Advocate NL 7/21/26

Early on June 10, 2006, Kevin Aviance left the Phoenix, a bar in the East Village. A group followed him down First Avenue, throwing garbage and a paint can and shouting slurs. They surrounded him and beat him, breaking his jaw. Four people were arrested.

Aviance recognized instantly that this wasn’t the ordinary hostility he’d learned to absorb as a visibly queer Black performer. “This one was different,” he tells The Advocate's Christopher Wiggins. “It was way different, and I could feel the hate from them.”

Six days after the beating, Aviance appeared at a rally with his jaw wired shut and delivered the line that would follow him for two decades: “You can’t keep a good queen down.” The recovery was not tidy though. The attack, he said, sent his career “down the tube.”

Aviance's fame belonged to a kind of nightlife hard to explain to anyone raised on social media. As Wiggins writes, "He didn’t become famous by showing up in people’s homes every week. People left their homes to see him. They traveled, waited in line, packed into a club at midnight, and stayed till morning. Then Aviance appeared above the crowd, and the night became a story they’d tell for years."

Don't miss the full profile on Aviance, including the artist's advice to the LGBTQ+ community on countering the Trump administration's attacks: "We need to start living outwardly."

Until next time,
Edgar Ramirez, Audience Editor

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