At Hollywood Forever Cemetery, where palm trees cast slender shadows across marble and myths, the past seems to flutter in the heat. Here, in conversation with the spirits of stars, wannabe stars, ordinary people (whatever that may mean), and yes, even animals—and in the presence of impressive life’s works and, far more often, unfinished ideas—Pleasant Gehman feels at home. By her side on this truly brutally hot July day: Coyote Shivers, her husband. A true rebel at heart and thus the ideal companion, he knows how to ground her verbal verve with dry wit and shared memories.
Pleasant Gehman’s life can’t be so easily organized chronologically and filed away like ours, mere mortals. What hasn’t she done? Or rather: What hasn’t she actually done? She’s published fanzines, founded and sometimes even led bands, set dance floors ablaze, breathed life into tarot tables, and last but certainly not least, hypnotized belly dance nightclubs with her presence.How does it all fit together? Gehman gives a flirtatious look and explains: “My life motto is to say yes to everything!” Fair enough. And for the most part, it’s even true, because the self-proclaimed Princess Hollywood knows nothing of false games of ambition; “life strategy” is a foreign concept to her—with her, everything always arises from the natural flow of things. “I never viewed it as a career,” she interjects. “All these activities are things I’ve wanted to do my whole life—so I did them.”
Hollywood – an urban version of a deserted Midwestern town
This deep-seated refusal to separate art from life brings us close to the essence of this typically atypical Hollywood biography set within the Los Angeles punk scene—a scene that, in the mid-1970s, was less an aesthetic and artistic lifestyle choice in favor of a specific, admittedly hedonistic and culturally appealing milieu, but above all a consistent confrontation with all the middle-class baggage that had driven the protagonists to the western edge of the USA. A desertion, so to speak, from the oppressive dreariness of the American dishwasher’s dreams of existence.Around The Masque, a club established by Brendan Mullen in the basement of a porn theater, which would become for Gehman and so many others one of the epicenters of punk and their largely nocturnal lives, something like a temporary autonomous zone emerged. Cheap rents, urban plight, and the absence of any control created what Gehman describes as “an urban version of a deserted Midwestern town.” It wasn’t romantic, but it was liberating. “Who was thinking about a career back then?” she asks rhetorically. What really mattered, she says, was being close to the hustle and bustle of the city, to people happily dancing on the edge, to the chance to embrace the forbidden. “Just think about who you want to get to know,” people used to ask themselves back then, she comments with a giggle. And she adds: “Or who do you want to have dinner with for the rest of your life?”
Aside from the fact that, in conversation, you never quite know whether Gehman isn’t (at least slightly) pulling your leg, she naturally also overshadows her own aura here. For she was never just one of the many who were there every night—she was one of those few mystically radiant figures whose presence everyone in the room noticed and who would leave a lasting mark on the scene. As a fanzine pioneer and later staff member at LA Weekly and Slash, she documented the scene from the inside out, writing at night—often under the influence of speed, as she notes with nostalgic wistfulness—and typing drafts using the ten-finger method (a certain level of professionalism is a must), in which observational reporting and personal presence blended together. The DIY ethic wasn’t just a pose; it was the essence of existence. In those days, photocopiers became machines of self-empowerment. The means of production weren’t just democratized on stage. “When the magazines suddenly wanted my contributions and kept asking for more, I just started sending in my handwritten notebook pages,” she recalls with a chuckle. “Of course, the editors called me and asked if I could type it up, and I lied and said, ‘My typewriter’s in for repairs.’”
If there is a common thread running through Gehman’s life, it is this: she succeeds in transforming and transcending fixed categories. Author, performer, dancer, psychic—these are neither job titles nor phases of life, but rather simultaneously existing incarnations of the one, ever multifaceted Princess Hollywood. Even her later turn to belly dancing, which, as she reports, some of her old “friends” who weren’t exactly fond of her found to be a source of snide comments, was ultimately always written in the stars. Even as a child, she says, she prayed to Allah at the dinner table and was fascinated by images from National Geographic magazine. “I’ve been interested in all of this since I was born,” she says. What she means by that: The punk scene didn’t shape her; it merely amplified everything that was already slumbering within her.
“In the end, there’s a Starbucks on every corner”
Los Angeles, the other central character in this story, has not remained untouched by the passage of time. The geography of punk, once defined by a self-proclaimed, cultivated neglect (equally on the part of city officials, the police, and runaway teenagers), has been overtaken by capital in Hollywood, just as it has been in the rest of the world. Selma Avenue (named after Selma Weid, the daughter of early Hollywood pioneer Ivar Weid—and to this day the center of Pleasant’s world), once a place of chaos, now sparkles with boutique hotels. “Places where people used to get drugs or throw up are now behind a VIP barrier,” Gehman remarks cynically. The dialectic is well known: subculture creates an aura, the aura creates real estate value, and real estate displaces subculture. Or as Shivers puts it: “In the end, there’s a Starbucks on every corner.”The Ramones Ducks
By now, we’ve left Hollywood Forever Cemetery—or, to put it more accurately: we were asked to leave because we didn’t have a permit to film. We’re sitting a few blocks away, in front of the door to the temporary Kaput Headquarters in Hollywood. The perfect time to talk about the Ramones ducks, arguably one of the strangest anecdotes from the Corona pop culture wormhole. During the pandemic, Gehman and Shivers began feeding ducks at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. At first, it was a simple act of kindness, motivated partly by a love of animals and partly by their own sense of loss during those days. But the whole thing quickly took on a life of its own when they taught the ducks to walk to Dee Dee Ramone’s grave—accompanied by a sampled, quacking version of “Blitzkrieg Bop,” the spectacle went viral. “For us, it was always just about our love for the ducks, for music, and for nature,” Gehman emphasizes. “The idea of making money off ducks is absurd.” And yet, within hours of an article appearing on the American Rolling Stone website, she was inundated with requests from all over the world. But a true Hollywood princess isn’t fazed by that sort of thing anyway. Even when a major TV network called and wanted to put her on the air during prime time, she politely declined: “Listen, I’m sorry, that’s not possible right now. We’ve just arrived at the cemetery, and things are about to get hectic here.”“In the end, things just happen the way they happen,” Gehman concludes. “How else can you explain that ducks, of all things, have become ambassadors of punk memory?” None of it was intentional, she emphasizes … and adds: “If you don’t fight against chaos, chaos will take care of you.”
“I’m a 63-year-old, slightly crazy stripper. Write that down!”
The punk scene in 1970s Los Angeles has often been mythologized through its male protagonists, its bands, and its venues. Gehman’s presence complicates this narrative. She is not merely a witness, but an archivist of textures, sounds, and much more: the smell of old theaters, the etiquette of restrooms in trans-sex worker bars, the acoustic hum of late-night television—her stories breathe the spirit of those long-gone days; they dwell on the chaotic, permeable boundaries between art, sex, survival, and boredom.Speaking of sex: “Sometimes the only reason to leave the house was the prospect of meeting someone on the street and having sex,” she says matter-of-factly. Not provocation, but anthropological classification. This scene was just as much about desire—social, sexual, aesthetic—as it was about rebellion. Or as Shivers dryly adds: “Much of what drove what we considered political or artistic movements was often simply people who wanted to have sex.” Age has certainly not robbed Gehman of her sense of humor. On the contrary. “I’m a 63-year-old, slightly crazy stripper. Write that down!” she tells me toward the end of our conversation, which has lasted several hours. As is so often the case with her, it is at once a joke, a manifesto, and a delightfully defiant refusal to lose relevance as she gets older—and instead to remain open to new experiences.
In a culture increasingly shaped by constant optimization and perfect self-marketing, Pleasant Gehman remains pleasantly unpredictable. She has spent her entire life rejecting any pre-planned scenarios, instead throwing herself body and soul into the unpredictability of life—why should she now surrender to the conservatism of old age or the crass monetization of capitalism? And that is precisely why her influence endures, and people still whisper the name Princess Hollywood reverently into each other’s ears today.
But the final word, of course, belongs to her: “I always just said yes—everything else then happened quite automatically.”