Legends of Drag

Hanson Harry James Hanson

Description

A tribute to the groundbreaking drag icons who helped pave the way for the queens of today Drag has officially transcended the underground and exploded into the mainstream. Queens have more visibility than ever, and it's been hard won through decades of perseverance, imagination, and intergenerational support within local drag communities. It's time to honor the queens who paved the way for the new generation of drag and are still carrying out their work today. To create Legends of Drag, a photo book and archive of living drag history, authors Harry James Hanson and Devin Antheus traveled coast to coast, visiting 16 cities to meet 80 legendary entertainers who shared boundless wisdom and powerful anecdotes from their lives. These queens are featured in stunning portraits shot on location and styled with unique floral elements.

Informations

• Publié par: ABRAMS BOOKS
• Date de parution: 21 juin 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781647005085
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

Map of Contents
Prelude by Miss J Alexander
Foreword by Sasha Velour
Introduction
SAN FRANCISCO
Phatima Rude
Joan Jett Blakk
Carla Gay
Renita Valdez
Collette LeGrande
Olivia Hart
Glamamore
Juanita More
Mutha Chucka
Tita Aida
BeBe Sweetbriar
Sister Roma
Mrs. Vera Newman
Donna Personna
Rumi Missabu
PORTLAND, OR
Darcelle XV
Poison Waters
LOS ANGELES
Lady Red Couture
Dolly Levi
Maximilliana
Krystal Delite
The Goddess Bunny
Glen Alen
Momma
The Fabulous Wonder Twins
Vancie Vega
Fontasia L Amour
Gypsy
Love Connie
Psycadella Facade
Sir Lady Java
LAS VEGAS
Hot Chocolate
Crystal Woods
DuWanna Moore
Lawanda Jackson
TEXAS
Tasha Kohl
Dina Jacobs
Kitty Litter
MILWAUKEE
Karen Valentine
BJ Daniels
Shannon Dupree
The Sugarbaker Twins
Ruthie Keester
Christina Chase
CHICAGO
Chilli Pepper
Maya Douglas
JoJo Baby
Capucine Deveroux
Honey West
NORTH CAROLINA
Ebony Addams
Dana St. James
Kelly Ray
ATLANTA
Tina Devore
Shawnna Brooks
NEW ORLEANS
Regina Adams
Teryl Lynn Foxx
Vanessa Carr Kennedy
Moanalot Fontaine
Agnes de Garron
MIAMI
Adora
Kitty Meow
FORT LAUDERDALE
Charity Charles
China
Sharde Ross
Nikki Adams
Electra
NEW YORK CITY
Egyptt LaBeija
Linda Simpson
Harmonica Sunbeam
Princess Diandra
Perfidia
Flotilla DeBarge
Coco LaChine
Panzi
Barbra Herr
Pickles
Ruby Rims
Witti Repartee
Simone
Chronology
Special Thanks
Prelude
Miss J Alexander
While simple enough to define-a form of entertainment in which performers wear elaborate costumes and transgress gender expectations-drag poses a much more slippery question: Why? What purpose does the act of transformation serve?
A singular answer eludes us: some get in drag for fun and fantasy, while others reveal their authentic selves. Drag can be performed privately, or in outrageous public displays. Drag serves delicacy and severity, glamour and horror, butch and femme-sometimes all these at once, other times somewhere in between.
My drag has always been rooted in fashion. Growing up in the Bronx in the 1960s, I taught myself to sew at a young age. Being the naturally creative and gifted Black boss that I am, I was sewing my first looks by the age of twelve. It s an intuitive process; I don t overthink it. Some of us are gay, and some of us are gayer than gay. I never had time to think about the implications, I just did the damn thing. If this life chooses you, baby don t hold back.
When I look through these bold and beautiful portraits of our community s drag elders, I am in awe at the lives these souls have lived and touched. To not just survive but thrive in a world that wasn t built for us requires a truly unfathomable degree of strength and wisdom. Which is to say nothing of the enormous amount of fun they must have had throughout it all, breaking boundaries while claiming their individuality and identity.
The children need to hear these stories; the power is theirs to inherit. From William Dorsey Swann to the Lady Chablis, and the millions of drag queens, kings, and gender nonbinary royalty who have performed, rebelled, and created-we are beautiful and infinite.
Foreword
Sasha Velour
We should call ourselves drag queens with pride. It s a name that connects us to a glorious legacy of gender transgression that spans hundreds of years! Even before I learned how to paint a cateye, I aspired to be a researcher of the long queer history of drag. It is a history that is largely unknown and misunderstood-but it attests to the undeniable existence of queer people throughout time and our enduring belief that we deserve to live authentic lives that are full of joy, even in the face of direct oppression.
It was this radical history that inspired me to become a drag queen myself. I honestly liked the feeling that there was nothing I could do in drag that hadn t already been done. We don t need to worry about being innovators in drag, instead we can stay true to the enduring spirit that s already there and channel the power of this legacy for the present and future.
Connecting with history is priceless, and the best way to do so is by hearing stories from people who ve lived it. This is especially true for drag, where traditional archives and histories left us out. Perhaps we have no choice but to learn our legends through storytelling. Folk traditions appeal to us because they remind us that queer people function like a large family, bonded not by blood, but by shared sensibility and the choice for liberation. Like in any family, we may not agree on everything, but we still need our elders to help us understand where we came from.
When I first came to Brooklyn in 2015, I was surprised to see such a young drag scene. Growing up in small towns, I was used to seeing older people living big queer lives and presiding over drag at local bars. In bigger cities, I learned, nightlife culture is often more disconnected from previous generations. The legends are still around-but sometimes you must seek them out yourself and pay them their dues!
In early 2018, my young career bolstered by a surreal Drag Race win, I was back at work in Brooklyn putting on shows and brainstorming articles for the fourth issue of Velour: The Drag Magazine . It was then that I received, quite simply, a perfect pitch from Harry James Hanson (a fellow queen from the Brooklyn scene). Harry wrote, I m particularly interested in pursuing a photo essay/interview(s) that address the [lack of] intergenerational exchange within the drag community. YES! With a small budget, mostly for flowers, I happily gave them the OK. Three months later, Harry flew to California to create the first images for The Legends of San Francisco with Devin Antheus.
Phatima Rude, Renita Valdez, Carla Gay, and Mutha Chucka all agreed to be subjects and posed for the first four portraits and interviews. When I first read the accompanying text, it sent a shiver of recognition down my spine. Each [photo] offered another lens into a lifestyle, a scene, a neighborhood, and a city thoroughly enchanted by spirits of place, Harry and Devin wrote. Phatima described recognizing the spirits of long-dead queens in the very specific affects and aesthetic choices of kids who d moved to the city a decade after their ancestors of style had passed. Generation after generation, we are connected to each other, even if we don t realize or acknowledge it. Phatima herself is no longer with us, but I still imagine her haunting all of us with anthuriums, arched brows, and smeared fuchsia lipstick.
The fourth issue of the magazine unfortunately never materialized, but the photos were published in Vogue the next year, to an audience FAR larger than Velour magazine! Everything happens for a reason, and it makes me happy to know that Phatima got a chance to see herself called legendary and beautiful in Vogue before the end of her life. From there, the project continued to expand and transform into the book you are holding now.
Drag is once again finding its way back into the cultural mainstream. Today, there are drag performers whose names are known all over the world. It s not the first time this has happened, of course-in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Du-Val, Barbette, Mei Lanfang, Divine, and Sylvester all grew to be world famous. But perhaps the question now is: do we have the privilege to be seen as part of a vital cultural legacy and tradition, or are we always going to be written off as a little bit of color, just for fun?
The seventy-nine portraits on these pages are the perfect example of how we use beauty to create lasting space and value for ourselves. Through our looks and images, we assert proud difference into the world, and by putting it in books like this, we leave a lasting mark, a clue for future generations. Our stories, our living legends, are vital. The faces in this book are just a small fragment of our radical past. Our legendary elders and ancestors fought for us and helped shape the very possibilities for our existence, our genders, our beauty, and our joy that we continue to explore. Their stories are the key to recognizing who we are and how we fit in to the big queer world out there.
Introduction
The night of the winter solstice 2017, we decided to go to church. For the uninitiated, church in the queer world often means drag show. Harry, visiting Devin in San Francisco, wanted to see the local performers for the first time, so we dropped into Aunt Charlie s, a landmark of the Tenderloin neighborhood. Known for being irreverent, political, and unapologetically weird, SF drag revealed a more corporeal quality that evening: the median cast age of sixty. At the time, we knew few performers outside our own millennial generation, yet here was an entire ensemble of drag legends giving the children a run for their money.
These queens of a certain age possess an inimitable mastery of the art but often remain unsung heroines in an increasingly youth-focused drag culture. That night, we realized this was a deep well, filled with important stories. Everything happened quickly since then.
We followed the thread and, guided by the ancestors, found ourselves tracing an underworld comprised of dive bars and nightclubs, communes and punk houses. A subversive tradition emerged, tied up in the wandering history of what has come to be called drag. It s become a common understanding that queens-especially the most marginalized-were on the front lines of the riots that kicked off the gay liberation movement. We forget, however, that these fiery moments in history exist within a constellation of subversion going back millennia. 1
Despite an array of persecution, ritual cross-dressing persists in bacchanals and carnivals whenever people meet to celebrate resilience and seek a shared freedom. During the Third Reich, queens like Denis Rake used their background in cross-d