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The Power of Love!

Circuit Star Lena Love Lives to Break Boundaries

Written by D. Michael Taylor

Seeing Lena Love’s highly stylized photos alone can be a jarring experience, let alone one of her meticulously produced shows. Who is this creature? With her aggressive makeup and funhouse fashion, the first impulse might be to peg her as an overgrown club kid. But then there’s something about her that seems a bit too … authentic for that. Often she has her very real tits showing, so perhaps she’s one of those eerily convincing transsexuals. Then—at last—the truth. She is exactly what she looks like: a gorgeous woman with muscle and talent for days. She’s been driving Circuit boys wild for over a decade now. If you haven’t heard of her yet, you will.

An alluring (if also slightly alarming) mix of Marilyn Manson and Brigitte Nielsen, you’ll probably find Lena performing with a gaggle of beautiful boys acting like a pack of dogs at her feet; when, that is, she’s not sculpting people into shape as a personal trainer in her hometown of Toronto. Whether it’s Black & Blue in Montreal, Gay Ski Weekend in Vancouver, or an appearance on Queer as Folk as a Barbie doll breaking out of its package, Lena puts everything she’s got into entertaining and surprising the most jaded party posse.

Surprisingly, she says she was initially taken aback at the way the gayboiz took to her. “You would figure the last thing a plethora of gay cha chas would want to see is a half-naked woman,” she (rather reasonably) explains. “To this day I can never explain it, but I was embraced. I think it’s because it shows when I perform: I’m an open book.” This charming and introspective modesty, however, vanishes instantly the moment she’s “on”—on stage or in front of the camera. There is a power to her presence that screams confidence, talent, and the wisdom of experience.

Lena’s life has always been a stage of some sort. Both of her parents were well-known bodybuilders in Toronto in the ‘80s. Lena brags about her mother getting a call from Jennifer Beals, whom she was training for the movie Flashdance. Her father worked with Lou Ferrigno (of Incredible Hulk fame), so Lena’s bodybuilding career path was set at an early age. When asked if she lets the two sides of her life merge at all, she laughs at the “image of yelling at my clients to do three more reps with horns on my head and a painted white face and fangs.”

Her relationship with her father was rocky at best, so she poured herself into dance classes as a child to get some positive attention from him—to little avail: “It was something I could say I was good at it, trying to say, ’Look, Dad, can you see me now?’ I knew he didn’t, but in my mind I knew it made a little part of me happy anyhow.”

Hard work and perseverance taught her to accept the things she couldn’t change about her life while opening up new worlds of creativity and freedom. “I breathed it,” says Love, calling performance “my therapy. I would rather move than speak verbally about my emotions. Dancing was a braver method of explaining feelings through a song.”

But dancing was something that cost a lot, both financially and emotionally. So Lena had to make a difficult decision: stop taking classes and started escaping to the big city—in this case, Toronto–to the welcoming arms of the burgeoning rave scene. She avoided the easy temptation of drug use. “I was too distracted with the community it brought and the diversity,” she recalls. “The music was like an open book, and when people would dance, they were the words to the story.”

She quickly became a fixture on the go-go boxes of Toronto, which she sees in retrospect as “more of an art form” at the time, “very interpretive. This gave me leeway to dance and express myself, and at the same time I was inspired by the music and the unique people.”

Eventually, the local raves peaked, and she found herself following her gay friends to the newly developing Circuit scene, where she quickly found herself smack dab in the spotlight. The non-threatening sexual vibe she felt from her gay fans was a new kind of freedom for her. She loved the way she could use her body erotically and artistically—without a bunch of horny straight boys salivating over her. The over-the-top colors, lights and sounds of the gay scene also resonated with her outlandish nature, and she felt she had found her “new home.”

SKIING & SANKER

Once established locally, she was courted by the likes of Sanker and the big gay ski weeks. She had always thought of herself as a go-go dancer primarily, but quickly realized that these huge events expected a bit of a show; Ms. Love was happy to oblige. Since she is not a drag queen, “I couldn’t just put on a wig and pretend to be J-Lo.”

Maybe that was an advantage. She was forced to rely on—gasp—her talent. The resulting production value of her shows blossomed. Today, she is now well known throughout Canada for her keen eye for visual pageantry and drama. She is constantly finding new ways to “tell my version of the song on stage through visual movement, costuming, and interacting with the crowd.”

She now finds herself among the luminaries of the Circuit performance world. She has worked with Circuit legends such as Buck Angel and RKM, and caused a minor scandal in Toronto with Angel, an infamous female-to-male erotic performer. Being the “man with a vagina” (the phrase that appears on his business cards), he tends to give quite an eye-popping show, as those who attended the Black Party a few years back well know. He and Lena hit it off immediately, and they decided to surprise the crowd with a little fisting, with Buck as the fister and Lena as the fistee. Toronto wasn’t quite ready for that type of rawness, which upset Lena, since it was “such a small piece of what the story offered.” A flood of calls and emails expressing shock and outrage had Lena quickly yearning for more cosmopolitan stages—or at least more accepting ones.

Lena’s plans for the future will no doubt be shaped by her increasing restlessness with the scene as she finds it today. What she sees as an influx of harder drugs and a sense that the party scene has become jaded and stale is having an impact on her enthusiasm—not to mention the fact that many people simply don’t go out anymore, instead preferring the relative proximity and simplicity of cruising around online for company.

But she stays upbeat about a scene that she still loves and cherishes, and is using this moment to take stock of how she can continue to do what she loves and feel that she is getting the most out of her creative output. She has much to be thankful for, “discovering as an artist the best and worst of what comes along with your passion.” But she is not afraid to admit that she is at a “crossroads” and yearns to “take Lena Love to another level.”

This might take the form of moving to Europe to seek out new audiences with a thirst for her brand of boundary-pushing aesthetics. She also hints that there may be a “legendary musical” in her life, and from the look of things, it would certainly be a surprise if there weren’t. Too bad the name “Taboo” is already taken. It would fit her boundary-breaking performance style perfectly.

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