Exhibit recalls the ‘sleazy goodness’ behind the East Village’s drag history

“She doesn’t simply mouth the words, she rides a song like a cowboy rides a bronco,” Fleisher would later write of Mona Foot, known out of drag as Nashom Wooden, in his groundbreaking book “The Drag Queens of New York: An Illustrated Field Guide,” published by Riverhead five years later in 1996. “She penetrates it. bends it to her will.” Mona, who appeared in the 1999 movie Flawless, tragically died of COVID in 2020.

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Long before the days of RuPaul’s Drag Race, the East Village drag of the mid-90s, which centered around the queer nightlife venues Boy Bar (both since shuttered), was, in Fleisher’s recollection, “chaotic.” 

“It was ridiculous, it was unplanned, it was anarchic,” made up of “a bunch of extremely creative, driven, hilarious, often arty people,” he recalled to Gay City News. Unlike today, he said, “there was no central ruling authority.”  

In his book, cheekily written in the style of a birding field guide, Fleisher — a singer, songwriter, producer, actor and writer — had just moved into his East Village apartment, where has lived ever since, and set out to immortalize the world he saw unfolding before his eyes. His book combines a thorough analysis of the history of drag with profiles of 28 prominent queens, including the likes of Mona Foot, Lady Bunny, Lypsinka, Sherry Vine, and Joey Arias.

Now, 30 years later, an exhibit at the Lower East Side gallery and archive Howl! Arts is bringing the book, long out of print — and the legacy of its queens — back into focus, sharing its brilliance with a new audience. The show features large black-and-white photos of the legendary performers, including prints of original negatives and spreads from the book, with never-before-seen archival materials that would take days to fully digest. They include handwritten notes and the surveys Fleisher requested the queens to complete, videos, and hours of digitized audio from interviews with the drag queens themselves and influential figures like bell hooks, Fran Lebowitz, and Sandra Bernhard. The interviews, recorded anywhere from Yaffa Cafe to Fleisher’s own apartment, reveal an intimate portrait of their personal and professional lives: They’ll tell you about how Lypsinka performed for the ranks of his “adoring family” as a child, or how Mona Foot, inspired by her mother’s aesthetic, had a fascination for superheroes, secret agents, and anything futuristic. 

The book’s profiles provide an overview of each queen’s backstory while also following the ornithological theme, ranking their “plumage” on a scale of “glamorous” to “clown” (Lady Bunny falls smack in the middle, while Lypsinka is decidedly more glamorous), and revealing if and how often they tuck. Like a coda to the original work, underneath each queen’s image is a short blurb, written in their own words, describing where life has taken them, procured at the suggestion of the show’s co-curator and Howl! librarian Aldo Hernández.

“There was a certain sensibility that reigned: campy, goofy and bohemian,” Linda Simpson, one of the many talented drag queens featured in the book, told Gay City News, describing the seven-year period from the late 1980s to the mid-90s when drag began its evolution into a “mainstream sensation.” 

At a time when a lot of the articles about drag queens sensationalized them, Fleisher’s “was more respectful, got the humor, got the insights,” Simpson said. 

Fleisher remembers the Pyramid Club of the ’90s as a nondescript “big old wooden bar.” Through its doors, there was a room for dancing, with a small stage with a lighting system at the end, similar to the “adult version of a summer camp theater — kind of raw and dumpy.” Something similar could be said of Boy Bar, which had a downstairs lounge for cruising. No bright colors, no sequins.  

Yet it was the quotidan, mundane appearance of these spaces on the surface that made their spotlights shine all the brighter.

“It was the people that turned them into magic,” Fleisher said. “The DIY-ness of it is part of why it was fun.”  

Simpson, who now hosts drag bingo at Nordstrom, first stepped into these spaces as an observer, watching the likes of Lady Bunny, Happy Face and Taboo! Soon after, she ventured into drag herself, stepping into the Pyramid’s dressing room, a hotspot for socializing. Most of the queens lived downtown, leading them to form a close-knit community in and out of the clubs, she explained. Many of them were also employed as gogo dancers, so it wasn’t uncommon to come across “a wall of drag queens on the bar shaking their stuff.”  

Simpson has played an important role in preserving drag history herself, publishing her own nightlife images in her recent book My Comrade included “rough-hewn stories of urban gay life and poorly reproduced, unretouched centerfolds of fleshy East Village boys in well-worn underpants,” Fleisher wrote at the time, along with “camp variations on a glam-rock theme and profiles of still-unknown drag queens.” 

What made that time so special to Fleisher, in an age before the internet, was the ephemeralness of it all. 

“Their lunacy was bespoke. It happened in that room on that night for that audience, and that was it,” he explained. “And that feeling that this is for nobody else but us is a very special feeling.” 

“It was unmoored and untamed,” he recalls. Not least because, unlike in today’s drag institutions, “there was no panel of judges.” The goal was to critique wealth, power and success, rather than reach for them. 

It also took place during a period, at the height of the AIDS crisis, when the LGBTQ community was persevering through tremendous loss and adversity. Looking back on his own writing, Fleisher realizes that while it wasn’t often explicitly discussed, it was inescapably there, almost as if drag were “the entertainment portion of the AIDS crisis.” 

“There was a need for escapism, so people partied a lot because there was this doom and gloom all the time,” Simpson added. 

Through his book, Fleisher’s goal was to create a portal between the drag world and the ‘real’ world. He describes his ideal reader as “some straight dude” who he imagines “walking through the East Village, and in their hand is a subway map, a cup of coffee and a field guide.” 

There were moments when those worlds collided, like when Fleisher received a three-page-long lawyer letter prior to publication, asking him to justify claims that, to him and practically anyone in the queer New York scene, would have been given facts, but appeared to a legal mind to be potentially actionable — such as confirmation that The Anvil was a sex club, a reference to Joey Arias “fellating the microphone in the middle of the act,” and other questions perhaps not fit for print. 

“East Village drag in the ’90s, with all of its grit and its weird, poorly lit, drugaddled, sleazy goodness — it was hard not to love it,” Fleisher reflected. 

The “Drag Queens of New York” exhibit is on display at Howl! Arts / Howl! Archive, 250 Bowery second floor in Manhattan, through Nov. 30.