Michael Musto writes of drag queen/drag historian/wowlebrity Linda Simpson in today’s New York Times.
“Long before RuPaul’s Drag Race made cross-dressing a televised form of mainstream entertainment,” he says, “there was the drag boom of the 1980s and ’90s, when a burgeoning New York club scene was filled with drag performers who perfected the art form.”
Much of that scene would be forgotten were it not for the drag comic who goes by the stage name Linda Simpson, who captured it all with a point-and-shoot camera she kept in her purse, making her the Studs Terkel of the nip-and-tucking crowd.
Between 1987 and 1996, Ms. Simpson (whose birth name is Leslie and who prefers female pronouns when referring to her drag persona) took some 5,000 photographs of drag performers posing in clubs, on the street and on gay-pride parade floats, unwittingly creating a time capsule of an era when drag queens were the de rigueur jesters and goddesses of the underground.
The photos are alternately carefree and glamorous, with rising stars like RuPaul, Lady Bunny and Sweetie looking sultry for the camera, and Page Potter Reynolds (the transgender subject of Ms. Simpson’s 2013 photo book, Pages) exuding subversive charm in a clown wig.
“I was at the right place at the right time,” says Linda. “As I grew as a drag queen, drag went from an underground art form into a pop cultural phenomenon. I was just photographing people for fun, not with a thought of being a historian,” she said. “But I’m glad I captured a group of people expressing so much personality.”
Linda’s pictures can be seen in her touring exhibit The Drag Explosion. Check out its web page to see if its coming to a club or museum near you.
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