Rebels with a religious cause: Meet New York’s avant-garde conservatives
Salomé slides her svelte figure through a cracked-open double door near the front of the dark sanctuary.
Click clack. It’s the first moment of the vigil of Easter at Church of the Most Holy Redeemer in Manhattan’s East Village. Worshippers at this historic Catholic church can only hear her stiletto heels, faint and staccato, as she walks to its organ.
She steps carefully up the old stone steps to the console, flicking on a reading light that illuminates her sharp features. As more parishioners walk in, she begins to play a mournful introduction, marking the last moments of Lent in what is now a quiet cacophony of footsteps.
This is the organist’s sixth gig in four days during Holy Week, which she says is “kind of fashion week for Catholics.” A classically trained musician, she is also an artist and model. Earlier this year at an uptown literary ball, she walked a runway for Elena Velez, a well-known designer who’s been called the enfant terrible of the fashion world, modeling her controversial “Gone With the Wind”-inspired clothing line during the actual New York Fashion Week.
The church is tucked into a street of 19th-century tenements between Avenues A and B in the East Village, a neighborhood that once embodied New York’s bohemian clichés. Right next to it is Graveyard NYC, a heavy-metal tattoo parlor. A few blocks away, the legendary CBGB nightclub, shuttered in 2006, was one of the birthplaces of punk. In 1990, local artists and musicians staged a legendary Resist 2 Exist festival in nearby Tompkins Square, then a drug market and homeless tent city, sparking a near riot when police shut it down.
The neighborhood may have long since gentrified, but Salomé, her confirmation name-turned-celebrity mononym, has been part of a new cadre of young New York artists who have been raging against a different cause: the cultural rot and decadence brought about by “libtards.”
“Leftists see greatness, and they see beauty, and they’re threatened by it, and they want to destroy it,” says Salomé, who says the Tridentine Mass is “the greatest work of art” for its superior musical composition.
Originally from Philadelphia, Salomé has been a devout Catholic since she was young. She wears a “Make America Great Again” hat
