When I first met Sophia Lamar in 2009, I was starstruck—even though I’d never heard of her. A friend brought me to her famous “Beige” dinner, a weekly gathering at B-Bar on Bowery in the East Village, famous for having had guests like Madonna, or even smaller-scale local celebrities like a teenage Sky Ferreira. Everyone from what I would learn to be “the downtown scene” seemed to orbit around this transgender Cuban woman in her late fifties who both loved and detested the gays (she has an impossibly hilarious and catchy song out on Spotify called “Sh***y F****t”). She was as quick to hand you a drink ticket as she was to whip out one of her boobs while sitting at a coke-ridden table in Kenmare, the basement club that reigned supreme at the time. Her “tagline” of sorts was “Sophia Lamar Will Kill You”—sometimes, it felt as if she was crazy enough to actually do so, if you crossed her.

But outside of being a natural comedian and host of New York City’s most glamorous parties, Lamar is a bona fide artiste with as many layers as a Cuban pastelito. 16 years after first meeting her at Beige, I reconnected with my “New York Mother” and friend to discuss fleeing Cuba, the shock of commercialism in America, and how smoking changed nightlife forever.

Mathias Rosenzweig: I remember you telling me that you used to make blush out of brick and water back in Cuba. What else would you do for beauty?

Sophia Lamar: We would use shoe polish as mascara, and it was actually excellent. It was really, really good mascara and easy to take off, too. You just rubbed your fingers and it ran and crumbled, and then you would wash with soap and water. Your lashes would look fantastic. But we did so many things for beauty. To make platform shoes, we put cardboard together and we sandpapered them, and we would paint them black and make a heel out of wood. We’d ask some carpenter to do a wooden heel. And voila, you have platform shoes.

Mathias Rosenzweig: It must have been a strange experience to come from a very communist country to the most capitalist country.

Sophia Lamar: I never saw an ATM machine before in my life because I was coming from the Third World and a communist country, so it was a double shock. It’s not about poor and rich, because in any country in the world, there are poor and rich people. You can go to a department store in Haiti because they have everything for the rich people who live there.

But when you live in Cuba, it’s like equal poverty. Only the minority of people who own the power had the power to travel anywhere, to go abroad and buy things.

Mathias Rosenzweig: Did you always plan to be an actor when you came to the States?

Sophia Lamar: I had always been involved in art – don’t laugh – but I went for a short period of time to a clown school. I wanted to be a clown. I’m fascinated by clowns.

I always liked acting. I always loved to become somebody else. And when I act, I never care about beauty, or the way I look, or anything like that. I just want to become somebody else. I’ve worked with some people, and they stop every five minutes and want to see how they look and check the lighting and all that. I just want to give you the character. What are you looking for? And I don’t give a shit how I look. I offer the beauty at the premiere, right on the red carpet, but I’m ugly on the screen.

Mathias Rosenzweig: Do you feel that being physically present in New York and involved in its nightlife still plays a role in the art scene, compared with, say, 15 years ago?

Sophia Lamar: I think that nightlife in general is the same play with different actors and different extras. Every three, four, or five years, the casting changes, but it’s the same play. I’ve been out here for a long time, and nothing has changed.

Just two things have really, really changed nightlife, and people actually didn’t know what it was. People thought that it was the bottle service because yeah, the rents went up, and people had to serve bottles to pay the rent the bills.

But I think what really, really changed nightlife is the smoking outside. Smoking outside really breaks the dynamic of a party, because if you have 25 people at a party and 10 are outside smoking, you already have a completely different dynamic than before.

Mathias Rosenzweig: When I moved to New York to go to NYU in 2009, I was able to get a small room in a two-bedroom apartment in the East Village, with my parents’ help. And even back then, it was $1,200, which was a lot for an 18-year-old.

It seems to me that New York has gotten so expensive that artists who want to be singers, and so on, have to work constantly to pay their bills, so they have very little time to work on their art.

Do you feel that New York is still a conducive city for an artist to live?

Sophia Lamar: It’s always going to be a whole new ball game in New York City for artists, even though New York is really expensive and always has been.

The other day, I was thinking, “Oh, before the pandemic, it was better.” And then I was like, “No, Sophia, it was not.” You know, because we always have that tendency to think that five minutes ago was better than right now. And that is not true.

Mathias Rosenzweig: You’ve lived in the same apartment in the West Village, right?

Sophia Lamar: Yeah. And I say, “Well, this is great. From here, I’m going to the penthouse, if I make it big, or I’m going to the oven.” Well, at this pace, I’m close to the oven. I’m going to the oven.

But, you know, New York is a wonderful, wonderful place, but then on the weekend, it’s really horrible to go anywhere, because it’s full of people. I have the luxury to go out any day of the week, so I can enjoy New York and go out on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, any day of the week, and people are having a great time out.

Mathias Rosenzweig: You hang out with a lot of very young people when you’re hosting parties at nightclubs. What’s that like for you?

Sophia Lamar: Young people are shaping the culture. When people dismiss young people, it’s because they feel sexually threatened by them. They’re afraid, so they dismiss them. But when you roll with the young movement and the young people, you know you’re still valid.

You are shaping yourself along with the culture, and you’re adapting with the time and moving on. You’re not thinking, “Oh my God, ten, twenty, thirty, forty, sixty years back it was great.” Yeah, well, so what? It’s over. It was great for you, but you know, people are having a great time
right now.