Selena Mooney wanted her friends to feel beautiful and sexy, because they were. That's how it started.
When Mooney was a photography student at Portland's Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2001, she started making and collecting nude, pinup-style photographs of the tattooed women in her social circle. Inevitably, she ended up creating a website to showcase them. She called it SuicideGirls.
The name comes from Chuck Palahniuk's 1999 novel "Survivor," whose narrator, Tender Branson, fields calls meant for a crisis hotline when the local paper prints his phone number by mistake. "Suicide girls" is what he calls the lonely souls who reach out to him for help. "It's so perfect some nights to hear them in the dark," he says. "The girl will just trust me. The phone in my one hand, I can imagine my other hand is her."
Yep, from the start SuicideGirls was about sex. Not pretty or conventional sex, but also not creepy sex like Tender Branson's phone dalliances. SuicideGirls celebrates raw, real, even silly sex. You can see for yourself on April 23 when its acclaimed "Blackheart Burlesque" lands at Revolution Hall in Portland. (Buy tickets for the show.)
SuicideGirls: Blackheart Burlesque from SuicideGirls on Vimeo.
"The original intent" of the site, Mooney told The Oregonian last week, "was to provide a place for the girls who I thought were the most beautiful in the world who didn't fit the normal image of what beautiful could be -- girls with piercings and tattoos and [attitude]. A place where they could be appreciated for themselves."
The pinup photography website, which Mooney founded with Sean Suhl, quickly became an alt-culture social platform and then an internet phenomenon. In the years that followed, the brand branched out to include not just live performances but also DVDs, CDs and a movie. Mooney published a collection of her original SuicideGirls photos in 2004; the most recent SG photography book is "Hard Girls, Soft Light."
Missy Suicide
The company is now based in Los Angeles, but it could only have started in Portland, says Mooney, a graduate of Beaverton's Arts and Communications High School who goes by the professional nom de plume Missy Suicide.
"I don't think SuicideGirls could have been born anywhere else," she said. "Portland had the sensibility: individualism, confidence in being different, openness to sexuality and your body.
"There's sort of the Nike side of Portland and the Gus Van Sant side," she added. "I definitely gravitated toward the Gus Van Sant side. Portland is a great place to raise a rebel girl. I feel very lucky to have grown up in Portland."
Portland has changed in the dozen years since Mooney became Missy Suicide and relocated to LA to be close to SuicideGirls' distributor, label and publisher. But she's heartened that the whimsical, down-and-dirty, be-yourself vibe continues to thrive in her hometown. She still thinks about the places that helped define her 20-something existence in the city and launched her life's work. "Anna Bannanas was my coffee shop of choice," she said. "I loved Montage for late night. Zell's for breakfast. Bar of the Gods. The Matador. Cinema 21."
So these are good places to meet SuicideGirls? Well, sure, but that's if you have time on your hands. If you want to be sure of running into a woman who's on Missy Suicide's site, head over to the Rose City's iconic strip joint. "You have to go to Mary's Club," Mooney said. "And the little burrito place behind there. Definitely. And Old Town Pizza. You gotta go to Voodoo Doughnut. Powell's is a great place for a SuicideGirl."
And if you don't find a real live SuicideGirl at the city's premier bookstore, you can at least read about her there.
-- Douglas Perry