Do you have any of Greer’s work, Nan?
I was obsessed with Catholic art for many, many years. I had a collection of bleeding hearts, so Greer made an anorexic Jesus for me. I have another doll that’s a contortionist, but this is the one she made (Goldin lifts the Jesus figure to the screen) especially for me.
Do you remember when she made it?
Well, we were living together, so basically 1981 to ’82—sometime in that period. A lot of people went through there in those years—like, 25 people came and went. She stayed for a year.
So you were sharing an apartment, but did you also socialize together?
In the ’80s, we each did a lot of drugs, but not together. Greer always laughed when I used to say, “You are the only person I knew who could get addicted to MDMA.” I guess times changed.
You mentioned earlier how magazines were important—that’s how I discovered Greer back in the ’80s in the UK. If I remember correctly, it was an image of her with (trans model and Steven Meisel muse) Teri Toye, perhaps in The Faceor i-Dand Greer’s doll of Teri.
When Greer first came into the downtown scene, she was the only openly trans artist. Sometimes I think she felt like a freak—people were fascinated, but she also felt like that fascination had a twinge of vicariousness. When she met Teri, she idolized Teri, and then they started hanging out together around ’87. Teri and Patrick were living in my house for a while after their wedding, and so Greer and Patrick and Paul (Monroe), Greer’s ex-husband, were hanging out together in my house. Paul had a huge influence on Greer then. Her work was constantly in Paul’s store Einsteins. Most people remember her dolls from those windows.