Miss Kitty Litter Green: Spirit Sister, Glamor Goddess

On the 30th anniversary of her passing, Visual AIDS Research Fellow Avik Sarkar discusses the life and work of Miss Kitty Litter Green (1962-1995), a trans feminine and gender nonconforming visual and performance artist. Through interviews, archival materials, and close readings of her artwork, Sarkar pieces together a comprehensive portrait of Miss Kitty's irreverent, excessive, and radically empathetic creative practice.

Kitty was born in Berkeley, California, on December 1, 1962—exactly 26 years before the first World AIDS Day. Her creativity was fostered early on by her mother Cleo, who passed away in September 2024. A writer herself, Cleo chronicled Kitty’s life in her memoir.⁴ Precociously queer, Kitty began cross-dressing at age four and mounted her first drag performance, “The Outrageous Beauty Review,” at fourteen. When she came out as gay as an adolescent and told her father that she had found a gay psychiatrist, he offered to help with the finances. Kitty was perplexed. “You don’t understand, Dad. The psychiatrist is for you.”⁵

Kitty was singular in her fabulous defiance of the oppressive norms that govern gender and sexuality. Cabaret artist Justin Vivian Bond remembers the “glamor goddess” as her “intersex spirit sister.”⁶ Those who knew her, and Kitty herself, described her gender identity in many different, sometimes seemingly contradictory ways. Though “one pronoun simply wasn’t enough,” I use she/her throughout this essay, both for the sake of consistency and in recognition of her love for the feminine.⁷

Kitty’s painting also took the form of graffiti, as illustrated in this postcard from 1989. Three belles are trapped in what was formerly a lion cage at a zoo in Los Angeles. With characteristic cleverness, Kitty stages a critique of violence in multiple forms, at once condemning animal cruelty (she became a vegetarian at age seven) and homophobic persecution. The words “QUEEN TANK” written on the outside of the cage evoke the long history of policing and incarcerating gay men and trans women for cross-dressing in public. “Inside the cell,” Kitty explained about queer ancestors jailed under these conditions, they would “scribble on the walls with eyebrow pencil.”¹² Even under the most brutal circumstances, the creation of art was vital to queer existence—as Kitty’s own life demonstrates.

Though she called the Bay Area home, Kitty described travel as her “addiction,” her “drug of choice”—she ventured to Brazil, France, Egypt, and elsewhere.¹³ In Germany, where she performed in circuses and discos, she painted on the Berlin Wall not long before its fall. Another postcard features her piece from 1987, Home of Fallen Angels, a mural of two spirits in jockstraps who had departed this world for another—an ephemeral glimpse of a queer afterlife.

Kitty learned that she was HIV-positive around 1985 and began to experience symptoms around 1991, when she returned to San Francisco from Japan. Despite her illness, she flourished in the city’s queer counterculture and collaborated extensively with other avant-garde artists. She was a nightlife fixture, earning a reputation at the now-defunct Chaos, Klubstitute, and Club Uranus, where she performed alongside Doris Fish and Jerome Caja, fellow drag queen painters and friendly rivals who, in 1991 and 1995, respectively, were also lost to AIDS. She worked intimately with photographer Daniel Nicoletta, who characterized her as his “muse.”¹⁵ Everything in excess: for their first session together, she came prepared with no fewer than “four suitcases of drag, including six fully developed ensembles that she wanted to do in one evening”—and indeed, they did.¹⁶

Kitty contained multitudes—her talent extended into theater and music. A lifelong thespian, she toured nationwide with the San Francisco Shakespeare Company for two years after graduating high school in 1980. Later, she played minor roles in Tokyo Pop (1988) and the cult classic Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992). With Birdie Bob Watts and Roxy Toxic, she sang in the band Clipped Out Recipes and composed playfully political lyrics. In the song “Victim of Society,” she protests the constraints of the gender binary: “I’m not a woman; I’m not a man. / I’m just the freak you think I am.”¹⁷ In “Seven Years,” the duration of time she had been seropositive, she insists:

You can take away my pills
You can take away my AZT
Perhaps this freak won’t live long,
But no one will take away my song.¹⁸

Addressed to an amorphous and anonymous “you,” this song condemns both a government apathetic to queer death and a public complicit in the suffering of “freaks.” Kitty accepts the abject position of the freak pushed to the margins—to reclaim this status is to take back others’ power over her. Though those in power might deny her treatment and jeopardize her health, though she might resign herself to death, she held on tightly to what she would never relinquish: her self-expression.

Arguably, Kitty’s most visceral mode of self-expression was performance, defined expansively. Birdie recounts a particularly memorable act in which Kitty sang “Doll on a Music Box” from the children’s musical Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968). She rotated on a pedestal in a bridal gown like a marionette—until the very end of the song, when she lifted the dress to reveal another queen sucking her cock underneath. Some spectators were titillated, others scandalized, but almost none could make sense of what was on display. A doll with a dick? “It is no longer possible to derive a judgment about stable anatomy from the clothes that cover and articulate the body,” Judith Butler would write almost a decade later.¹⁹

Kitty’s scene literalized the question of what lies beneath the surface—who is under the dress? Even when confronted with full frontal, even when nothing was left to the imagination, the audience was still at a loss. “When one cannot with surety read the body that one sees . . . when one is no longer sure whether the body encountered is that of a man or a woman,” Butler proposed, “the reality of gender is also put into crisis.”²⁰ Likewise, the artifice of Kitty’s drag disturbed the stability of gender, which fell apart in the exact moment when she exposed her naked body. The very idea of a woman with a penis was enough to generate massive confusion—what Butler might consider “gender trouble.” Kitty “made sure everybody knew she had a penis,” recalled Bond. “It was a political statement. It challenged the gaze (which could also be spelled gays). She was a sexualized femme in a culture obsessed with masc (which could also be spelled mask).”²¹ It was risky business to assert her sexuality so overtly as a trans feminine person—especially in historical conditions that prized aggressive masculinity. But what might be dismissed as vulgar, obscene, or simply frivolous was, for Kitty, precisely the source of resistance.

Kitty was equally irreverent to gender and to genre. She blurred the lines between media and synthesized the multiple dimensions of her practice. “Painting and drag, in a lot of ways, are the same thing. Drag is painting on another side of yourself, and finding that . . . there is another character inside of you,” she observed in an interview with the drag zine Venus Castina: The Art of Gender. “And painting is the same for me. I always paint people, faces. Even when I paint a portrait, I’m always feeling what it’s like to be that person . . . What does it feel like to be something that you were not born, and told by your parents that you are not?”²² For Kitty, artmaking provided an escape from the confines of the self—even if only momentarily. It was ripe with possibilities: to exist as someone or something else, to see a projection of your fantasy reflected back in the mirror, to emancipate yourself from the gender you were assigned at birth and the person you were expected to be. Kitty exercised a radical empathy, a wild curiosity about how it would feel to encounter the world in a different body, to live life otherwise.

Kitty’s attachment to life endured even as her illness intensified. She remained an active member of the Radical Faeries, a queer spiritual community where she gained vital energy; she would return from gatherings at the Faeries’ sanctuary in Wolf Creek, Oregon, in a “manic high.”²³ In these final years she created at a frantic pace, driven by a sense of urgency, resulting in a prolific body of work that reckons poignantly, and sometimes painfully, with HIV and disability. With the gradual failure of her physical health came cognitive decline, too; she experienced phases of dementia accompanied by “erratic flights of fancy.”²⁴

Kitty’s last work, her “memento mori,” is the haunting portrait Miss Kitty as Angel (1994), captured by Nicoletta just a few months before her death.²⁸

Though she was “skin and bones at this point,” she was determined to walk up the stairs to Nicoletta’s studio.²⁹ The photograph was a collective effort, made possible by the support of her caretakers. In Kitty’s image, we see the devastation of the pandemic in flesh and blood—and yet she also gestures toward something ethereal. Her fragile body transcends the pain of the here and now as she transfigures into a celestial being. As Ms. Bob Davis writes, “Her emaciated, AIDS-ravaged body . . . fades, white on white, into an angel with wings.”³⁰

Kitty died on March 12, 1995, “in a tremendous ball of grace.”³¹ Throughout her life, and especially in her final years, she was obsessed with the color green, which she regarded as the “healing force” of the planet.³² She dyed her hair green first at ten years old and again at thirty-one; she rechristened herself “Miss Kitty Litter Green” and preferred to be addressed as “the Green Queen.” At her wake—held at Nicoletta’s studio, one of her favorite places—attendees decorated an altar with green dolls, makeup, and miniatures. Her drag sisters and fellow faeries paid homage by dressing up as her portraits. The memorial service doubled as a “drag free-for-all,” where her seemingly infinite wardrobe was divided up amongst friends.³³

Kitty had also produced amulets for distribution at the ceremony, each filled with sage, suspended from a rosary, and imprinted with her cackling face in neon green—as if to ridicule anyone who would dare to forget her.

In September 2000, the salon Glama-Rama! organized a retrospective of Kitty and Doris Fish’s art, aptly titled Angels. The exhibition made Kitty’s legacy clear: she “helped abolish the tired old female-bashing stereotypes of drag and gave birth to a fresh . . . uber-femme representation.”³⁴ In a world hostile to femininity, and especially to non-normative femininity, Kitty carved out a space for elegance and extravagance. She found pleasure and fantasy where others saw bodies not worth protecting, lives not worth living. Sensual and resplendent, her work continues to resonate in its capacity to provoke and to heal. Nonetheless, she remains largely unrecognized in scholarship and criticism.³⁵ Spirit sister, glamor goddess, angel, freak—she demands to be known in all her incarnations. Miss Kitty Litter Green’s vision speaks to the ongoing urgency of centering trans feminine and gender nonconforming artists in the cultural histories of AIDS. Or perhaps, as Kitty would say, we need an army of “total femme spirits to come down from outer space and give us a hand.”³⁶