KRAXIMO

Text by Danny Calvi
Photography by Paola Revenioti

Summer lovers...

BUTT loves an archive, especially when it features the life’s work of publisher slash transvestite prostitute Paola Revenioti. For the legendary photographer’s first solo exhibition, curator Andreas Angelidakis has carefully selected and displayed some of the juiciest bits from her documentation of the Athenian underworld, including several issues of her politically-charged magazine, Kraximo.

Revenioti began publishing her trans-anarchist fanzine under the name Kraximo, Greek for ‘gay bashing’, in the early ’80s. The pink ‘maga-paper’, as Paola called it, was ‘funded by blowjobs’, and donations from the Greek intelligentsia. Back then, publishing an interview with Félix Guattari alongside little chats with rough trade and street walkers was unheard of — it still is for the most part.

Andreas discovered Kraximo as a teenager and attended pride parties organized by Revenioti in the early ’90s. Back when the first Greek pride festivals we’re staged in cruise parks. What else made Paola’s outings so special? Andreas says: ‘The crowd was a mix of queers, trannies, punks and anarchists — sexy and political at the same time’.

One of Paola's drop-dead gorgeous models

 

Gender bending punk from the '80s

Hustler in a clipping from Kraximo...
Translation: 'It's tiring to take a rest'.

Early editions of Kraximo
had a cover price of just 100 drachma...
That would be like 25 euro cents today.