As an aspiring performer, Raven O had two roommates undergoing gender reassignment and considered following their lead. “We had a band called FDR Drive, and one day during rehearsals I realized I was standing to go to the bathroom, and trans women don’t. I had a moment of clarity: I was doing this for the wrong reason – because as a woman I got more positive attention than as a man.”
You can expect similar candor in an upcoming memoir about Raven O’s New York adventures. “Kate Rigg, one of my hanai sisters, co-writes it with me,” he said, using the Hawaiian term for friends who were essentially adopted as siblings; he has a lot of them. Raven O arrived in New York at age 18 and, according to him, spent most of the 1980s and early 1990s homeless.
“When it got cold I’d find a place to sleep, usually by picking up a man,” Raven O said with a sober smile. “I was also a whore; I sang for my dinner, but when I needed money, I did what I had to do. Usually it was like this, I’ll have sex if you let me sleep at your place and feed me and maybe give me some money.’ Then drugs became a factor: crack and crystal meth. Gradually he started to party less; he and Deutzman even renounced alcohol two years ago. “We’ve just decided, we’re done,” said Raven O. “My great weakness now is sugar. And I have a fetish for fried chicken.”
There will likely be fewer personal revelations on an album Raven O recently recorded with bassist Ben Allison, another longtime collaborator. It will be called “Piece of Sky,” he said, after one of the two original songs; the other songs contain standards and “some surprises, contemporary songs that we’ve turned into jazz songs.” Painting, an old hobby that Raven O picked up again while hosting the Cirque du Soleil show “Zumanity” in Las Vegas, will be a new creative outlet. Arias had come up with the Cirque part, ‘and Joey said, ‘If you ever stop performing, you have to paint.’ I said I would never give up performing, but here we are.”
Should the stem cell therapy work well enough, Raven O doesn’t rule out a return to the stage. “But I would never do it that intensely,” he said. “In Hawaii I can let nature take care of me. My older brother told me you should come home and leave the aina — the island – heal you. And he’s a badass too.”