Bailey’s first photo set, a slide show of thematically related striptease images, went live on May 20, 2002. The series was a 30-part sequence of her crawling around on a couch “when sets on couches weren’t boring,” getting nude except for a red tie and pulling Guns N’ Roses’s Appetite for Destruction on vinyl out of a crate. “It was a weird experience. I just remember being really cold.” A second set, titled “Thief,” got posted the following November. In that one, Bailey, in pink eye shadow and dressed in black (like a lady cat burglar), prowled around an empty apartment, rolled around in a bed, and wiped a bracelet she swiped from her roommate across her nether regions. For the shoot, Bailey and her photographer friend actually did bust into a vacationing neighbor’s place. “If you want to do a set called ‘Thief,’ you’ve definitely got to break in somewhere,” Bailey reasons, adding that they had still never confessed to the occupant that she’d “rubbed her ass all over her pillowcases.”
Tales like this are what’s made Bailey Maxwell a punk-porn mythical creature among her Boston heirs — that and her legendary habit of biting people. “I would leave welts on people. I’m not exactly sure what that was about, but it was something I did.” Or her tough-girl reputation earned by getting kicked out of ManRay (that only happened once) and pounding a greedy dude in the face. The latter occurred when the first “SuicideGirls Live” burlesque tour hit the Middle East Downstairs and an audience member tried to grab money out of the tip jar in her hands. “It was just my instinct: I jumped off the stage and punched him in the face and choked him. And he was like, ‘Here, have your money back.’ ” She eventually got so popular on the site that people started asking her to autograph the SuicideGirlscoffee-table book, even though she turned down the opportunity to be included in it because she was a preschool teacher at the time. But instead of scribbling her Jane Hancock for fans, she’d rip out a random page and run away. “I’m like, ‘Why do you want my autograph? I don’t do anything. I stand there and take my clothes off and smile.’ ”
In a big way, this nude online character was a chance to actualize her id. “Bailey is clearly my alter ego. It’s kind of who I wanted to be a few years ago, and I’m becoming that person more and more.” Thus, Bailey is a creation, one that she finds herself having to live up to when she hangs out with the younger SuicideGirls. “Now there’s this role I’m expected to play. There’s this person I’m supposed to be, these things I’m expected to say when I’m out with everybody. I’m expected to be wild and crazy.” And so for the past couple years, she’s been somewhat elusive, which has helped inflate her persona into an even bigger legend. “I’ve definitely been at the mall and had people be like, ‘Look! It’s a SuicideGirl!’ And I’m like, ‘Ahhhhh,’ and I’d run into a store.”
