: turning the discarded from trash to art—a defiant sensibility that elevates and celebrates the devalued, turns the frivolous into the fantastical, the insignificant into the magnificent.
Over the last four years, Machado’s sculpture-shrines, elaborate tributes to friends cut down by AIDS in the ’80s and ’90s, have appeared in two shows at Gordon Robichaux and are currently on view in the Whitney Biennial. They possess the presence of something unearthed as much as made. Assemblage is an almost-mystical form, getting the emphasis right, leaving out what doesn’t fix into place, trusting the hand as much as the eye. In Machado’s work, the charged presence of the dead radiates from the arrangements. They commune.
Last October, when I saw his second show at Gordon Robichaux, I was awed by the grotto-like wall sculpture Shrine (Queens) celebrating drag legends Jackie Curtis, Divine, International Chrysis, Flawless Sabrina, Tabboo!, and John Flowers of the Cockettes. With its ephemera and artworks framed by fabric and plastic icicles, like the set of a child’s puppet show, it had an almost otherworldly feel where reverence met a lets-put-on-a-show vibe. Single shelves draped with fabric and relics venerated Marsha P. Johnson and artist/filmmaker Jack Smith. An altar dedicated to Arch Connelly included one of the artist’s pearl paintings, a silk scarf, and pin-back buttons. A tabletop sculpture on a revolving tray, a kind of commemorative Lazy Susan, dazzled with brightly colored jewels, celebrating David Wojnarowicz and Peter Hujar.
His shrines are moving not only for the incredible assemblage of detritus and novelties that create the natural associations of friends and lovers, but for being portals to a sensibility so jarring in its completeness that it makes everything else look slick and soulless. They are not relics, remainders, or faded photographs, but rather a living testament to queer relationships.
Long before the avarice of fintech bros, before resentful strivers from upper-middle-class life coopted the term precarity, or before the nostalgia industrial complex became the cultural default, Machado dressed in drag and lived on the street, sleeping at crash pads, friends’ places, or with friends of friends. His street cred was without bluster or badge-flashing hard-times rhetoric. He simply spoke of the conditions of his life and survival. He was calling up scenes and the people in them. Trauma and ostracization were intrinsic but not the point.
Machado, for all his humility and self-deprecation, was a force. He and his friends made art when there was no market, when the concept would have been laughable. They made it for each other and themselves, a compulsive and convulsive extension of their lives of free expression. Some of the work was explicitly political—naming names, confronting power and institutions—but just as often it was relational, do-it-yourself, frivolous, a whimsical refusal in the face of straight society’s status kink for achievement. It created fantasias, distortions, and amusements in the face of bigotry (which is stupidity + power). Declamatory statements with a homosexual lilt, a refusal to be productive, reproductive, or product. Absolutely queer.
A few weeks before Machado’s death, his friend, compatriot, and fellow artist Tabboo! posted a painted portrait of Agosto to his Instagram, captioned, “My neighbor thought this was a portrait I did of Jesus.” Whitney Mallett and Chivas Clem chimed in beneath (respectively, “and why not!” and “Agosto Machado is a kind of queer Jesus”). Machado’s New York Times obituary stated he had no known survivors. We know that’s not true. His friends and admirers carry his name as he carried all those before him and as his art continues to.
Nate Lippens is the author of two novels, My Dead Book (2021), which was a finalist for the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize, and Ripcord (2024), both published by Semiotext(e) and Pilot Press. His novel Bastards is forthcoming from Semiotext(e) and Pilot Press (U.K.) in September 2026.
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