Bartsch-ing Orders

'I am flowing!" exclaims Susanne Bartsch, hidden behind the bathroom door right off an ultra-burgundy boudoir here on the seventh floor of New York's Chelsea Hotel. "I am flowing," she insists, "like a fountain!"

When the door opens, Bartsch, businesswoman and bacchante, makes yet another entrance. This time, however, she is free of all her famed cosmetic extravagance—her wry costumes and awry arrangement of wigs—and stands before me fresh from the shower. Her face is scrubbed clean of all artifice, and her body is wrapped alluringly in a white towel. "I am flowing," she says again, her voice just German enough to be filled with a clipped uniformity, each syllable marching in lockstep to an accent formed 42 years ago in Bern, Switzerland. She points to the back of her leg, where blood, even redder than her bedroom, streams steadily around her ankle. (On the other leg is a knee-to-ankle bruise she got in Paris when she spun off the stage into the orchestra pit during a party.) ''This is the first time I've shaved my legs in ages, and I made a mistake. I should have had one of you do it for me, since you shave your legs much more than I do," she tells the people waiting for her in her living room: a drag diva known as the Baroness—not only a member of the Swiss-and-Swish retinue that Bartsch takes along to her many party events, but also her secretary—and Bartsch's current paramour, 28-year-old gym owner David Barton, who is sprawled on the couch puffing on his first cigarette of the day. Barton, a kind of Eva Brawn, flicks the ashes into an empty Friskies cat-food can and rubs his sleepy eyes. He, Bartsch, and the Baroness each have the afternoon-after dark circles beneath their ever batting lashes that denote membership in ''the Raccoon Chic," that elite band of bohemians who forage in the fashionable late-night remnants of fashion.

Susanne Bartsch herself blasted through the remnants of the 1980s with her good-hearted hegemony of the worldwide club scene: the Copacabana nights in New York, her fashion-week forays in Paris, her Love Ball parties, which raised millions for AIDS patients and will again with Love Ball III in 1994. Bartsch's gender-fucking fun houses are not about anarchy or revolution, but acceptance and celebration. At the height of the kooky Christian era—in both the Lacroix and Jerry Falwell sense—Bartsch arrived to proclaim the end of Nancy Reagan regal righteousness and leaven the rise of head-for-the-Hillarys populism.

"I'm moving on, honey. I'm basically a producer. I just signed a deal with HBO," she tells me later in the day at our photo shoot, as two documentary camera crews (one Swiss and one Spanish) look on. "I'll never give up the clubs, though, because I really like it. I have a message: I like to mix rich and poor, races, young queens, old ladies, uptown, downtown, gay, straight. My whole life is about mixing things. I think I see myself as the ultimate mix, really. I'm the whore, the mother, the wife."

Speaking of mixing gay and straight, I have to ask her about her David Barton relationship. Some people say that the two of them, though they obviously adore each other, practice the safest sex there is—public-relations sex. "People think he's a queen. That's why I thought the bathtub would be really camp. When I first saw him I thought, What a gorgeous man. He's very charismatic."

"So who's the top and who's the bottom?" I ask.

"We mix-and-match, darling. We've christened every comer in the house," Bartsch decrees.

Barton: "We sleep sideways."

"Very good answer," says Bartsch. "We do everything. If it's just one thing, I get bored—and I'm not just talking poozy."

Bartsch and Barton climb into the empty bathtub. She wraps her bruised, bloodied legs around his muscles. They smile for the camera.

KEVIN SESSUMS