Loviatar
- At September 16, 2018
- By Great Quail
- In Vampire
0
You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing.
—Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”
Description
Clan: Daeva
Affiliation: Byzantium Coven
Role: Founder of Venusberg Burlesque Troupe, Artistic Director of Cabaret Tannhäuser
A voluptuous woman with arching eyebrows, perfect skin, and cheekbones to die for, Gloria Excelsis—better known as Loviatar—is one of the most striking neonates of the Byzantium Coven. A burlesque dancer and occasional cosplayer, her skills with costuming and stage make-up keep her appearance in constant flux, but her brash sex appeal and wicked sense of humor are impossible to mistake. Gloria is every bit the classic vixen, and she takes great delight in playing that role on and off the stage.
History
What Are Little Girls Made Of?
Born in Easton, Pennsylvania, Gloria Eck-Sellars began life as an unplanned addition to a family of poor white trash. Her father, Jonathan Eck, was a machinist from a long line of Finnish alcoholics who settled the Delaware Bay in 1638 and called it a day. Her mother, Sylvia Sellars, was an illiterate Dutchy whose intellectual high-water mark was a curious fascination with Star Trek. When a child caught them by surprise in 1972, Sylvia expressed the desire to give her daughter a hyphenated last name. While she couldn’t quite articulate her reasons, her husband just shrugged and tamped out his cigarette—“Sure, baby, why not?” A few months later, John spent the money from the baby shower on a pair of cowboy boots, and Sylvia nearly drowned her newborn in the bathtub while high on painkillers. With their black and white television as babysitter, the unhappy couple boldly carried on, but never had sex again—just to be sure.
How these parents produced such a bright and inquisitive daughter is anyone’s guess, but Gloria was always the “smart one” in the room. She loved school, and she was the first member of the family to possess a library card. As a teenager, Gloria dreamt of going to college and becoming a writer, but a classic combination of poverty and poor decisions derailed her plans. Her father smoked his way to an early grave, and when he died of emphysema, the family was left without a source of income. By this time, Sylvia was suffering from a vaguely-defined “mysterious illness.” Its precise nature may have baffled the medical community, but it sure prevented her from working, so she suggested that her daughter begin waitressing. Gloria was sixteen years old.
The Naked Time
Gloria was not just smart and funny—she was also gorgeous. After emerging from an awkward ugly duckling period, Gloria was declared “the prettiest girl” by everyone from flustered schoolboys to jealous aunts. Maturity also presented her with an amazing figure, and her tips at the diner increased as her buttons came undone.
Gloria was aware that her curves were an asset that didn’t require a college degree to monetize, and the moment she turned eighteen, she began working as a nude model at Lafayette College in between shifts at the diner. She enjoyed being the object of such devoted scrutiny, and found herself becoming sexually aroused by the attention. She began cultivating a slow, delicious rapport with some of the students as they sketched her body. All it required was a sly glance; or to shift her ankle just so, and she could sense their pulses flutter. Two months into the semester, the teacher pulled Gloria aside. He’d been receiving complaints about Gloria’s behavior; that she was “needlessly eroticizing” the sessions. With his eyes fixed some sixteen inches below her own, the teacher suggested that perhaps Gloria could find more “appropriate” work.
Two weeks later, she was dancing at the Box Car Gentleman’s Club as “Gloria Excelsis.”
Is There In Truth No Beauty?
Even as a stripper, Gloria brought self-reflection to her work, and invested her performance with thought and creativity. She began developing a kind of postmodern burlesque act, inspired by classic striptease and incorporating science fiction themes derived from Star Trek, Space 1999, and U.F.O. She provided the club DJ with cassettes of music ordered from obscure catalogs, and used Sylvia’s old sewing machine to create clever new outfits.
Needless to say, her efforts went over the heads of the blue-collar clientele, truckers and farmers just looking for titties and beer. Dissatisfaction led to boredom, and boredom led to an unfortunate fondness for cocaine. Gloria had always known that her fucked-up family was prone to self-destructive spirals of addiction and neglect; she was only surprised by how readily she followed their lead. Her habit thinned her income, and soon she was following the occasional customer to his cab, episodes she sarcastically referred to as “grokking for coke.”
The only regular who seemed to “get” Gloria was a dealer named Rusty Hoenscheid, a college dropout and gaming nerd who sold weed to the local high school kids. Fellow members of the Dead Fathers Club, they enjoyed getting high in Rusty’s trailer and watching Doctor Who. They would bitch about their dysfunctional mothers and pretend that something big was just around the corner. The sex wasn’t bad, either. Rusty wasn’t the jealous type, and never asked uncomfortable questions. He stopped coming to the Box Car, and they began going to concerts at the Fairground, making out at Becky’s Drive-In, pumping quarters into the Dragon’s Lair game at South Side Pizza—normal stuff. Rusty even drove her to Wisconsin for Gen Con, although he blew his money on a sketch by Erol Otus, and they had to sell their stash to get back home again. Gloria found herself using less cocaine, and in 1992 she moved into Rusty’s mobile home and cleaned herself up. Maybe it was even time to look for a real job? In the meantime, life kept happening.
The Way to Eden
In 1994, Rusty made an unexpected proposal. During his failed semester at Penn State, he had made a friend playing Dungeons & Dragons, a New Yorker named “Fuzzy” who now owned a comic book store on Staten Island. The apartment above his store had just become vacant, and Fuzzy was offering his old buddy reduced rent if he’d help out behind the register. Although Gloria wasn’t sure if she actually loved Rusty, she was pretty sure about her feelings for the Schweps Mobile Home Park conveniently off of I-78, so she didn’t think twice. Rusty sold his trailer and they moved to the big city.
Like so many hopefuls before her, Gloria discovered that New York wasn’t exactly a Woody Allen movie. First of all, Staten Island. Second, the big city clubs were just as indifferent to her talents as the Box Car, and Gloria was told to “knock off the fancy shit and just jiggle your tits.” And finally, there was their new landlord. Fuzzy was a conspiracy theorist, a perpetually-stoned crackpot who ran a series of bizarre “zines” devoted to a range of topics from “Adapting Gamma World to the Traveler Universe” to “Haunted Pavonia: The Secrets of Staten Island.” The apartment itself was decent, but the air was permanently tainted by a saurian funk from Fuzzy’s “Reptile Zoo” downstairs—several aquariums filled with snakes and lizards, and a free-roaming iguana named, what else, Iggy Stardust.
Fuzzy was a bad influence on Rusty from the start, pulling him into a world of comic-store snobbery and alpha-geek bullshit. Worse, Fuzzy seemed oddly resentful of Gloria; whether he was a closet misogynist, awkwardly asexual, or just a jerk, he made Gloria felt decidedly unwelcome. She tried to discuss this with Rusty, but he would become uncharacteristically angry, accusing her of “ruining his shot.” Whatever that meant; as far as Gloria could tell, Rusty’s only “shot” was holding Asia for a full round during an all-night game of Risk. Before long, Rusty was spending most of his time playing Dungeons & Dragons with his new stoner friends, and Gloria’s role as “glamorous stripper girlfriend” devolved into “roommate who brings home dollar bills scented with cocoa butter.” As the distance between them expanded, Gloria started using again. Soon it was Champagne Room grokjobs and girl-on-girl peepshows; anything for some extra cash. Hello, self-destructive spiral, how ya been?
In early 1996, Gloria finally caught a break. A coworker landed her an audition at Zoara Bela, an upscale Manhattan club looking for “unique” acts. She decided to give them what they wanted. Dressed like a glittery Medusa, a coked-up Gloria borrowed a couple of Fuzzy’s live snakes and choreographed a sensual striptease to “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun.” Although she was bitten twice—spontaneously incorporating her own blood into the act—her audition was a smashing success. She was hired on the spot by Zoara’s manager, Enrique “just call me Quique” Quesada. While club managers are creepy as a rule, Quesada was creepy on a whole other David Lynch level; but Zoara didn’t charge a house fee, and paid their dancers minimum tipped wage. Gloria was assigned to the “Indigo Room,” a second-floor stage that encouraged burlesque-style routines and maintained a strict hands-off policy for private dances. As long as Gloria removed her clothing and made generous eye contact with the audience, she would have free rein.
Burlesque girls were alchemists. They were steel-tough performers who were willing to use kitchens as dressing rooms, haul their costume bags through the snow, and go into debt over fake diamonds, all for the five minutes onstage when they were goddesses.
—Molly Crabapple
Metamorphosis
Adopting “Loviatar” as her nom de guerre, Gloria worked tirelessly to light up the stage with something truly unique. With her cocaine habit humming along in a “productive phase,” every week brought ingenious new costumes, fresh dance moves, and increasingly outrageous routines that played with the expectations of her audience. She made extra cash selling “collectable” photographs and books-on-tape, usually erotic fan fiction and femslash she wrote herself. Within months, Loviatar was the top draw in the Indigo Room, and Quiqueasked if she’d feel comfortable putting together a full-length show. Zoara Bela was trying to spin off the Indigo Room as a self-contained weekend cabaret—“You know, something a little more brainy for the artsy-artsy East Village types.” Gloria was entrusted with all major creative decisions, from the show’s over-arching theme to selecting individual dancers and performers. She was also offered a respectable percentage of the door. No one had ever expressed this much faith in Gloria before, and she made a solemn vow not to fuck it up. Gloria wasn’t naïve—she knew that some of the dancers at Zoara Bela doubled as prostitutes. But the Indigo Room was different, and if she could pull this off, she would never have to “go downstairs” to make her half of the rent.
The show took three months to produce. Gloria called in favors, ran up her credit cards, and even “borrowed” money from Fuzzy’s safe after she guessed the combination—42-06-66, really? While the old Rusty would have cheered her on, the new Rusty seemed annoyed by her excessive energy; but at least he provided the perfect name. She called the show “Chaotic Neutral,” a D&D term Rusty was fond of using whenever he felt Gloria was being “unreasonable” or, can you even believe he said it, “unruly.”
Chaotic Neutral launched on Friday night, September 13, 1996. After a shaky start, the evening gathered momentum, and concluded to ecstatic applause from a packed house. Next week’s performance attracted return customers, many with friends in tow. The show quickly developed a reputation as controversial, a sure-fire win in New York, and began selling out every Friday night. Although Gloria had no way of knowing, words were whispered into Quesada’s ear by a certain bald Dutchman, and she was promoted to Associate Artistic Director of the Indigo Room. Gloria was shocked to discover she now had a budget. Rusty still couldn’t understand the difference between being a stripper and a burlesque performer; but soon she’d make enough money to get her own place in the East Village. It was time to leave the trailer park once and for all.
The night she was killed, Gloria was débuting a Saturday solo show. Jokingly called “Witches, Bitches & Fishes,” it consisted of five routines inspired by goddesses from the Deities & Demigods manual. Performing on stage as Aphrodite, Hecate, Bast, Tlazolteotl, and yes, even Blibdoolpoolp, her soundtrack ranged from forgotten yé-yé delights to grating and undanceable metal. While few understood her arcane references, the crowd was wildly enthusiastic, cheering her sensational costumes and whistling, laughing, and gasping at all the right places.
Gloria emerged from the dressing room to find Quesada with Ingo Wallrafen, the famous fetish photographer. After kissing her hand, Ingo invited Gloria to meet the club’s mysterious owner next week for “midnight drinks” at a place called Club Byzantium. He presented her with a fancy tarot card of “The Lovers,” and Gloria was startled to see an art-nouveau depiction of herself as one of the central figures. The other was a beautiful woman with billowing red hair embellished in gold leaf. Turning the card over, she saw an address printed in golden letters. Ingo nodded and smiled enigmatically, “Welcome to Byzantium.”
Returning to Staten Island in a state of euphoria, Gloria stopped at Rokovoko Ink and received her first and only tattoo, a line of text flowing down her left arm: “For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky.”
A Taste of Armageddon
Gloria opened the door to her apartment to find Rusty and his friends hanging upside-down from the rafters, their throats slashed above a clutter of graph paper, polygonal dice, and gaming manuals. Squatting on Fuzzy’s dismembered corpse was a beautiful young boy, naked and spattered with blood. Fuzzy’s fake Japanese sword rested across his thighs. He looked at Gloria with a malicious grin, then held out a ceramic Yoda bong. It was filled with blood, its congealing bubbles slowly rupturing into clouds of dank smoke. “Hey, pretty. You wanna get straight before I fuck you up?” Before she could register his movement, the boy was pinning her down, his needle-sharp teeth latched onto her throat. Gloria died screaming, her thin voice like a layer of cirrostratus clouds unspooling somewhere above the ceiling.
That Which Survives
When Gloria came back from the dead, she found herself gulping blood from a dour Romanian in black leather. The naked boy was chained to her stove, a wooden stake thrust into his chest. He seemed dead—just like Rusty and Fuzzy. She was astonished to discover Ingo Wallrafen by her side. He introduced the Romanian as “Zathael, the Templar of the Alabaster Madonna.” Taking Gloria in his arms, Ingo took her downstairs and informed her that nothing would ever be the same again.
Over the course of a seemingly endless night, Ingo explained that Gloria’s “singular talents” had attracted the attention of the Byzantium Coven, and she was being groomed as a potential Daeva, a vampire devoted to the erotic arts. She had truly just died, but Zathael’s blood had restarted her heart, and Gloria was now technically a ghoul. There was no going back; those midnight drinks with Zoara’s owner would have to be moved up. Still partially in shock, Gloria was taken to Club Byzantium to meet Venus and Orchid. After taking a discreet sip of Gloria’s remaining blood, the majestic Daeva nodded her approval. Gloria was entrusted to Mistress Naamah for further “education.” A retainer was dispatched to collect her things, and Chaotic Neutral was put on temporary hiatus.
Whom Gods Destroy
Over the following months as Naamah’s student, Gloria learned that Michael “Fuzzy” Fink had also been a ghoul, one belonging to a Sabbat hacker named Tindalos and valued for his connections in the convoluted world of conspiracy theories, science fiction fandom, and chaos magick. Foolishly, Fuzzy had self-published a Ravenloft module that fictionalized genuine Kindred politics in a fantasy D&D setting. Reflecting reality a touch too closely, Fuzzy’s lack of imagination earned him a death sentence from the humorless “Hiroki Suzuki,” the real-life Midori Satsujin, who dispatched one of her Malkavian assassins to murder the dungeon master and his associates. Fortunately for Gloria, Zathael had been ordered to rescue the valuable retainer; unfortunately for said dungeon master and associates, the Templar had been delayed.
Gloria was astonished by this information, but not exactly traumatized. Attracted to science fiction and fantasy all her life, she could barely believe what was happening—vampires were real, and she was going to become one. And if we’re being completely honest? Rusty had failed her. She was sorry he was dead, he didn’t deserve that; but then again, she didn’t deserve to grow old above a second-rate comic store, shoveling cocaine up her nose and watching her boobs sag. Well, maybe that was unfair. She was planning to leave Rusty the moment she made some real money. But then again, it wasn’t the first time she had plans, was it? All her life Gloria had wanted to “make it big.” What could be bigger than joining the Sabbat?
Current Role
The Changeling
On January 1, 1997, Gloria Excelsis undertook the Rites of Amizu and accepted the Daeva’s Embrace, becoming the third progeny created by Venus and Orchid. Purged of her cocaine addiction by Venus’ blood, her Daevic talents blossomed, and for the first time in her life, Gloria felt like she belonged. The timing couldn’t have been better, as the burlesque revival of the nineties finally created an audience receptive to Gloria’s talents. In 1998, she founded the Venusberg Burlesque troupe and opened Cabaret Tannhäuser, a Ludlow-street theater devoted to vaudeville, striptease, and burlesque. She also launched a series of traveling burlesque shows devoted to “erotic geekery,” such as “The Monster Manual,” “The Orion Slave Market,” and “Club Silencio.”
Gloria’s routines remain dark and edgy, and themes of violence, nymphomania, and bloodletting are common. As her stage name suggests, the sympathies of “twice-killed” Loviatar have always been with dark goddesses and misunderstood monsters. Still, Gloria is certainly not evil, and being little more than a fledgling, much of her humanity remains intact. She enjoys drinking blood, but she refuses to kill indiscriminately, and like many in the Byzantium coterie, she avoids Sabbat activities that result in wanton slaughter. Gloria deplores Siddim, rarely visits Viriconium, and avoids the Catacombs of Sarnath. Like Venus, she detests Roger and Kitty Plant and remains aloof from their subterranean coterie. Unlike her Sire, Gloria has yet to frenzy, and has never been forced to murder for survival—she can still afford the luxury of principles.
Gloria lives by herself in an old bookstore on the Lower East Side. She keeps the ground floor as a private library, but she’s converted the second and third floors into a studio, and the top floor as her residence. She occasionally feeds on strangers and tourists, but her associated burlesque troupes offer a more companionable source of blood. Many of Gloria’s dancers and their partners are happy to serve as blood dolls, eager for a chance to bed the Daeva and surrender their vitae. Gloria treats this bohemian herd with genuine affection—“Every monster must have her minions!”
Mirror, Mirror
But that’s not the whole truth, and “our girl Loviatar” has been concealing a secret. Her stance of ironic detachment has become more difficult to maintain. As Gloria develops as a Cainite, she finds it harder to control her “inner monsters.” She’s beginning to hear their voices, a menagerie of gorgons, succubae, and goddesses muttering deep within her blood. Their origin is unclear—perhaps they entered her body when she died, perhaps she’s calling them into being through sympathetic magic, or perhaps she’s just crazy, and is manifesting the first signs of Venus’ unstable bloodline. No matter their provenance, lately Loviatar has been finding herself staring into the dressing room mirror, curiously reluctant to dissolve her makeup, detach her wings, or remove her crown of serpents. Even her eyes appear different, and she has no more need for specialized contact lenses. Loviatar simply imagines herself a monster, and a new awareness swims to the surface of her eyes, pressing itself forward, curious, hungry. Perhaps it’s time for a second tattoo; but should it be “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” or “The Enemy Within?”
Sources & Notes
The core of the Gotham Sabbat was first uploaded on 31 October 2000, but the Byzantium Coven was extensively revised during the August-October 2018 update. While facets of Gloria’s history and personality are based on people I know, there’s no doubt that Loviatar is my “Mary Sue” of the Byzantium Coven. So yes, I created a ridiculously hot imaginary girlfriend who would have played D&D and dressed up like my beloved Romana or Leeloo at Comic Con. (That’s Romanadvoratrelundar and Leeloominaï Lekatariba Lamina-Tchaï Ekbat de Sebat to you, buddy!) And then I had the chutzpah to close with a Margaret Atwood poem. I’m the worst, I know. However, Loviatar’s performance style is a tribute to an actual burlesque artist from the nineties named Velocity Chyladd, an amazing and controversial dancer who brought some of the routines described above to the stage of the Blue Angel Exotic Cabaret. The thrashing mermaid and the striptease with fake blood and razor blades? That was Velocity.
All photographs of “Loviatar” are actually the Russian cosplayer Elena Samko. After finishing Loviatar’s profile, I did a Google search for “Medusa Cosplay” and found Samko’s amazing work. I immediately knew that I’d found my Daeva! You can peruse photographs of Samko’s cosplay on Deviant Art, and you can support her on Patreon. The blood-spattered D&D pages were scanned in from my copy of Deities & Demigods. Fucking Blibdoolpoolp, man! Am I right? And one final thing. I’m the one who blew my money on a sketch by the incomparable Erol Otus. I cannot blame the “fictional” Rusty Hoenscheid. It was me.
Author: Great Quail
Original Upload: 31 October 2000
Last Modified: 10 May 2019
Email: quail (at) shipwrecklibrary (dot) com
PDF Version: [Coming Soon]
Helen of Troy Does Counter Dancing
By Margaret Atwood
The world is full of women
Who’d tell me I should be ashamed of myself
if they had the chance. Quit dancing.
Get some self-respect
and a day job.
Right. And minimum wage,
and varicose veins, just standing
in one place for eight hours
behind a glass counter
bundled up to the neck, instead of
naked as a meat sandwich.
Selling gloves, or something.
Instead of what I do sell.
You have to have talent
to peddle a thing so nebulous
and without material form.
Exploited, they’d say. Yes, any way
you cut it, but I’ve a choice
of how, and I’ll take the money.
I do give value.
Like preachers, I sell vision,
like perfume ads, desire
or its facsimile. Like jokes
or war, it’s all in the timing.
I sell men back their worst suspicions:
that everything’s for sale,
and piecemeal. They gaze at me and see
a chain-saw murder just before it happens,
when thigh, ass, inkblot, crevice, tit, and nipple
are still connected.
Such hatred leaps in them,
my beery worshipers! That, or a bleary
hopeless love. Seeing the rows of heads
and upturned eyes, imploring
but ready to snap at my ankles,
I understand floods and earthquakes, and the urge
to step on ants. I keep the beat,
and dance for them because
they can’t. The music smells like foxes,
crisp as heated metal
searing the nostrils
or humid as August, hazy and languorous
as a looted city the day after,
when all the rape’s been done
already, and the killing,
and the survivors wander around
looking for garbage
to eat, and there’s only a bleak exhaustion.
Speaking of which, it’s the smiling
tires me out the most.
This, and the pretense
that I can’t hear them.
And I can’t, because I’m after all
a foreigner to them.
The speech here is all warty gutturals,
obvious as a slam of ham,
but I come from the province of the gods
where meaning are lilting and oblique.
I don’t let on to everyone,
but lean close, and I’ll whisper:
My mother was raped by a holy swan.
You believe that? You can take me out to dinner.
That’s what we tell all the husbands.
There sure are a lot of dangerous birds around.
Not that anyone here
but you would understand.
The rest of them would like to watch me
and feel nothing. Reduce me to components
as in a clock factory or abattoir.
Crush out the mystery.
Wall me up alive
in my own body.
They’d like to see through me,
but nothing is more opaque
than absolute transparency.
Look—my feet don’t hit the marble!
Like breath or a balloon, I’m rising,
I hover six inches in the air
in my blazing swan-egg of light.
You think I’m not a goddess?
Try me.
This is a torch song.
Touch me and you’ll burn.