STEVEN SATYRICON is a multidisciplinary performance artist, writer, poet, and practicing Witch who has called San Francisco his home for 21 years. Queerness and non-normative gender roles have been a definitive part of his life experience since early childhood, when he prefered Strawberry Shortcake dolls to G.I. Joes, and he would tear off his clothes and run naked into the woods whenever he could--much to the shame and bedevilment of his relatively conservative, middle-class suburban parents.

Steven pursued singing and theater in school, but Alabama in the 90s was not exactly a welcoming place for radical self-expression or queerness (much less drag), so he eventually dropped out of college to become a beatnik hippie vagabond, which eventually led him to Atlanta, Georgia and the magical world of clubs and nightlife. He was a gogo dancer and fetish performer at the definitive Gothic-Industrial BDSM nightclub The Chamber (which was the host of Pat Briggs' "Glitterbox" monthly drag/clubkid/genderfuck event) and a regular at the legendary and infamous 24-hour den of sin called Backstreet Atlanta, the original home of Charlie Brown's X-Rated Cabaret, where he first began to become integrated into drag and trans culture.

The week he moved to San Francisco, Steven was plucked from the waiting line of a then-new party called Colossus, and thrown in front of the camera of Eric Stein (aka Shuttterslut), who was the in-house photographer at The Stud for much of its peak clubkid era. Before a year had passed, Steven was a high-profle gogo dancer and club personality; at the end of 2003, Heklina invited him to move beyond being a "drag prop"/supporting performer, and perform as a solo artist/headliner at her longrunning and incomparable club night/drag show Trannyshack. Ironically, Heklina always expressed frustration at Steven's lack of conformity to the "rules" of drag--bearded queens and genderfuck had not yet resurfaced on the community's radar.

All that changed in 2008, when a queer underground theater company called The Thrillpeddlers began restaging classic shows from the iconic SF acid hippie freakshow group The Cockettes at their home venue, The Hypnodome. Under the artistic vision of proprietor/director/actor Russel Blackwood, and musical impresario and original Cockette Scrumbly Koldewyn, a Cockettes genderfuck Renaissance began there. As a style and aesthetic, Steven's brand of bearded drag began to coalesce into a more refined expression of Ritual Theatre, with spirituality and self-inquiry becoming more and more important to the overall vision.

When The Hypnodrome was forced into closure and The Thrillpeddlers officially disbanded, Steven and some of his closest and dearest drag/theater cohorts spun off to form the theatrical darg collective Palace Of Trash, which is now well known in the entire Bay Area for being fiercely politically disruptive, intellectually challenging, boundary-pushing, gender-smashing, and all-around some of the most innovative and sacramental drag performance in continued existence. The troupe will be celebrating its 6the anniversary this December.

Steven is honored and delighted to be delivering a presentation on the Western roots of genderqueerness and drag throughout theatrical history, which is linked directly to the ancient Greek play cycle, and the wine god Dionysus. His Keynote Speech "The Performative Non-Binary: Manifestations of Queerness in Ritual & Theater" is part of the Summit's final morning.