The Mojo of Music featuring Venus DeMars
In the world of Minnesota punk, few figures command the kind of mythic gravity that Venus DeMars does. The frontwoman of glam-punk trans-band All the Pretty Horses has long blurred the lines between music, fashion, and identity, turning every performance into a declaration of originality. Her story is stitched together through decades of rebellion, artistry, and courage, and is a tale of liberation not only through music but through mojo.
“I thought I would be the coolest looking person there,” Venus remembers of her first bold fashion choice, a mod-inspired outfit she picked from the Sears catalog in the late 1960s. She was a first-grader in Duluth, thrilled to wear green huggers corduroy bell-bottoms, a paisley shirt, and a yellow neckerchief. But the reaction from classmates was swift and cruel. “A friend confided in me that it made me look like a girl,” she says. “So I was getting the social messages pretty young that I shouldn’t be playing with my gender variant approach.” She put the outfit away, only wearing it that one time, but continued to hold onto it and look at it in the dresser.
That moment was an early sting of shame mixed with aesthetic freedom, foreshadowing much of her early life filled with the tension between self-expression and survival. Growing up in conservative northern Minnesota meant suppressing her truest impulses. That early encounter may have buried Venus’ own sense of identity, but the artist inside continued to crawl up.
“It was very clear to me that I needed to adhere to a standard of look, which just served to shove my own sense of self as deep as possible and to be ashamed of it. So I worked really hard to try to fit that masculine role, but it was boring. When I got into the seventies in high school, the hippie movement was going. There were the elephant bell bottoms and torn jeans that I rocked. They were kind of unisex, so I could feel a little bit better, but it was still hard because I couldn't really be myself.”
-Venus DeMars
By the early 80’s, the punk movement gave her a new outlet. Venus embraced it because she thought it was the cure for being trans. She grabbed a razor blade and cut her hair down to a spiky buzz, dyed her hair red, and pierced her own ear to explore gender experimentation inside punk’s aesthetic of defiance. “I thought if I just became punk enough, maybe it would fix me,” she says. “Of course, it didn’t. But it gave me permission to stand out.”
Even in those early years, fashion remained her artistic compass. “Throughout it all, I was very fashion-focused,” Venus says. “It got tangled up with identity struggle, but I was always aware of it. I tried to look cool, to be on the front edge of everything.”
That pursuit of “cool” eventually led to self-discovery. After years of repressing her identity, Venus faced a breaking point. Depression brought her to the brink of suicide. In therapy, she finally encountered the language to describe herself. “The first person I came out to was my therapist,” she says. “He was supportive, but back then being trans was still considered a mental illness, so he couldn’t treat me after that. But he encouraged me to explore on my own.”
She gravitated in an interesting way towards the fetish world in the late 80’s when Venus began living fully as herself. As an adult having just come out, she was countering a trope which was feminine presenting. People were thought of as submissive to be very prissy and embrace the whole girly things. Venus wanted to look cool and look like Catwoman that combined a sexy, cool look but with a sense of power and strength. It gave her a sense of strength that countered what people expected from trans-fem individuals.”
In New York’s 1990s underground, Venus forged her identity as both musician and performance artist. She drew inspiration from Wendy O. Williams of the Plasmatics and from icons like Mrs. Peel and David Bowie. These were figures who embodied power, mystery, and glamour. So when she started performing more and more in New York, she wanted to prove that she was 24-7 trans and not doing drag, like so many others were. That’s when she started wearing the electrical-tape pasties, an homage to Wendy O, but hers shaped like stars. Her fetish-inflected look wasn’t about provocation for its own sake. It was about visibility, authenticity, and reclaiming control. It was important for her to show that it wasn’t a costume. People needed to see she was real.
Onstage, her aesthetic became unmistakable. There was a visual exclamation point that supported her music’s DIY punk spirit. Leather corsets, feathered jackets, and shredded leggings became extensions of her voice and tools of a performance. “It gave me safety,” she admits. “With big heels, I was over six feet tall. People might give me shit, but they also knew I could probably kick their ass if they pushed too far.” For Venus, fashion is another language, a code for survival and transcendence.
“My spouse Lynette really loved to travel. We were early in our marriage and traveled overseas a few times and had to deal with very hostile environments. Instead of reverting to hiding again and being more mad, I just did more makeup, which did not make sense to Lynette. She couldn't understand why I wouldn't just tie my hair back and blend it. No, I just have to be more out there then. My reaction was not to hide, but to push farther and harder. And it was admittedly horribly difficult and terribly distressing, but that was the only path I saw forward. So fashion, that being what you do when you have only your clothing and your makeup and your hair and your presentation, that is what I relied on to push me forward and to give me a foundation.”
-Venus DeMars
Before she led All the Pretty Horses, Venus was an installation artist and filmmaker. Collaborations with artists like Tim Miller and exhibitions at the Walker Art Center deepened her appreciation for performance as total immersion. “Art taught me to think visually,” she says. “When I brought that to music, it changed everything. I wanted every moment on stage to be a visual and emotional experience.”
Venus’s live shows blur the border between concert and ritual. Grinding metal sparks with her angler, she commands the stage like a gothic high priestess. The theatricality, she explains, owes as much to art school and David Bowie as it does to punk. “Watching Bowie during the Ziggy Stardust era was huge for me,” she says. “He made being ‘other’ feel magical.”
Venus’ fuzzy jacket was a spontaneous find while in New York, walking out of a store. She spotted in on an end cap, picked it up and knew she was going to buy it, no matter the price. She was drawn to the drama of the shorter coat and fuzziness. She ended up altering the coat to add fake fur extensions on the hands, which flares down and has been a constant fashion quirk of hers over the years.
She found black leggings at the Minnesota State Fair in the International Market that had slits down the front with little rhinestones on them. Using that first pair as inspiration, Venus continues to buy black leggings and cutting them, making this a continual piece of her stage outfit.
The corset was found at the sex museum in Berlin in the early 2000’s. She added hair ties as bindings across the connectors, altering it in a unique way just for herself.
Venus has always loved cowboy boots, especially with a bit of heel and aggressive pointy toes. Cowboy boots are an interesting gender play because depending how you style them, or how high the heel is, both sexes can wear boots.
Her jewelry and accessories typically are a bit darker, pulling in a more magical vibe with a sense of mortality. For her it goes back to the pagan ways of thinking about where all of our religious and spiritual practices come from and how we try to understand what happens when we die. It is the representation of the human condition that we are linear creatures that go through a degradation of body, and eventually disappear.
Venus has marked up the back of the acoustic neck in white and black tape since the guitar has minimal marks on the frets. It allows her to quickly feel each fret in dark rooms while playing, or looking down and spotting the right spot to place her fingers.
The feathery coat in her second outfit was custom made by a local designer, Melanie Ree back in the early 2000’s. The drama of the sleeves and collar are trademark mojo designs for Venus. While not practical to wear during performances, Venus loves walking on stage with this to call attention and create that curiosity and desire for engagement with the audience.
Venus designed her own cowl of black rooster feather to compliment the jacket, sewing them together.
When Venus would travel to New York, she would go to fetish places to buy stuff. The idea was to find things to wear onstage that nobody else had. This corset specifically is a wasp waist, which doesn’t go over her hips or breasts.
The fishnet tights are a staple piece of her outfits, allowing the regular tear and holes to happen with use. She’ll use safety pins to pull bigger hols together, which leans into the punk rock aesthetic. She heads to dance stores to find higher quality fishnets that hold up longer than typical tights.
Strapped on her arm former dancer and co-manager of the band, Shannon Blowtorch, made two metal arm bands, adding long pheasant feathers to them. Venus wears only one of them, continually repairing and replacing feathers on it. She’ll use the metal grinder on it, creating a visual shower of sparks during a show.
The goth boots were purchased online as she tried to find the most dramatic taller boots. The boots complete an outfit that makes Venus taller, sleek, artful, and empowering.
Decades into her career, Venus remains a symbol of perseverance and authenticity. Touring with Laura Jane Grace in 2014, she witnessed a cultural shift. That was when the national awakening around trans identity really began and Laura didn’t have to prove she was trans, she could just exist. The Obama administration even acknowledged the trans community with a State of the Union address for the first time. Still, the fight for representation continues.
“Visibility is how you make a difference and how people can see beyond the rhetorical tropes that are created for a community when they actually meet individuals. And those individuals are much more complex, much more beyond the tropes, and for the most part do not fit the tropes at all because it changes people, it changes their attitude. Even if you become the one sole exception, it still plants a seed, which eventually I believe will change people ultimately. So that is so important and fashion is all about that.”
-Venus DeMars
Venus DeMars newest single “Even With Scars” is an empowerment song for the trans-community against the unprecedented anti-trans agendas of this new political atmosphere. The video unites the images of trans people, the history of the Stonewall Inn (where pride began in 1969), and a choir of voices repeating “We are, free as the stars, even with scars”. The imagery is a simple ask and dream to be more empathic, kind, and welcoming each other through art, music, and authenticity. It’s also a strong reminder that no matter the politics of our world, the trans-community is not going anywhere.
Her music, meanwhile, has evolved alongside her style. From punk’s sneer to art-rock’s sophistication, Venus has continually reinvented herself without compromise. Whether dressed in a corset and fishnets or cowboy boots and feathers, her fashion remains a living document of resistance and rebirth. From that little kid in Duluth flipping through a Sears catalog to the commanding figure who turns sparks into stardust on stage, Venus has spent a lifetime reclaiming her image.
“I’ve always been about pushing forward,” she says. “Fashion was how I survived and how I finally became myself.”
Check out the links below for ways to follow Venus De Mars and all the things we discussed above.
Venus DeMars website - Instagram - YouTube - Spotify - Laura Jane Grace - Wendy O - The Stonewall Inn
