[00:16] Meg: Welcome to Desperately Seeking the'80s. I am Meg.

[00:19] Jessica: And I'm Jessica. And Meg and I have been friends since 1982. We got through middle school and high school together here in New York City where we still live.

[00:30] Meg: And where we podcast about New York City in the '80s. I do ripped from the headlines

[00:35] Jessica: And I do pop culture.

[00:37] Meg: So, Jessica, last week we did our first live recording at the amazing Malt & Mold. What an adventure.

[00:44] Jessica: That was so much fun. I had no idea what to expect. We can even start with my epic insanity, which is that I showed up without any of our recording equipment and you didn't kill me.

[00:58] Meg: I didn't.

[01:00] Jessica: I locked eyes with you when I showed up, and I had this profound lack of understanding. I just looked at you with you had, like, death rays coming out of your face, and I was scared. What? Oh no.

[01:15] Meg: I was like, does the roadie, who we don't have, have all the equipment?

[01:20] Jessica: In my brain, yes that's right.

[01:23] Meg: So we jumped in an Uber and went all the way uptown again to Jessica's place and got all the equipment and then came back. And do you remember the name of our amazing Uber driver?

[01:34] Jessica: Jordy.

[01:35] Meg: Jordy. He was so supportive. He was so sweet.

[01:40] Jessica: Jordy was like the Uber angel.

[01:43] Meg: And then we were just, like, 20 minutes late getting started, and everyone was fine because they were getting their beers and their cheese, and it was fine.

[01:51] Jessica: The takeaway, as far as I'm concerned, is it's good to be on time, but people are very forgiving, and it was our first time doing it ever.

[02:00] Meg: First time doing it. And the sound quality was great. The only thing that I am sad about is that we didn't hear more of our audience. So next time I can bring our remote recorder and we can get some room tone.

[02:14] Jessica: We had a very lively audience.

[02:15] Meg: We had a really lively audience. And you can't really tell from the recording because our mics are so sensitive to us and not to other people. It's very interesting.

[02:24] Jessica: It's like they were made just for us and our little egos.

[02:29] Meg: Do you want to get started?

[02:31] Jessica: Oh, please. Okay. Yes, I do. Meg, before we begin, we have a note from a BFF of the podcast. Our friend Nick. Who, like some of the other wonderful men who listen to our podcast, cannot contain himself from correcting us. And I'm open to corrections because I know that I am frequently, I won't say poorly researched. It's just a bit sketchy.

[03:12] Meg: I like the discourse. I approve of the back and forth, for sure.

[03:16] Jessica: Well, I like that he begins like this. Hello. Fabulous episode. Wonderful way to start. What more can we ask for? He says, I am so sorry that I could not be there. He was not at Malt & Mold. He says, Mr. Pedantic strikes again. That's great self knowledge. The first building granted landmark status in New York City in 1965 was the 300 year old The Wyckoff House in Brooklyn. In fact, the first group of buildings landmarked that day, which became the very first landmarks in Manhattan, were the Merchant's House Museum, the Stuyvesant Fish House, and the remaining houses of Colonnade Row/LaGrange Terrace at 428, 430, 432 and 434 Lafayette Street, which isn't that The Public Theater.

[04:10] Meg: Everything is in the same neighborhood. The Merchant's House Museum, The Public Theater.

[04:15] Jessica: I thought that the Colonnade. Lafayette street. I thought that Colonnade Row. Anyway, then he says the former Astor Library/Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, now, The Public Theater was designated a landmark later in 1965, while the Salmagundi Club was not landmarked until 1969 and he even includes a press clipping from thevillagepreservation.org or sorry, villagepreservation.org. He goes on to say, the Merchant's House Museum was the first Manhattan building designated.

[04:51] Meg: Now we know.

[04:52] Jessica: Now we know. And as a quick plug for the Merchant's House Museum, you can visit the Merchant's House. And it is quite something. And because of Nick's involvement with the Merchant's House Museum, I had the great and good fortune of attending a seance there.

[05:09] Meg: Okay. My very good friend Dan is actually a ghost hunter, and he has done a tour of ghosts in the Merchant's House Museum.

[05:21] Jessica: Has he turned anything up?

[05:23] Meg: You know, I haven't gone on the tour so I don't. I assume so. Otherwise, why would he continue to do?

[05:29] Jessica: Is he a ghost hunter or a ghost of New York tour guide?

[05:34] Meg: I think he hunts them. I don't think he means them harm, but I think he definitely wants to find some.

[05:38] Jessica: And does he want to put them in, like, a contraption, like, ghostbusters?

[05:44] Meg: I should probably follow up before I talk too much more about it.

[05:46] Jessica: Think we need him on the show.

[05:49] Meg: Oh completely! The second I heard Merchant's House Museum, I was like, we got to get Dan.

[05:52] Jessica: Oh, my gosh. Love it.

[05:53] Meg: All right, are you ready for my engagement question?

[05:56] Jessica: Yes.

[05:57] Meg: All right. When we were little, wonderful to go on field trips from school.

[06:02] Jessica: Field trip.

[06:03] Meg: Do you have some of your favorite field trips? Do you remember? I mean, there were ones that we did regularly. We would go to The Metropolitan Museum of Art regularly. We went to the Museum of the City of New York. I remember that was kind of a regular one.

[06:17] Jessica: Yes, I actually I remember going to the Museum of the City of New York, and I remember there was some Indigenous People of the Americas display that was not called that at the time and we even had a little discussion about it way back in the '80s.

[06:35] Meg: Interesting. The American Museum of Natural History has to do a lot of, they have new plaques.

[06:40] Jessica: Oh, do they?

[06:41] Meg: Yes, they do. For the Dioramas.

[06:45] Jessica: That seems quite right. Yeah, the Dioramas were scandalous.

[06:50] Meg: By today's standards absolutely.

[06:50] Jessica: Yeah. Well, just putting someone from a different culture in a glass case, like they were a puma or an elephant, not good. Favorite field trip. I really liked going to London for our glee club field trip.

[07:11] Meg: Which I was not at.

[07:14] Jessica: For the Glee Club field trip that you did not attend. We also went to DC. That was fun. That was really fun.

[07:20] Meg: And we met with Geraldine Ferraro.

[07:22] Jessica: We did. Oh, my gosh. You've got a good memory.

[07:24] Meg: I know. '80s reference much.

[07:26] Jessica: Nice. And as a child we would just go around New York, like to the aquarium or some kind of day trip. But yeah, there was fun.

[07:39] Meg: Cool. I think you will, it's going to come up at the very end of this story, but you will know why I asked that question. My sources are The Guardian, The New York Times, The New Yorker and the documentary that has recently come out called All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.

[07:57] Jessica: You must have dropped dead with joy when you heard that title.

[08:03] Meg: In the winter of 1986, Nan Goldin's slideshow, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, was published as a book by Mark Holborn, an editor at the Aperture Foundation, filled with photos of friends in their most private moments. The raw and intensely personal project had evolved over the last seven years. Its publication was not exactly a seal of approval from the exclusive, male dominated art world, but it certainly showed that some gatekeepers were ready to allow access to a new vision. Nan had a loft on the Bowery and tended bar at Tin Pan Alley on 49th Street in Times Square. She took photographs of the people she hung out with, drag queens and drug addicts and sex workers, people on the fringe, people who had come to New York because it had space for weirdos. The slideshow started as a way to entertain her friends. She played it to music in bars and clubs and performance spaces in Tribeca in the East Village. And people would shout back to the screen, either because they loved or hated a picture or were just excited to see their lives projected. The soundtrack at first was The Velvet Underground or James Brown or Nina Simone and then people started sending her music. She would change the slideshow based on her mood. It was never the same. It evolved. And of course, she kept taking more pictures. There was nothing off limits. The photos showed people doing drugs and having sex and fighting and sleeping and being sad in dark bars and hotel rooms and apartments. At one point, she had a series of photos of her friend having sex. Her friend got pretty upset, so Nan replaced them with photos of herself having sex. The goal wasn't to expose people against their wishes or to catch them in an unseemly moment. She looked for honesty. She wanted to show the drag queens as they wanted to be seen, as beautiful. Quote, "I'm not crashing. This is my party. This is my family, my history." As the slideshow became more popular, Nan got a lot of shit. The art world did not consider her work art. She was dismissed by male artists and gallerists. Someone actually told her, quote, "There is no such thing as a good woman artist." And that sounds so crazy. Who would ever say something? But I remember hearing things like that. That used to happen.

[10:39] Jessica: Well that's like women can't be funny.

[10:43] Meg: Right. Exactly. And even for those who didn't articulate their beliefs so bluntly as that, there was a presumption that women could not be voyeurs. My father once said to me that women couldn't play guitar because a guitar is an extension of a penis.

[11:02] Jessica: Well, that's not unlike Joan Jett's experience with her first and only guitar lesson. Did you ever hear that story?

[11:08] Meg: No.

[11:08] Jessica: She went to some school, I don't know what it was, but she went to have a guitar lesson. She already had a guitar and was sort of trying to pick it up. And she had a male guitar teacher who said that she had real potential. But don't bother trying to be a rock player, not a rock star, a player of rock and roll music because women just don't do that. And she was like, may I introduce you to The Runaways later on? But the idea yeah, a woman cannot touch something that is associated with maleness unless she is required to or invited to.

[11:59] Meg: Okay, so this is all from the perspective of being a visual artist. And so the idea that a woman can't be a voyeur because women are supposed to be looked at, they're not supposed to be the ones who are doing the looking.

[12:13] Jessica: Is it also because if a woman is a voyeur, that means that she is in spaces where she's not supposed to be?

[12:19] Meg: I think it's actually like I don't want to see what she sees. I don't give a fuck. Fortunately, Nan had a thick skin. Quote "I didn't care about good photography. I cared about complete honesty." And I'll tell you a little bit about her background. She'd grown up in a painfully conventional home in Maryland. Her parents didn't like each other very much, favored their sons, and were terrified of their smart, rebellious daughters. Her older sister Barbara fought with her parents and was sent to a mental institution. Ultimately, she committed suicide at 18 by lying down on the railroad tracks outside Union Station.

[12:59] Jessica: Oh my God.

[13:00] Meg: Nan was twelve.

[13:02] Jessica: Oh my God.

[13:03] Meg: Her parents response to the suicide? Move to a new town and never mention it again. This scarred Nan for life and made her hell bent on breaking free from that repression. And incidentally, there are many photos of couples in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, including her parents. Interesting. So in 1984, in small clubs around the city, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency was picking up steam. The art world didn't embrace her work, but they were pissed off by it, which helped its popularity with the counterculture. Nan had an opportunity to show it in a loft in Berlin. Now for the last three years, she'd been living with a man named Brian, who she'd met while bartending at Tin Pan Alley. He was an office worker and an ex-Marine. On their first date, Nan asked him to get her some heroin, which she was snorting at the time and he did, and they fell into each other through drugs and sex, and he became a subject of many of her photos. Their relationship was tumultuous and unhealthy, and they often tried to break up, but always came back to each other. Nan had been in Berlin showing her slideshow for a bit before Brian came to meet her there. When he found out she had cheated on him with a woman, he lost his shit and beat Nan to a pulp. He focused all of his rage specifically on her eyes. Her friend Sylvie managed to drag her out of the hotel room and get her to a hospital, saving her life. Brian left back in the room, trashed the place. He wrote bitch and cunt and lipstick on the walls and burned her diaries. Fortunately, she had left the slideshow at the loft where she was showing it, otherwise he would have destroyed that, too. All the bones in her orbital floor were broken, and she almost lost one of her eyes. It took months to recover, and she took photos of it. She says the photos of her battered face kept her from returning to him, and those photos became part of the slideshow. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency was part of the 1985 Whitney Biennial, and for those who don't know, the Whitney Biennial is a biennial exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art for up and coming artists, and it's known for setting trends and making careers. So it was a pretty big deal. A year later, when the Aperture Foundation wanted to publish The Ballad of Sexual Dependency as a book Nan wanted to include her family story in the text of the book. I mean, it's really her origin story. And her father tried to stop the publication of the book, accusing her of blaming him and her mother for her sister's suicide. And Brian tried to stop the publication, too for obvious reasons. Nan was indefatigable and the book was published, and the rest is art history. Photography curator Susan Bright says, quote "one only has to teach a class of undergraduate photography students to realize her influence. She gave legitimacy to snapshot style or diaristic. I would go so far as to say her work has come to represent an entire style" and now she has a huge influence in the art world. Case in point Nan had an operation in 2014 and was prescribed OxyContin as a painkiller. She took it as prescribed and became addicted when, by the grace of God, she managed to pull herself out of the addiction three years later, she realized that the Sackler family this is a quote "the Sackler family, whose name I knew from museums and galleries were responsible for the epidemic." A little background. The Sackler family owns Purdue Pharma, which manufactures and heavily markets Oxy. They also donate untold millions to cultural institutions like The Met, The Guggenheim, the Tate, the Louvre. Arthur Sackler funded the wing of The Met that houses The Temple of Dendur. We should do a poll of people who grew up in New York.

[17:20] Jessica: I mean, well, The Temple of Dender is like the I don't know, like the most glamorous and iconic piece of a museum in the city.

[17:27] Meg: Seriously. Me too. And the fact that the playground right outside the glass windows, I mean, that was my favorite playground. It was actually a safe playground because it was so close to the street.

[17:39] Jessica: And people who did not grow up in New York know The Temple of Dender because When Harry Met Sally is filmed there, they have their conversation about, oh, I don't know, gender politics. One of their conversations about that.

[17:54] Meg: Anyway, Nan was so incensed by this revelation that she took all the lessons she learned from her friends and ACT UP in the '80s, that's a callback to Episode Eight, The Queen of Mean + Silence = Death. And she staged a die-in's in The Temple of Dendor and The Guggenheim and other cultural institutions accepting Sackler money. And she won, thanks to P.A.I.N., which stands for Prescription Addiction Intervention Now, which she helped start, and her influence in the art world, major museums and galleries are now rejecting Sackler money and have removed their name from plaques and wings, including The Temple of Dendur.

[18:38] Jessica: Wow.

[18:39] Meg: Her art and her activism reek of integrity, honesty over secrecy. Quote, "When people talk about the immediacy in my work, that's what it's about. This need to remember and record every single thing."

[18:55] Jessica: Didn't she get some flak for taking photos of her children?

[19:00] Meg: No, I think that's a different photographer. Mann. No, no, she doesn't have children.

[19:05] Jessica: Well, then it's definitely not her. That was another woman photographer who had.

[19:11] Meg: Whose last name is Mann. Sally Mann.

[19:14] Jessica: Yeah. I thought you meant a man. No, no, Sally Mann. You're absolutely right. Sorry. Nan. Man. Sally Mann. Anyway, that's amazing. I had no idea that Nan Goldin had so much to do with bringing down in fact, almost everything to do with bringing down the Sacklers.

[19:32] Meg: Yeah, you got to see this documentary. It is so cool.

[19:36] Jessica: That's incredible.

[19:37] Meg: And it's very moving. And there was only so much that I could talk about because her story is there's so much more to her life. But, yeah, I tried to focus in on this particular piece of artwork.

[19:48] Jessica: Pretty amazing. Thank you.

[20:02] Meg: We're back.

[20:03] Jessica: We're back. I found a writer who I'm now kind of obsessed with.

[20:09] Meg: Oh.

[20:10] Jessica: His name is Tim Lawrence.

[20:12] Meg: Okay.

[20:12] Jessica: He's a Brit, but he has some very interesting things to say about the American music scene.

[20:19] Meg: Okay. How old is he?

[20:21] Jessica: Our age.

[20:22] Meg: Okay. And he's writing about music right now?

[20:25] Jessica: But he wrote a book that I'm reading from and about. "Listen and You Will Hear all the Houses that Walked There Before': A History of Drag Balls, Houses and the Culture of Voguing". So we had Seder at my dad's house last night, and it was such a joy to see the teenagers there, the kids. And I was thinking about how it's amazing that your son and Ale's son and daughter were all getting along and they're the age that we were during a lot of what we talk about on this podcast.

[21:07] Meg: That's true. Good point.

[21:08] Jessica: And I thought, like, what did they care about? What did they know? What did they not know? You and I speak so frequently about music and going out and how we socialized and all that kind of stuff. And I was wondering, what did they really know about what our nightlife was or the nightlife that we cared about? Because when I hear about what they do, I'm like, is that as boring as I think it is? It seems extraordinarily boring. Sorry, kids. And then I thought so much of what we were into has been sort of repackaged for television right now, or streaming. The most obvious example is Stranger Things. That has repackaged '80s culture into this not actually '80s, it's like '80s cosplay. What? You have a look on your face.

[22:06] Meg: Well, I feel like I'm not doing Billy justice, or Alice Justice, for that matter. It's what they tell us they're doing. They seem to be enjoying it and honestly, like, we don't know exactly what they're doing. We just know what they've said.

[22:19] Jessica: No, I'm not saying that we know. I'm saying what we see and hear is boring. But I'm sure that they are keeping us very ignorant on many, many different levels. So maybe you should see this as like I'm throwing down the gauntlet. All right, kids, tell us how cool you really are.

[22:41] Meg: I don't know if I want to know.

[22:43] Jessica: That's actually a very good point as well. I was thinking about what I wanted to talk about today, and in thinking about it, ran across this piece that I'm going to read from. And I was thinking about how we were, going dancing was such a very big thing and how dance trends still existed. Dance trends. If you see something in the movies or whatever, it's always like the '60s, like the Mashed Potato or the Stomp or whatever. But there were dance trends. I think that on the last podcast, I was talking about how Ale and I would drool over Mel Gibson sadly, and practice dance moves in her room. And there were, like, moves that you had to know how to do. And that by the time we were in college, I guess it was the beginning of our senior year, the incredibly famous and we've talked about it on this podcast several times, Paris Is Burning came out and it coincided with Madonna's song Vogue, and there was a real focus on that dance style at that time, but not I mean, aside from Jennie Livingston's Paris Is Burning, there wasn't a lot of information about where it came from. And the number of people, I think, who have actually seen Paris Is Burning is not as large as we would think.

[24:20] Meg: Right. I saw it when it first came out and what I remember about Vogue, Madonna's video of Vogue was that she got some backlash because it was like she was co-opting somebody else's or another community's culture and making it her own. You know, all of that kind of thought was very new to me. I was like, isn't it a celebration? I don't understand.

[24:44] Jessica: Well, particularly because the dancers in that video were from one of the houses and they wound up being her backup dancers on her Blonde Ambition tour.

[24:54] Meg: Right. But I do remember that there was just everything she did, she got a little bit of backlash.

[24:59] Jessica: Yes. And so she was doing something right.

[25:02] Meg: I mean, look, who am I to say? But it didn't seem like the worst thing in the world to me.

[25:06] Jessica: Not to me neither. So with that in mind, I'm gonna just I'm going to read a little bit from this person who I'm now kind of obsessed with, and I want to read a lot more of his work. Just as a quick aside, Tim Lawrence is the author of three books that trace the history of DJ music, dance and art culture in New York City during the '70s and early '80s. Love Saves the Day, a History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970 to 1979. Hold On to Your Dreams, Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992, and Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980 to 1983. Together they amount to an unprecedented in depth account of the importance of New York City's DJ music, dance and art culture during the '70s and early'80s. And they are all published by Duke University Press.

[26:02] Meg: Cool. And that's from the jacket of the book?

[26:06] Jessica: That is the bio that I found online. Got it. For Tim Lawrence. Not only did Vogue and drag balls and all that not start with Madonna, it didn't even start in this century. So in my usual way, I'm going to take us back in time. So this is thanks to Tim Lawrence. Here we go. Bursting into public consciousness between 1989 and 1991, the culture of drag balls and voguing can be traced back to the second half of the 19th century. Harlem's Hamilton Lodge staged its first queer masquerade ball in 1869. Wow. And some 20 years later, a medical student stumbled into another ball that was taking place in Valhalla Hall on the Lower East Side. He witnessed 500 same sex male and female couples, quote, "Waltzing sedately to the music of a good band". A rickety old building situated at 119 East 11th Street, Webster Hall, where we used to go and it still exists. I totally danced at Webster Hall. Played host to further events during the 1920s. And by the end of the decade, masquerade parties were being staged in conspicuous venues such as Madison Square Garden and the Astor Hotel (Hotel Astor) where they attracted crowds of up to 6000 people. Invited to attend another ball at Hamilton Lodge by the entrepreneur and party host A'Lelia Walker, Harlem renaissance social activist and writer Langston Hughes proclaimed the drag balls to be the, quote, "strangest and gaudiest of all Harlem spectacles in the 1920s" and described them as "spectacles in color". Noting the presence of, quote, "distinguished white celebrities" during this period, Hughes concluded that Harlem was in vogue and the negro was in vogue.

[28:04] Meg: And who said that again?

[28:05] Jessica: Langston Hughes.

[28:06] Meg: Oh, and wait, and you were saying earlier that both same sex men and same sex women were partying together.

[28:16] Jessica: Yes, which also went wildly out of fashion. Held once a year, the balls came to feature a procession known as Parade of the Fairies which included drag queen contestants sacheting through the auditorium in preparation for a costume competition. For the rest of the evening, dancers took to the floor in couples and formed partnerships that were superficially straight with men including lesbians dressed as men and gay men who favored butch style accompanying women or men dressed as women, as well as straight femmes while any number of straights watched on from the sidelines.

[28:54] Meg: It's so interesting given all this talk about outlawing drag, which is oh so interesting. I mean, as if you could?

[29:03] Jessica: Who is outlawing drag?

[29:07] Meg: That's in the news. Not New York, but some states trying to...

[29:14] Jessica: Oh, oh, oh like Florida. Ew. Okay.

[29:15] Meg: Right.

[29:16] Jessica: Well, that actually is going to come up in our little chat because it was outlawed in New York City. So here's a little quote about the Parade of Fairies from the time "About 12:30 a.m. We visited this place and found approximately 5000 people, colored and white, men attired in women's clothes and vice versa" reported a team of undercover investigators following an inspection of the Hamilton Lodge Ball held in the Manhattan Casino in February 1928. The affair, we were informed, was a, quote, "Fag masquerade ball." All these words. I know. Four years later, Broadway Brevities reported from another ball that men rivaled birds of paradise and peacocks, their plumed headdresses nodding and undulating from their shapely heads. Soon after, novelists Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler evoked the drag ball floor as, quote, "a scene whose celestial flavor and cerulean coloring no angelic painter or nectarish poet has ever conceived."

[30:30] Meg: Now, who are these undercover people who were? These parties were just for the participants or for the community? Straight people didn't come?

[30:38] Jessica: Straight people came to watch.

[30:40] Meg: So who's undercover?

[30:42] Jessica: Well, good question. Because as all of the balls gained popularity and the open expression of homosexuality gained popularity, the New York State legislature had criminalized homosexual solicitation in 1923 as part of a wider backlash around male male sexual relations. But dragball organizers found that they could continue to stage events if a neighborhood organization applied for official police sponsorship on their behalf. The hiatus lasted until the autumn of 1931, when officers, reacting to the cultural experimentation of the Prohibition years and the onset of the Depression, began to clamp down on the city's queer community and targeted the balls.

[31:30] Meg: So, interesting.

[31:31] Jessica: Indeed.

[31:33] Meg: I wonder if the resurgence of these balls happened because people knew of the history of them or just spontaneously was born again.

[31:45] Jessica: They never went away.

[31:46] Meg: Okay.

[31:47] Jessica: They just went underground.

[31:49] Meg: Okay. And then were passed down from generation to generation somehow.

[31:53] Jessica: Well, it revives full force in the very late '60s, early '70s, and I found out a piece of information that blew my mind. Because one wonders, why did New York become a haven for gay men? And the same might be said for San Francisco. Why? It's because during World War II, soldiers were being processed in and out of New York and San Francisco, and they saw already existing gay cultures from whatever their little tiny hometowns were. They were like, there's no way I'm going back.

[32:30] Meg: Oh, so you're saying because soldiers were being processed, they were coming from all over the country to one place?

[32:37] Jessica: Yes. And they saw something that they would never, ever be able to experience anyplace else. Which, by the way, is a callback to our field trip with Russell, because he said exactly the same thing. I had never seen anything like it before, and I knew that these were my people. Anyway, so it never really went away and interestingly, it fragmented further because in the '60s, it really started to break down on racial lines and one of the major bones of contention within the members of the drag community was that it became more like a pageant and there was more judging going on.

[33:22] Meg: Interesting.

[33:22] Jessica: And the judges were white, and if you were not white, you could only win if you looked white.

[33:34] Meg: Oh no! No, no, no. That's not that's not in the spirit.

[33:39] Jessica: Oh no. So in Jennie Livingston's film Paris Is Burning, we're introduced to all of the houses, the drag ball houses. That's when this started to pop up. So, founded in 1972, the first house came into existence when Lottie, a Harlem drag queen who worked in the welfare office at 125th Street, asked Crystal LaBeija to co-promote a ball. One of the few black queens to be awarded a Queen of the Ball title at a white organized ball, LaBeija had also become tired of the anti-black bias of the balls, as she made clear during a documentary that you can actually see on Netflix called The Queen by Frank Simon. Cool. And it tracks the Miss All-America Camp Beauty Contest. LaBeija and others competed in front of a panel that included Larry Rivers and Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol would have gone to the opening of an envelope. Honestly, it's crazy. He popped up everywhere. Convinced the result was a caucasian fix, LaBeija flew into a rage when host Flawless Sabrina declared the winner to be Harlow, described by The New York Times as a, quote, "frail." I mean, The New York Times was reporting on this. Crazy. Hello. "A frail, blonde, pouting young man formerly Miss Philadelphia." The experience prepared the way for LaBeija's collaboration with Lottie. Crystal agreed to do it so long as she was a highlight of the ball, notes Terrence Legend International. Lottie made the deal sweeter by convincing Crystal that they should start a group and name it the House of LaBeija with Crystal's title as mother. Crystal agreed. The event was titled Crystal & Lottie LaBeija presents the first annual House of LaBeija Ball at Up the Downstairs Case on West 115th Street and 5th Avenue in Harlem.

[35:37] Meg: What year are we?

[35:39] Jessica: 1972.

[35:40] Meg: Wow. So it's not that long ago.

[35:43] Jessica: Oh, no. Now, just because this is one of my favorite drag stories of all time and we've talked about it on this podcast before. The infamous Dorian Corey, the drag queen who had the mummified body in the naugahyde.

[35:57] Meg: Okay, but that's in the '70s, isn't it?

[36:00] Jessica: Yes. Referencing the glamorous fashion houses were glamour and style, whose glamour and style they admired. Other black drag queens started to form drag houses or families that headed by a mother and sometimes a father would socialize, look after one another and prepare for balls. Mother Dorian and Father Chipper founded the House of Corey in 1972. And two years later, Father Jay set up the House of Dior, after which La Duchess Wong and Nicole Wong established the House of Wong and Paris Dupree and Burger Dupree inaugurated the House of Dupree in 1975. And this kept going on in Manhattan until in Brooklyn, they started popping up as well. The House of Chanel sprung up in Brooklyn during 1979 and 1980. So now we are in the decade that Jennie Livingston got into in Paris Is Burning. From this point on, contestants battled to win trophies. There were multiple entrants walking along an imaginary runway. A group of scrupulous judges would cast their verdicts, sometimes rewarding optimum realness or the ability to pass as straight to the outside world. Quote "it was our goal then to look like white women," LaBeija told Cunningham reporter as she reflected on the days before the black queens organized their own balls and initiated a very particular housing boom. "They used to tell me, you have Negroid features. And I'd say, that's all right, I have white eyes. And that's how it was back then." But it was in the 1980s that diversity really came to rule. Willi Ninja founded the House of Ninja in 1981 and '82 and set out his intention to bring Asian aesthetics and philosophy into the ball world. Possibly founded by Father Hector in 1982, the House of Xtravaganza, the first Latin house, formally entered the drag ball scene when they attended the House of Omni ball in 1983. In 1987, the boutique owner and fashion designer Pat Field established the House of Field as the first white downtown house to walk the uptown balls. We call ourselves House of Field now because that is what we've evolved into. Myra Christopher, a sales clerk in the boutique who encouraged Field to create the house commented in '88, we were always around, though, as Pat Field kids and we'll evolve into something else eventually. Becoming a house was just socializing.

[38:32] Meg: So are we talking about the stylist, Patricia Field?

[38:35] Jessica: Yes.

[38:36] Meg: So she had her own house.

[38:37] Jessica: So get this. So this is another back to our past. Did you ever buy things at House of Field?

[38:44] Meg: Of course.

[38:45] Jessica: All the time. Because Patricia Field was, in my mind, the alternate if Betsy Johnson didn't have what you wanted.

[38:55] Meg: Right. No, it was super funky, like, I mean if you could afford it.

[38:59] Jessica: Yeah. And I never understood why were the shoes so big?

[39:04] Meg: Oh, that's so funny.

[39:07] Jessica: Yes. Pat Field was always outfitting drag queens.

[39:11] Meg: Well, I guess I knew that. I just didn't know that. I mean to have your own house feels like a whole other level of involvement in the community.

[39:25] Jessica: Absolutely and as many people know, Pat Field also was the stylist for Sex and the City.

[39:30] Meg: Yeah.

[39:30] Jessica: So it's a great example of how there's a trickle down of street look to fashion, to high fashion. Right. And it's sort of the opposite of what the Anna Wintour character that Meryl Streep plays in The Devil Wears Prada says to Andy. You know like, you're wearing that blue sweater because we told you to. And it's like, actually, no, the queens up in Harlem told you. And then that's how that goes.

[40:04] Meg: That's nice. I like that.

[40:04] Jessica: So, yes. I just think that's worth a moment. Now, there's another thing that I found really fascinating about where the 1980s drag culture came from. Growing out of the drag queen ritual of throwing shade or subtly insulting another queen voguing emerged as a distinctive dance of first the houses and then inevitably, the balls where specific voguing categories were eventually introduced. Quote "it all started at an after hours club called Footsteps on Second Avenue and 14th Street" which, by the way, I have been to, says David DePino, an influential DJ for the voguing community. Paris Dupree was there, and a bunch of these black queens were throwing shade at each other. Paris had a Vogue magazine in her bag and while she was dancing, she took it out, opened it up to a page where a model was posing and then stopped in the new pose again on the beat. The provocation was returned in kind and then Paris went in front of her and did another pose adds DePino. This was all shade. They were trying to make a prettier pose than each other. And it soon caught on at the balls. At first they called it posing and then because it started from Vogue magazine, they called it voguing. An alternative account has it that voguing was first practiced by the black gay inmates of Rikers Island, a New York City jail who pursued the movement as a way of attracting the attention of boys and throwing shade. Maybe they didn't have a name for it, but that's what they were doing, or so it said, notes Kevin UltraOomni, "I know Paris was an early pioneer of voguing, but I believe that vogue existed in some other form through other people as well. I also think that a lot of voguing poses come from African art and Egyptian hieroglyphics." So just to come full circle, Langston Hughes in the 1920s, the Negro is in Vogue, and then they have chosen to pose from Vogue. So nice wrap, Jessica. That is a quick.

[42:18] Meg: And tell us again the name of the book and the author.

[42:21] Jessica: Well, the author is Tim Lawrence. His books are Love Saves the Day, Hold on to Your Dreams, and Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980 to 1983.

[42:33] Meg: Nice.

[42:34] Jessica: Oh, and Love Saves the Day, the subtitle is, a history of American Dance Music Culture, 1970 to 1979. Deep in vogue we are no longer, but we can go back there. Okay.

[42:56] Meg: So I think the tie in is clear.

[42:59] Jessica: I think the tie in is very clear.

[43:01] Meg: Drag queens. Drag queens and the representation of drag queens and the history of it. And Nan Goldin certainly want to tell the drag queen story respectfully and beautifully.

[43:14] Jessica: As does Tim Lawrence, who now we have to stalk and make him our friend. But yes, drag queens. And there was another thing that occurred to me. Did you watch the TV show The Deuce?

[43:28] Meg: No, I haven't. You've talked about it on the program.

[43:30] Jessica: We've talked about it before.

[43:33] Meg: On the program. This is our program.

[43:35] Jessica: You're listening to NPR.

[43:39] Meg: No, I haven't. You know, I should obviously it comes up in so many articles I read.

[43:45] Jessica: Well, it's something that you would just love, but I think one of the characters is based on Nan Goldin.

[43:51] Meg: Oh, I absolutely know that's true because it came up in the stuff I was reading this week.

[43:56] Jessica: Yeah, yeah.

[43:56] Meg: And Tin Pan Alley, that bar which made me go yeah, she was the bartender there. And the woman who owned Tin Pan Alley primarily hired sex workers because she wanted to give them a way to provide for themselves that wasn't what they didn't necessarily want to have to do.

[44:15] Jessica: So the main character, the female character, is the one who employs sex workers on the show. And I can't remember if she is also a photographer or if they broke that out into an actual other

[44:27] Meg: Maybe 2 people.

[44:30] Jessica: But anyway, it's another reason to watch the show. Whether or not it's the best thing ever or glamorizes, whatever, it's still a hell of a trip. Watch it.[00:16] Meg: Welcome to Desperately Seeking the'80s. I am Meg.

[00:19] Jessica: And I'm Jessica. And Meg and I have been friends since 1982. We got through middle school and high school together here in New York City where we still live.

[00:30] Meg: And where we podcast about New York City in the '80s. I do ripped from the headlines

[00:35] Jessica: And I do pop culture.

[00:37] Meg: So, Jessica, last week we did our first live recording at the amazing Malt & Mold. What an adventure.

[00:44] Jessica: That was so much fun. I had no idea what to expect. We can even start with my epic insanity, which is that I showed up without any of our recording equipment and you didn't kill me.

[00:58] Meg: I didn't.

[01:00] Jessica: I locked eyes with you when I showed up, and I had this profound lack of understanding. I just looked at you with you had, like, death rays coming out of your face, and I was scared. What? Oh no.

[01:15] Meg: I was like, does the roadie, who we don't have, have all the equipment?

[01:20] Jessica: In my brain, yes that's right.

[01:23] Meg: So we jumped in an Uber and went all the way uptown again to Jessica's place and got all the equipment and then came back. And do you remember the name of our amazing Uber driver?

[01:34] Jessica: Jordy.

[01:35] Meg: Jordy. He was so supportive. He was so sweet.

[01:40] Jessica: Jordy was like the Uber angel.

[01:43] Meg: And then we were just, like, 20 minutes late getting started, and everyone was fine because they were getting their beers and their cheese, and it was fine.

[01:51] Jessica: The takeaway, as far as I'm concerned, is it's good to be on time, but people are very forgiving, and it was our first time doing it ever.

[02:00] Meg: First time doing it. And the sound quality was great. The only thing that I am sad about is that we didn't hear more of our audience. So next time I can bring our remote recorder and we can get some room tone.

[02:14] Jessica: We had a very lively audience.

[02:15] Meg: We had a really lively audience. And you can't really tell from the recording because our mics are so sensitive to us and not to other people. It's very interesting.

[02:24] Jessica: It's like they were made just for us and our little egos.

[02:29] Meg: Do you want to get started?

[02:31] Jessica: Oh, please. Okay. Yes, I do. Meg, before we begin, we have a note from a BFF of the podcast. Our friend Nick. Who, like some of the other wonderful men who listen to our podcast, cannot contain himself from correcting us. And I'm open to corrections because I know that I am frequently, I won't say poorly researched. It's just a bit sketchy.

[03:12] Meg: I like the discourse. I approve of the back and forth, for sure.

[03:16] Jessica: Well, I like that he begins like this. Hello. Fabulous episode. Wonderful way to start. What more can we ask for? He says, I am so sorry that I could not be there. He was not at Malt & Mold. He says, Mr. Pedantic strikes again. That's great self knowledge. The first building granted landmark status in New York City in 1965 was the 300 year old The Wyckoff House in Brooklyn. In fact, the first group of buildings landmarked that day, which became the very first landmarks in Manhattan, were the Merchant's House Museum, the Stuyvesant Fish House, and the remaining houses of Colonnade Row/LaGrange Terrace at 428, 430, 432 and 434 Lafayette Street, which isn't that The Public Theater.

[04:10] Meg: Everything is in the same neighborhood. The Merchant's House Museum, The Public Theater.

[04:15] Jessica: I thought that the Colonnade. Lafayette street. I thought that Colonnade Row. Anyway, then he says the former Astor Library/Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, now, The Public Theater was designated a landmark later in 1965, while the Salmagundi Club was not landmarked until 1969 and he even includes a press clipping from thevillagepreservation.org or sorry, villagepreservation.org. He goes on to say, the Merchant's House Museum was the first Manhattan building designated.

[04:51] Meg: Now we know.

[04:52] Jessica: Now we know. And as a quick plug for the Merchant's House Museum, you can visit the Merchant's House. And it is quite something. And because of Nick's involvement with the Merchant's House Museum, I had the great and good fortune of attending a seance there.

[05:09] Meg: Okay. My very good friend Dan is actually a ghost hunter, and he has done a tour of ghosts in the Merchant's House Museum.

[05:21] Jessica: Has he turned anything up?

[05:23] Meg: You know, I haven't gone on the tour so I don't. I assume so. Otherwise, why would he continue to do?

[05:29] Jessica: Is he a ghost hunter or a ghost of New York tour guide?

[05:34] Meg: I think he hunts them. I don't think he means them harm, but I think he definitely wants to find some.

[05:38] Jessica: And does he want to put them in, like, a contraption, like, ghostbusters?

[05:44] Meg: I should probably follow up before I talk too much more about it.

[05:46] Jessica: Think we need him on the show.

[05:49] Meg: Oh completely! The second I heard Merchant's House Museum, I was like, we got to get Dan.

[05:52] Jessica: Oh, my gosh. Love it.

[05:53] Meg: All right, are you ready for my engagement question?

[05:56] Jessica: Yes.

[05:57] Meg: All right. When we were little, wonderful to go on field trips from school.

[06:02] Jessica: Field trip.

[06:03] Meg: Do you have some of your favorite field trips? Do you remember? I mean, there were ones that we did regularly. We would go to The Metropolitan Museum of Art regularly. We went to the Museum of the City of New York. I remember that was kind of a regular one.

[06:17] Jessica: Yes, I actually I remember going to the Museum of the City of New York, and I remember there was some Indigenous People of the Americas display that was not called that at the time and we even had a little discussion about it way back in the '80s.

[06:35] Meg: Interesting. The American Museum of Natural History has to do a lot of, they have new plaques.

[06:40] Jessica: Oh, do they?

[06:41] Meg: Yes, they do. For the Dioramas.

[06:45] Jessica: That seems quite right. Yeah, the Dioramas were scandalous.

[06:50] Meg: By today's standards absolutely.

[06:50] Jessica: Yeah. Well, just putting someone from a different culture in a glass case, like they were a puma or an elephant, not good. Favorite field trip. I really liked going to London for our glee club field trip.

[07:11] Meg: Which I was not at.

[07:14] Jessica: For the glee clib field trip that you did not attend. We also went to DC. That was fun. That was really fun.

[07:20] Meg: And we met with Geraldine Ferraro.

[07:22] Jessica: We did. Oh, my gosh. You've got a good memory.

[07:24] Meg: I know. '80s reference much.

[07:26] Jessica: Nice. And as a child we would just go around New York, like to the aquarium or some kind of day trip. But yeah, there was fun.

[07:39] Meg: Cool. I think you will, it's going to come up at the very end of this story, but you will know why I asked that question. My sources are The Guardian, The New York Times, The New Yorker and the documentary that has recently come out called All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.

[07:57] Jessica: You must have dropped dead with joy when you heard that title.

[08:03] Meg: In the winter of 1986, Nan Goldin's slideshow, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, was published as a book by Mark Holborn, an editor at the Aperture Foundation, filled with photos of friends in their most private moments. The raw and intensely personal project had evolved over the last seven years. Its publication was not exactly a seal of approval from the exclusive, male dominated art world, but it certainly showed that some gatekeepers were ready to allow access to a new vision. Nan had a loft on the Bowery and tended bar at Tin Pan Alley on 49th Street in Times Square. She took photographs of the people she hung out with, drag queens and drug addicts and sex workers, people on the fringe, people who had come to New York because it had space for weirdos. The slideshow started as a way to entertain her friends. She played it to music in bars and clubs and performance spaces in Tribeca in the East Village. And people would shout back to the screen, either because they loved or hated a picture or were just excited to see their lives projected. The soundtrack at first was The Velvet Underground or James Brown or Nina Simone and then people started sending her music. She would change the slideshow based on her mood. It was never the same. It evolved. And of course, she kept taking more pictures. There was nothing off limits. The photos showed people doing drugs and having sex and fighting and sleeping and being sad in dark bars and hotel rooms and apartments. At one point, she had a series of photos of her friend having sex. Her friend got pretty upset, so Nan replaced them with photos of herself having sex. The goal wasn't to expose people against their wishes or to catch them in an unseemly moment. She looked for honesty. She wanted to show the drag queens as they wanted to be seen, as beautiful. Quote, "I'm not crashing. This is my party. This is my family, my history." As the slideshow became more popular, Nan got a lot of shit. The art world did not consider her work art. She was dismissed by male artists and gallerists. Someone actually told her, quote, "There is no such thing as a good woman artist." And that sounds so crazy. Who would ever say something? But I remember hearing things like that. That used to happen.

[10:39] Jessica: Well that's like women can't be funny.

[10:43] Meg: Right. Exactly. And even for those who didn't articulate their beliefs so bluntly as that, there was a presumption that women could not be voyeurs. My father once said to me that women couldn't play guitar because a guitar is an extension of a penis.

[11:02] Jessica: Well, that's not unlike Joan Jett's experience with her first and only guitar lesson. Did you ever hear that story?

[11:08] Meg: No.

[11:08] Jessica: She went to some school, I don't know what it was, but she went to have a guitar lesson. She already had a guitar and was sort of trying to pick it up. And she had a male guitar teacher who said that she had real potential. But don't bother trying to be a rock player, not a rock star, a player of rock and roll music because women just don't do that. And she was like, may I introduce you to The Runaways later on? But the idea yeah, a woman cannot touch something that is associated with maleness unless she is required to or invited to.

[11:59] Meg: Okay, so this is all from the perspective of being a visual artist. And so the idea that a woman can't be a voyeur because women are supposed to be looked at, they're not supposed to be the ones who are doing the looking.

[12:13] Jessica: Is it also because if a woman is a voyeur, that means that she is in spaces where she's not supposed to be?

[12:19] Meg: I think it's actually like I don't want to see what she sees. I don't give a fuck. Fortunately, Nan had a thick skin. Quote "I didn't care about good photography. I cared about complete honesty." And I'll tell you a little bit about her background. She'd grown up in a painfully conventional home in Maryland. Her parents didn't like each other very much, favored their sons, and were terrified of their smart, rebellious daughters. Her older sister Barbara fought with her parents and was sent to a mental institution. Ultimately, she committed suicide at 18 by lying down on the railroad tracks outside Union Station.

[12:59] Jessica: Oh my God.

[13:00] Meg: Nan was twelve.

[13:02] Jessica: Oh my God.

[13:03] Meg: Her parents response to the suicide? Move to a new town and never mention it again. This scarred Nan for life and made her hell bent on breaking free from that repression. And incidentally, there are many photos of couples in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, including her parents. Interesting. So in 1984, in small clubs around the city, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency was picking up steam. The art world didn't embrace her work, but they were pissed off by it, which helped its popularity with the counterculture. Nan had an opportunity to show it in a loft in Berlin. Now for the last three years, she'd been living with a man named Brian, who she'd met while bartending at Tin Pan Alley. He was an office worker and an ex-Marine. On their first date, Nan asked him to get her some heroin, which she was snorting at the time and he did, and they fell into each other through drugs and sex, and he became a subject of many of her photos. Their relationship was tumultuous and unhealthy, and they often tried to break up, but always came back to each other. Nan had been in Berlin showing her slideshow for a bit before Brian came to meet her there. When he found out she had cheated on him with a woman, he lost his shit and beat Nan to a pulp. He focused all of his rage specifically on her eyes. Her friend Sylvie managed to drag her out of the hotel room and get her to a hospital, saving her life. Brian left back in the room, trashed the place. He wrote bitch and cunt and lipstick on the walls and burned her diaries. Fortunately, she had left the slideshow at the loft where she was showing it, otherwise he would have destroyed that, too. All the bones in her orbital floor were broken, and she almost lost one of her eyes. It took months to recover, and she took photos of it. She says the photos of her battered face kept her from returning to him, and those photos became part of the slideshow. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency was part of the 1985 Whitney Biennial, and for those who don't know, the Whitney Biennial is a biennial exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art for up and coming artists, and it's known for setting trends and making careers. So it was a pretty big deal. A year later, when the Aperture Foundation wanted to publish The Ballad of Sexual Dependency as a book Nan wanted to include her family story in the text of the book. I mean, it's really her origin story. And her father tried to stop the publication of the book, accusing her of blaming him and her mother for her sister's suicide. And Brian tried to stop the publication, too for obvious reasons. Nan was indefatigable and the book was published, and the rest is art history. Photography curator Susan Bright says, quote "one only has to teach a class of undergraduate photography students to realize her influence. She gave legitimacy to snapshot style or diaristic. I would go so far as to say her work has come to represent an entire style" and now she has a huge influence in the art world. Case in point Nan had an operation in 2014 and was prescribed OxyContin as a painkiller. She took it as prescribed and became addicted when, by the grace of God, she managed to pull herself out of the addiction three years later, she realized that the Sackler family this is a quote "the Sackler family, whose name I knew from museums and galleries were responsible for the epidemic." A little background. The Sackler family owns Purdue Pharma, which manufactures and heavily markets Oxy. They also donate untold millions to cultural institutions like The Met, The Guggenheim, the Tate, the Louvre. Arthur Sackler funded the wing of The Met that houses The Temple of Dendur. We should do a poll of people who grew up in New York.

[17:20] Jessica: I mean, well, The Temple of Dender is like the I don't know, like the most glamorous and iconic piece of a museum in the city.

[17:27] Meg: Seriously. Me too. And the fact that the playground right outside the glass windows, I mean, that was my favorite playground. It was actually a safe playground because it was so close to the street.

[17:39] Jessica: And people who did not grow up in New York know The Temple of Dender because When Harry Met Sally is filmed there, they have their conversation about, oh, I don't know, gender politics. One of their conversations about that.

[17:54] Meg: Anyway, Nan was so incensed by this revelation that she took all the lessons she learned from her friends and ACT UP in the '80s, that's a callback to Episode Eight, The Queen of Mean + Silence = Death. And she staged a die-in's in The Temple of Dendor and The Guggenheim and other cultural institutions accepting Sackler money. And she won, thanks to P.A.I.N., which stands for Prescription Addiction Intervention Now, which she helped start, and her influence in the art world, major museums and galleries are now rejecting Sackler money and have removed their name from plaques and wings, including The Temple of Dendur.

[18:38] Jessica: Wow.

[18:39] Meg: Her art and her activism reek of integrity, honesty over secrecy. Quote, "When people talk about the immediacy in my work, that's what it's about. This need to remember and record every single thing."

[18:55] Jessica: Didn't she get some flak for taking photos of her children?

[19:00] Meg: No, I think that's a different photographer. Mann. No, no, she doesn't have children.

[19:05] Jessica: Well, then it's definitely not her. That was another woman photographer who had.

[19:11] Meg: Whose last name is Mann. Sally Mann.

[19:14] Jessica: Yeah. I thought you meant a man. No, no, Sally Mann. You're absolutely right. Sorry. Nan. Man. Sally Mann. Anyway, that's amazing. I had no idea that Nan Goldin had so much to do with bringing down in fact, almost everything to do with bringing down the Sacklers.

[19:32] Meg: Yeah, you got to see this documentary. It is so cool.

[19:36] Jessica: That's incredible.

[19:37] Meg: And it's very moving. And there was only so much that I could talk about because her story is there's so much more to her life. But, yeah, I tried to focus in on this particular piece of artwork.

[19:48] Jessica: Pretty amazing. Thank you.

[20:02] Meg: We're back.

[20:03] Jessica: We're back. I found a writer who I'm now kind of obsessed with.

[20:09] Meg: Oh.

[20:10] Jessica: His name is Tim Lawrence.

[20:12] Meg: Okay.

[20:12] Jessica: He's a Brit, but he has some very interesting things to say about the American music scene.

[20:19] Meg: Okay. How old is he?

[20:21] Jessica: Our age.

[20:22] Meg: Okay. And he's writing about music right now?

[20:25] Jessica: But he wrote a book that I'm reading from and about. "Listen and You Will Hear all the Houses that Walked There Before': A History of Drag Balls, Houses and the Culture of Voguing". So we had Seder at my dad's house last night, and it was such a joy to see the teenagers there, the kids. And I was thinking about how it's amazing that your son and Ale's son and daughter were all getting along and they're the age that we were during a lot of what we talk about on this podcast.

[21:07] Meg: That's true. Good point.

[21:08] Jessica: And I thought, like, what did they care about? What did they know? What did they not know? You and I speak so frequently about music and going out and how we socialized and all that kind of stuff. And I was wondering, what did they really know about what our nightlife was or the nightlife that we cared about? Because when I hear about what they do, I'm like, is that as boring as I think it is? It seems extraordinarily boring. Sorry, kids. And then I thought so much of what we were into has been sort of repackaged for television right now, or streaming. The most obvious example is Stranger Things. That has repackaged '80s culture into this not actually '80s, it's like '80s cosplay. What? You have a look on your face.

[22:06] Meg: Well, I feel like I'm not doing Billy justice, or Alice Justice, for that matter. It's what they tell us they're doing. They seem to be enjoying it and honestly, like, we don't know exactly what they're doing. We just know what they've said.

[22:19] Jessica: No, I'm not saying that we know. I'm saying what we see and hear is boring. But I'm sure that they are keeping us very ignorant on many, many different levels. So maybe you should see this as like I'm throwing down the gauntlet. All right, kids, tell us how cool you really are.

[22:41] Meg: I don't know if I want to know.

[22:43] Jessica: That's actually a very good point as well. I was thinking about what I wanted to talk about today, and in thinking about it, ran across this piece that I'm going to read from. And I was thinking about how we were, going dancing was such a very big thing and how dance trends still existed. Dance trends. If you see something in the movies or whatever, it's always like the '60s, like the Mashed Potato or the Stomp or whatever. But there were dance trends. I think that on the last podcast, I was talking about how Ale and I would drool over Mel Gibson sadly, and practice dance moves in her room. And there were, like, moves that you had to know how to do. And that by the time we were in college, I guess it was the beginning of our senior year, the incredibly famous and we've talked about it on this podcast several times, Paris Is Burning came out and it coincided with Madonna's song Vogue, and there was a real focus on that dance style at that time, but not I mean, aside from Jennie Livingston's Paris Is Burning, there wasn't a lot of information about where it came from. And the number of people, I think, who have actually seen Paris Is Burning is not as large as we would think.

[24:20] Meg: Right. I saw it when it first came out and what I remember about Vogue, Madonna's video of Vogue was that she got some backlash because it was like she was co-opting somebody else's or another community's culture and making it her own. You know, all of that kind of thought was very new to me. I was like, isn't it a celebration? I don't understand.

[24:44] Jessica: Well, particularly because the dancers in that video were from one of the houses and they wound up being her backup dancers on her Blonde Ambition tour.

[24:54] Meg: Right. But I do remember that there was just everything she did, she got a little bit of backlash.

[24:59] Jessica: Yes. And so she was doing something right.

[25:02] Meg: I mean, look, who am I to say? But it didn't seem like the worst thing in the world to me.

[25:06] Jessica: Not to me neither. So with that in mind, I'm gonna just I'm going to read a little bit from this person who I'm now kind of obsessed with, and I want to read a lot more of his work. Just as a quick aside, Tim Lawrence is the author of three books that trace the history of DJ music, dance and art culture in New York City during the '70s and early '80s. Love Saves the Day, a History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970 to 1979. Hold On to Your Dreams, Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992, and Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980 to 1983. Together they amount to an unprecedented in depth account of the importance of New York City's DJ music, dance and art culture during the '70s and early'80s. And they are all published by Duke University Press.

[26:02] Meg: Cool. And that's from the jacket of the book?

[26:06] Jessica: That is the bio that I found online. Got it. For Tim Lawrence. Not only did Vogue and drag balls and all that not start with Madonna, it didn't even start in this century. So in my usual way, I'm going to take us back in time. So this is thanks to Tim Lawrence. Here we go. Bursting into public consciousness between 1989 and 1991, the culture of drag balls and voguing can be traced back to the second half of the 19th century. Harlem's Hamilton Lodge staged its first queer masquerade ball in 1869. Wow. And some 20 years later, a medical student stumbled into another ball that was taking place in Valhalla Hall on the Lower East Side. He witnessed 500 same sex male and female couples, quote, "Waltzing sedately to the music of a good band". A rickety old building situated at 119 East 11th Street, Webster Hall, where we used to go and it still exists. I totally danced at Webster Hall. Played host to further events during the 1920s. And by the end of the decade, masquerade parties were being staged in conspicuous venues such as Madison Square Garden and the Astor Hotel (Hotel Astor) where they attracted crowds of up to 6000 people. Invited to attend another ball at Hamilton Lodge by the entrepreneur and party host A'Lelia Walker, Harlem renaissance social activist and writer Langston Hughes proclaimed the drag balls to be the, quote, "strangest and gaudiest of all Harlem spectacles in the 1920s" and described them as "spectacles in color". Noting the presence of, quote, "distinguished white celebrities" during this period, Hughes concluded that Harlem was in vogue and the negro was in vogue.

[28:04] Meg: And who said that again?

[28:05] Jessica: Langston Hughes.

[28:06] Meg: Oh, and wait, and you were saying earlier that both same sex men and same sex women were partying together.

[28:16] Jessica: Yes, which also went wildly out of fashion. Held once a year, the balls came to feature a procession known as Parade of the Fairies which included drag queen contestants sacheting through the auditorium in preparation for a costume competition. For the rest of the evening, dancers took to the floor in couples and formed partnerships that were superficially straight with men including lesbians dressed as men and gay men who favored butch style accompanying women or men dressed as women, as well as straight femmes while any number of straights watched on from the sidelines.

[28:54] Meg: It's so interesting given all this talk about outlawing drag, which is oh so interesting. I mean, as if you could?

[29:03] Jessica: Who is outlawing drag?

[29:07] Meg: That's in the news. Not New York, but some states trying to...

[29:14] Jessica: Oh, oh, oh like Florida. Ew. Okay.

[29:15] Meg: Right.

[29:16] Jessica: Well, that actually is going to come up in our little chat because it was outlawed in New York City. So here's a little quote about the Parade of Fairies from the time "About 12:30 a.m. We visited this place and found approximately 5000 people, colored and white, men attired in women's clothes and vice versa" reported a team of undercover investigators following an inspection of the Hamilton Lodge Ball held in the Manhattan Casino in February 1928. The affair, we were informed, was a, quote, "Fag masquerade ball." All these words. I know. Four years later, Broadway Brevities reported from another ball that men rivaled birds of paradise and peacocks, their plumed headdresses nodding and undulating from their shapely heads. Soon after, novelists Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler evoked the drag ball floor as, quote, "a scene whose celestial flavor and cerulean coloring no angelic painter or nectarish poet has ever conceived."

[30:30] Meg: Now, who are these undercover people who were? These parties were just for the participants or for the community? Straight people didn't come?

[30:38] Jessica: Straight people came to watch.

[30:40] Meg: So who's undercover?

[30:42] Jessica: Well, good question. Because as all of the balls gained popularity and the open expression of homosexuality gained popularity, the New York State legislature had criminalized homosexual solicitation in 1923 as part of a wider backlash around male male sexual relations. But dragball organizers found that they could continue to stage events if a neighborhood organization applied for official police sponsorship on their behalf. The hiatus lasted until the autumn of 1931, when officers, reacting to the cultural experimentation of the Prohibition years and the onset of the Depression, began to clamp down on the city's queer community and targeted the balls.

[31:30] Meg: So, interesting.

[31:31] Jessica: Indeed.

[31:33] Meg: I wonder if the resurgence of these balls happened because people knew of the history of them or just spontaneously was born again.

[31:45] Jessica: They never went away.

[31:46] Meg: Okay.

[31:47] Jessica: They just went underground.

[31:49] Meg: Okay. And then were passed down from generation to generation somehow.

[31:53] Jessica: Well, it revives full force in the very late '60s, early '70s, and I found out a piece of information that blew my mind. Because one wonders, why did New York become a haven for gay men? And the same might be said for San Francisco. Why? It's because during World War II, soldiers were being processed in and out of New York and San Francisco, and they saw already existing gay cultures from whatever their little tiny hometowns were. They were like, there's no way I'm going back.

[32:30] Meg: Oh, so you're saying because soldiers were being processed, they were coming from all over the country to one place?

[32:37] Jessica: Yes. And they saw something that they would never, ever be able to experience anyplace else. Which, by the way, is a callback to our field trip with Russell, because he said exactly the same thing. I had never seen anything like it before, and I knew that these were my people. Anyway, so it never really went away and interestingly, it fragmented further because in the '60s, it really started to break down on racial lines and one of the major bones of contention within the members of the drag community was that it became more like a pageant and there was more judging going on.

[33:22] Meg: Interesting.

[33:22] Jessica: And the judges were white, and if you were not white, you could only win if you looked white.

[33:34] Meg: Oh no! No, no, no. That's not that's not in the spirit.

[33:39] Jessica: Oh no. So in Jennie Livingston's film Paris Is Burning, we're introduced to all of the houses, the drag ball houses. That's when this started to pop up. So, founded in 1972, the first house came into existence when Lottie, a Harlem drag queen who worked in the welfare office at 125th Street, asked Crystal LaBeija to co-promote a ball. One of the few black queens to be awarded a Queen of the Ball title at a white organized ball, LaBeija had also become tired of the anti-black bias of the balls, as she made clear during a documentary that you can actually see on Netflix called The Queen by Frank Simon. Cool. And it tracks the Miss All-America Camp Beauty Contest. LaBeija and others competed in front of a panel that included Larry Rivers and Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol would have gone to the opening of an envelope. Honestly, it's crazy. He popped up everywhere. Convinced the result was a caucasian fix, LaBeija flew into a rage when host Flawless Sabrina declared the winner to be Harlow, described by The New York Times as a, quote, "frail." I mean, The New York Times was reporting on this. Crazy. Hello. "A frail, blonde, pouting young man formerly Miss Philadelphia." The experience prepared the way for LaBeija's collaboration with Lottie. Crystal agreed to do it so long as she was a highlight of the ball, notes Terrence Legend International. Lottie made the deal sweeter by convincing Crystal that they should start a group and name it the House of LaBeija with Crystal's title as mother. Crystal agreed. The event was titled Crystal & Lottie LaBeija presents the first annual House of LaBeija Ball at Up the Downstairs Case on West 115th Street and 5th Avenue in Harlem.

[35:37] Meg: What year are we?

[35:39] Jessica: 1972.

[35:40] Meg: Wow. So it's not that long ago.

[35:43] Jessica: Oh, no. Now, just because this is one of my favorite drag stories of all time and we've talked about it on this podcast before. The infamous Dorian Corey, the drag queen who had the mummified body in the naugahyde.

[35:57] Meg: Okay, but that's in the '70s, isn't it?

[36:00] Jessica: Yes. Referencing the glamorous fashion houses were glamour and style, whose glamour and style they admired. Other black drag queens started to form drag houses or families that headed by a mother and sometimes a father would socialize, look after one another and prepare for balls. Mother Dorian and Father Chipper founded the House of Corey in 1972. And two years later, Father Jay set up the House of Dior, after which La Duchess Wong and Nicole Wong established the House of Wong and Paris Dupree and Burger Dupree inaugurated the House of Dupree in 1975. And this kept going on in Manhattan until in Brooklyn, they started popping up as well. The House of Chanel sprung up in Brooklyn during 1979 and 1980. So now we are in the decade that Jennie Livingston got into in Paris Is Burning. From this point on, contestants battled to win trophies. There were multiple entrants walking along an imaginary runway. A group of scrupulous judges would cast their verdicts, sometimes rewarding optimum realness or the ability to pass as straight to the outside world. Quote "it was our goal then to look like white women," LaBeija told Cunningham reporter as she reflected on the days before the black queens organized their own balls and initiated a very particular housing boom. "They used to tell me, you have Negroid features. And I'd say, that's all right, I have white eyes. And that's how it was back then." But it was in the 1980s that diversity really came to rule. Willi Ninja founded the House of Ninja in 1981 and '82 and set out his intention to bring Asian aesthetics and philosophy into the ball world. Possibly founded by Father Hector in 1982, the House of Xtravaganza, the first Latin house, formally entered the drag ball scene when they attended the House of Omni ball in 1983. In 1987, the boutique owner and fashion designer Pat Field established the House of Field as the first white downtown house to walk the uptown balls. We call ourselves House of Field now because that is what we've evolved into. Myra Christopher, a sales clerk in the boutique who encouraged Field to create the house commented in '88, we were always around, though, as Pat Field kids and we'll evolve into something else eventually. Becoming a house was just socializing.

[38:32] Meg: So are we talking about the stylist, Patricia Field?

[38:35] Jessica: Yes.

[38:36] Meg: So she had her own house.

[38:37] Jessica: So get this. So this is another back to our past. Did you ever buy things at House of Field?

[38:44] Meg: Of course.

[38:45] Jessica: All the time. Because Patricia Field was, in my mind, the alternate if Betsy Johnson didn't have what you wanted.

[38:55] Meg: Right. No, it was super funky, like, I mean if you could afford it.

[38:59] Jessica: Yeah. And I never understood why were the shoes so big?

[39:04] Meg: Oh, that's so funny.

[39:07] Jessica: Yes. Pat Field was always outfitting drag queens.

[39:11] Meg: Well, I guess I knew that. I just didn't know that. I mean to have your own house feels like a whole other level of involvement in the community.

[39:25] Jessica: Absolutely and as many people know, Pat Field also was the stylist for Sex and the City.

[39:30] Meg: Yeah.

[39:30] Jessica: So it's a great example of how there's a trickle down of street look to fashion, to high fashion. Right. And it's sort of the opposite of what the Anna Wintour character that Meryl Streep plays in The Devil Wears Prada says to Andy. You know like, you're wearing that blue sweater because we told you to. And it's like, actually, no, the queens up in Harlem told you. And then that's how that goes.

[40:04] Meg: That's nice. I like that.

[40:04] Jessica: So, yes. I just think that's worth a moment. Now, there's another thing that I found really fascinating about where the 1980s drag culture came from. Growing out of the drag queen ritual of throwing shade or subtly insulting another queen voguing emerged as a distinctive dance of first the houses and then inevitably, the balls where specific voguing categories were eventually introduced. Quote "it all started at an after hours club called Footsteps on Second Avenue and 14th Street" which, by the way, I have been to, says David DePino, an influential DJ for the voguing community. Paris Dupree was there, and a bunch of these black queens were throwing shade at each other. Paris had a Vogue magazine in her bag and while she was dancing, she took it out, opened it up to a page where a model was posing and then stopped in the new pose again on the beat. The provocation was returned in kind and then Paris went in front of her and did another pose adds DePino. This was all shade. They were trying to make a prettier pose than each other. And it soon caught on at the balls. At first they called it posing and then because it started from Vogue magazine, they called it voguing. An alternative account has it that voguing was first practiced by the black gay inmates of Rikers Island, a New York City jail who pursued the movement as a way of attracting the attention of boys and throwing shade. Maybe they didn't have a name for it, but that's what they were doing, or so it said, notes Kevin UltraOomni, "I know Paris was an early pioneer of voguing, but I believe that vogue existed in some other form through other people as well. I also think that a lot of voguing poses come from African art and Egyptian hieroglyphics." So just to come full circle, Langston Hughes in the 1920s, the Negro is in Vogue, and then they have chosen to pose from Vogue. So nice wrap, Jessica. That is a quick.

[42:18] Meg: And tell us again the name of the book and the author.

[42:21] Jessica: Well, the author is Tim Lawrence. His books are Love Saves the Day, Hold on to Your Dreams, and Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980 to 1983.

[42:33] Meg: Nice.

[42:34] Jessica: Oh, and Love Saves the Day, the subtitle is, a history of American Dance Music Culture, 1970 to 1979. Deep in vogue we are no longer, but we can go back there. Okay.

[42:56] Meg: So I think the tie in is clear.

[42:59] Jessica: I think the tie in is very clear.

[43:01] Meg: Drag queens. Drag queens and the representation of drag queens and the history of it. And Nan Goldin certainly want to tell the drag queen story respectfully and beautifully.

[43:14] Jessica: As does Tim Lawrence, who now we have to stalk and make him our friend. But yes, drag queens. And there was another thing that occurred to me. Did you watch the TV show The Deuce?

[43:28] Meg: No, I haven't. You've talked about it on the program.

[43:30] Jessica: We've talked about it before.

[43:33] Meg: On the program. This is our program.

[43:35] Jessica: You're listening to NPR.

[43:39] Meg: No, I haven't. You know, I should obviously it comes up in so many articles I read.

[43:45] Jessica: Well, it's something that you would just love, but I think one of the characters is based on Nan Goldin.

[43:51] Meg: Oh, I absolutely know that's true because it came up in the stuff I was reading this week.

[43:56] Jessica: Yeah, yeah.

[43:56] Meg: And Tin Pan Alley, that bar which made me go yeah, she was the bartender there. And the woman who owned Tin Pan Alley primarily hired sex workers because she wanted to give them a way to provide for themselves that wasn't what they didn't necessarily want to have to do.

[44:15] Jessica: So the main character, the female character, is the one who employs sex workers on the show. And I can't remember if she is also a photographer or if they broke that out into an actual other

[44:27] Meg: Maybe 2 people.

[44:30] Jessica: But anyway, it's another reason to watch the show. Whether or not it's the best thing ever or glamorizes, whatever, it's still a hell of a trip. Watch it.[00:16] Meg: Welcome to Desperately Seeking the'80s. I am Meg.

[00:19] Jessica: And I'm Jessica. And Meg and I have been friends since 1982. We got through middle school and high school together here in New York City where we still live.

[00:30] Meg: And where we podcast about New York City in the '80s. I do ripped from the headlines

[00:35] Jessica: And I do pop culture.

[00:37] Meg: So, Jessica, last week we did our first live recording at the amazing Malt & Mold. What an adventure.

[00:44] Jessica: That was so much fun. I had no idea what to expect. We can even start with my epic insanity, which is that I showed up without any of our recording equipment and you didn't kill me.

[00:58] Meg: I didn't.

[01:00] Jessica: I locked eyes with you when I showed up, and I had this profound lack of understanding. I just looked at you with you had, like, death rays coming out of your face, and I was scared. What? Oh no.

[01:15] Meg: I was like, does the roadie, who we don't have, have all the equipment?

[01:20] Jessica: In my brain, yes that's right.

[01:23] Meg: So we jumped in an Uber and went all the way uptown again to Jessica's place and got all the equipment and then came back. And do you remember the name of our amazing Uber driver?

[01:34] Jessica: Jordy.

[01:35] Meg: Jordy. He was so supportive. He was so sweet.

[01:40] Jessica: Jordy was like the Uber angel.

[01:43] Meg: And then we were just, like, 20 minutes late getting started, and everyone was fine because they were getting their beers and their cheese, and it was fine.

[01:51] Jessica: The takeaway, as far as I'm concerned, is it's good to be on time, but people are very forgiving, and it was our first time doing it ever.

[02:00] Meg: First time doing it. And the sound quality was great. The only thing that I am sad about is that we didn't hear more of our audience. So next time I can bring our remote recorder and we can get some room tone.

[02:14] Jessica: We had a very lively audience.

[02:15] Meg: We had a really lively audience. And you can't really tell from the recording because our mics are so sensitive to us and not to other people. It's very interesting.

[02:24] Jessica: It's like they were made just for us and our little egos.

[02:29] Meg: Do you want to get started?

[02:31] Jessica: Oh, please. Okay. Yes, I do. Meg, before we begin, we have a note from a BFF of the podcast. Our friend Nick. Who, like some of the other wonderful men who listen to our podcast, cannot contain himself from correcting us. And I'm open to corrections because I know that I am frequently, I won't say poorly researched. It's just a bit sketchy.

[03:12] Meg: I like the discourse. I approve of the back and forth, for sure.

[03:16] Jessica: Well, I like that he begins like this. Hello. Fabulous episode. Wonderful way to start. What more can we ask for? He says, I am so sorry that I could not be there. He was not at Malt & Mold. He says, Mr. Pedantic strikes again. That's great self knowledge. The first building granted landmark status in New York City in 1965 was the 300 year old The Wyckoff House in Brooklyn. In fact, the first group of buildings landmarked that day, which became the very first landmarks in Manhattan, were the Merchant's House Museum, the Stuyvesant Fish House, and the remaining houses of Colonnade Row/LaGrange Terrace at 428, 430, 432 and 434 Lafayette Street, which isn't that The Public Theater.

[04:10] Meg: Everything is in the same neighborhood. The Merchant's House Museum, The Public Theater.

[04:15] Jessica: I thought that the Colonnade. Lafayette street. I thought that Colonnade Row. Anyway, then he says the former Astor Library/Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, now, The Public Theater was designated a landmark later in 1965, while the Salmagundi Club was not landmarked until 1969 and he even includes a press clipping from thevillagepreservation.org or sorry, villagepreservation.org. He goes on to say, the Merchant's House Museum was the first Manhattan building designated.

[04:51] Meg: Now we know.

[04:52] Jessica: Now we know. And as a quick plug for the Merchant's House Museum, you can visit the Merchant's House. And it is quite something. And because of Nick's involvement with the Merchant's House Museum, I had the great and good fortune of attending a seance there.

[05:09] Meg: Okay. My very good friend Dan is actually a ghost hunter, and he has done a tour of ghosts in the Merchant's House Museum.

[05:21] Jessica: Has he turned anything up?

[05:23] Meg: You know, I haven't gone on the tour so I don't. I assume so. Otherwise, why would he continue to do?

[05:29] Jessica: Is he a ghost hunter or a ghost of New York tour guide?

[05:34] Meg: I think he hunts them. I don't think he means them harm, but I think he definitely wants to find some.

[05:38] Jessica: And does he want to put them in, like, a contraption, like, ghostbusters?

[05:44] Meg: I should probably follow up before I talk too much more about it.

[05:46] Jessica: Think we need him on the show.

[05:49] Meg: Oh completely! The second I heard Merchant's House Museum, I was like, we got to get Dan.

[05:52] Jessica: Oh, my gosh. Love it.

[05:53] Meg: All right, are you ready for my engagement question?

[05:56] Jessica: Yes.

[05:57] Meg: All right. When we were little, wonderful to go on field trips from school.

[06:02] Jessica: Field trip.

[06:03] Meg: Do you have some of your favorite field trips? Do you remember? I mean, there were ones that we did regularly. We would go to The Metropolitan Museum of Art regularly. We went to the Museum of the City of New York. I remember that was kind of a regular one.

[06:17] Jessica: Yes, I actually I remember going to the Museum of the City of New York, and I remember there was some Indigenous People of the Americas display that was not called that at the time and we even had a little discussion about it way back in the '80s.

[06:35] Meg: Interesting. The American Museum of Natural History has to do a lot of, they have new plaques.

[06:40] Jessica: Oh, do they?

[06:41] Meg: Yes, they do. For the Dioramas.

[06:45] Jessica: That seems quite right. Yeah, the Dioramas were scandalous.

[06:50] Meg: By today's standards absolutely.

[06:50] Jessica: Yeah. Well, just putting someone from a different culture in a glass case, like they were a puma or an elephant, not good. Favorite field trip. I really liked going to London for our glee club field trip.

[07:11] Meg: Which I was not at.

[07:14] Jessica: For the glee clib field trip that you did not attend. We also went to DC. That was fun. That was really fun.

[07:20] Meg: And we met with Geraldine Ferraro.

[07:22] Jessica: We did. Oh, my gosh. You've got a good memory.

[07:24] Meg: I know. '80s reference much.

[07:26] Jessica: Nice. And as a child we would just go around New York, like to the aquarium or some kind of day trip. But yeah, there was fun.

[07:39] Meg: Cool. I think you will, it's going to come up at the very end of this story, but you will know why I asked that question. My sources are The Guardian, The New York Times, The New Yorker and the documentary that has recently come out called All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.

[07:57] Jessica: You must have dropped dead with joy when you heard that title.

[08:03] Meg: In the winter of 1986, Nan Goldin's slideshow, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, was published as a book by Mark Holborn, an editor at the Aperture Foundation, filled with photos of friends in their most private moments. The raw and intensely personal project had evolved over the last seven years. Its publication was not exactly a seal of approval from the exclusive, male dominated art world, but it certainly showed that some gatekeepers were ready to allow access to a new vision. Nan had a loft on the Bowery and tended bar at Tin Pan Alley on 49th Street in Times Square. She took photographs of the people she hung out with, drag queens and drug addicts and sex workers, people on the fringe, people who had come to New York because it had space for weirdos. The slideshow started as a way to entertain her friends. She played it to music in bars and clubs and performance spaces in Tribeca in the East Village. And people would shout back to the screen, either because they loved or hated a picture or were just excited to see their lives projected. The soundtrack at first was The Velvet Underground or James Brown or Nina Simone and then people started sending her music. She would change the slideshow based on her mood. It was never the same. It evolved. And of course, she kept taking more pictures. There was nothing off limits. The photos showed people doing drugs and having sex and fighting and sleeping and being sad in dark bars and hotel rooms and apartments. At one point, she had a series of photos of her friend having sex. Her friend got pretty upset, so Nan replaced them with photos of herself having sex. The goal wasn't to expose people against their wishes or to catch them in an unseemly moment. She looked for honesty. She wanted to show the drag queens as they wanted to be seen, as beautiful. Quote, "I'm not crashing. This is my party. This is my family, my history." As the slideshow became more popular, Nan got a lot of shit. The art world did not consider her work art. She was dismissed by male artists and gallerists. Someone actually told her, quote, "There is no such thing as a good woman artist." And that sounds so crazy. Who would ever say something? But I remember hearing things like that. That used to happen.

[10:39] Jessica: Well that's like women can't be funny.

[10:43] Meg: Right. Exactly. And even for those who didn't articulate their beliefs so bluntly as that, there was a presumption that women could not be voyeurs. My father once said to me that women couldn't play guitar because a guitar is an extension of a penis.

[11:02] Jessica: Well, that's not unlike Joan Jett's experience with her first and only guitar lesson. Did you ever hear that story?

[11:08] Meg: No.

[11:08] Jessica: She went to some school, I don't know what it was, but she went to have a guitar lesson. She already had a guitar and was sort of trying to pick it up. And she had a male guitar teacher who said that she had real potential. But don't bother trying to be a rock player, not a rock star, a player of rock and roll music because women just don't do that. And she was like, may I introduce you to The Runaways later on? But the idea yeah, a woman cannot touch something that is associated with maleness unless she is required to or invited to.

[11:59] Meg: Okay, so this is all from the perspective of being a visual artist. And so the idea that a woman can't be a voyeur because women are supposed to be looked at, they're not supposed to be the ones who are doing the looking.

[12:13] Jessica: Is it also because if a woman is a voyeur, that means that she is in spaces where she's not supposed to be?

[12:19] Meg: I think it's actually like I don't want to see what she sees. I don't give a fuck. Fortunately, Nan had a thick skin. Quote "I didn't care about good photography. I cared about complete honesty." And I'll tell you a little bit about her background. She'd grown up in a painfully conventional home in Maryland. Her parents didn't like each other very much, favored their sons, and were terrified of their smart, rebellious daughters. Her older sister Barbara fought with her parents and was sent to a mental institution. Ultimately, she committed suicide at 18 by lying down on the railroad tracks outside Union Station.

[12:59] Jessica: Oh my God.

[13:00] Meg: Nan was twelve.

[13:02] Jessica: Oh my God.

[13:03] Meg: Her parents response to the suicide? Move to a new town and never mention it again. This scarred Nan for life and made her hell bent on breaking free from that repression. And incidentally, there are many photos of couples in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, including her parents. Interesting. So in 1984, in small clubs around the city, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency was picking up steam. The art world didn't embrace her work, but they were pissed off by it, which helped its popularity with the counterculture. Nan had an opportunity to show it in a loft in Berlin. Now for the last three years, she'd been living with a man named Brian, who she'd met while bartending at Tin Pan Alley. He was an office worker and an ex-Marine. On their first date, Nan asked him to get her some heroin, which she was snorting at the time and he did, and they fell into each other through drugs and sex, and he became a subject of many of her photos. Their relationship was tumultuous and unhealthy, and they often tried to break up, but always came back to each other. Nan had been in Berlin showing her slideshow for a bit before Brian came to meet her there. When he found out she had cheated on him with a woman, he lost his shit and beat Nan to a pulp. He focused all of his rage specifically on her eyes. Her friend Sylvie managed to drag her out of the hotel room and get her to a hospital, saving her life. Brian left back in the room, trashed the place. He wrote bitch and cunt and lipstick on the walls and burned her diaries. Fortunately, she had left the slideshow at the loft where she was showing it, otherwise he would have destroyed that, too. All the bones in her orbital floor were broken, and she almost lost one of her eyes. It took months to recover, and she took photos of it. She says the photos of her battered face kept her from returning to him, and those photos became part of the slideshow. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency was part of the 1985 Whitney Biennial, and for those who don't know, the Whitney Biennial is a biennial exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art for up and coming artists, and it's known for setting trends and making careers. So it was a pretty big deal. A year later, when the Aperture Foundation wanted to publish The Ballad of Sexual Dependency as a book Nan wanted to include her family story in the text of the book. I mean, it's really her origin story. And her father tried to stop the publication of the book, accusing her of blaming him and her mother for her sister's suicide. And Brian tried to stop the publication, too for obvious reasons. Nan was indefatigable and the book was published, and the rest is art history. Photography curator Susan Bright says, quote "one only has to teach a class of undergraduate photography students to realize her influence. She gave legitimacy to snapshot style or diaristic. I would go so far as to say her work has come to represent an entire style" and now she has a huge influence in the art world. Case in point Nan had an operation in 2014 and was prescribed OxyContin as a painkiller. She took it as prescribed and became addicted when, by the grace of God, she managed to pull herself out of the addiction three years later, she realized that the Sackler family this is a quote "the Sackler family, whose name I knew from museums and galleries were responsible for the epidemic." A little background. The Sackler family owns Purdue Pharma, which manufactures and heavily markets Oxy. They also donate untold millions to cultural institutions like The Met, The Guggenheim, the Tate, the Louvre. Arthur Sackler funded the wing of The Met that houses The Temple of Dendur. We should do a poll of people who grew up in New York.

[17:20] Jessica: I mean, well, The Temple of Dender is like the I don't know, like the most glamorous and iconic piece of a museum in the city.

[17:27] Meg: Seriously. Me too. And the fact that the playground right outside the glass windows, I mean, that was my favorite playground. It was actually a safe playground because it was so close to the street.

[17:39] Jessica: And people who did not grow up in New York know The Temple of Dender because When Harry Met Sally is filmed there, they have their conversation about, oh, I don't know, gender politics. One of their conversations about that.

[17:54] Meg: Anyway, Nan was so incensed by this revelation that she took all the lessons she learned from her friends and ACT UP in the '80s, that's a callback to Episode Eight, The Queen of Mean + Silence = Death. And she staged a die-in's in The Temple of Dendor and The Guggenheim and other cultural institutions accepting Sackler money. And she won, thanks to P.A.I.N., which stands for Prescription Addiction Intervention Now, which she helped start, and her influence in the art world, major museums and galleries are now rejecting Sackler money and have removed their name from plaques and wings, including The Temple of Dendur.

[18:38] Jessica: Wow.

[18:39] Meg: Her art and her activism reek of integrity, honesty over secrecy. Quote, "When people talk about the immediacy in my work, that's what it's about. This need to remember and record every single thing."

[18:55] Jessica: Didn't she get some flak for taking photos of her children?

[19:00] Meg: No, I think that's a different photographer. Mann. No, no, she doesn't have children.

[19:05] Jessica: Well, then it's definitely not her. That was another woman photographer who had.

[19:11] Meg: Whose last name is Mann. Sally Mann.

[19:14] Jessica: Yeah. I thought you meant a man. No, no, Sally Mann. You're absolutely right. Sorry. Nan. Man. Sally Mann. Anyway, that's amazing. I had no idea that Nan Goldin had so much to do with bringing down in fact, almost everything to do with bringing down the Sacklers.

[19:32] Meg: Yeah, you got to see this documentary. It is so cool.

[19:36] Jessica: That's incredible.

[19:37] Meg: And it's very moving. And there was only so much that I could talk about because her story is there's so much more to her life. But, yeah, I tried to focus in on this particular piece of artwork.

[19:48] Jessica: Pretty amazing. Thank you.

[20:02] Meg: We're back.

[20:03] Jessica: We're back. I found a writer who I'm now kind of obsessed with.

[20:09] Meg: Oh.

[20:10] Jessica: His name is Tim Lawrence.

[20:12] Meg: Okay.

[20:12] Jessica: He's a Brit, but he has some very interesting things to say about the American music scene.

[20:19] Meg: Okay. How old is he?

[20:21] Jessica: Our age.

[20:22] Meg: Okay. And he's writing about music right now?

[20:25] Jessica: But he wrote a book that I'm reading from and about. "Listen and You Will Hear all the Houses that Walked There Before': A History of Drag Balls, Houses and the Culture of Voguing". So we had Seder at my dad's house last night, and it was such a joy to see the teenagers there, the kids. And I was thinking about how it's amazing that your son and Ale's son and daughter were all getting along and they're the age that we were during a lot of what we talk about on this podcast.

[21:07] Meg: That's true. Good point.

[21:08] Jessica: And I thought, like, what did they care about? What did they know? What did they not know? You and I speak so frequently about music and going out and how we socialized and all that kind of stuff. And I was wondering, what did they really know about what our nightlife was or the nightlife that we cared about? Because when I hear about what they do, I'm like, is that as boring as I think it is? It seems extraordinarily boring. Sorry, kids. And then I thought so much of what we were into has been sort of repackaged for television right now, or streaming. The most obvious example is Stranger Things. That has repackaged '80s culture into this not actually '80s, it's like '80s cosplay. What? You have a look on your face.

[22:06] Meg: Well, I feel like I'm not doing Billy justice, or Alice Justice, for that matter. It's what they tell us they're doing. They seem to be enjoying it and honestly, like, we don't know exactly what they're doing. We just know what they've said.

[22:19] Jessica: No, I'm not saying that we know. I'm saying what we see and hear is boring. But I'm sure that they are keeping us very ignorant on many, many different levels. So maybe you should see this as like I'm throwing down the gauntlet. All right, kids, tell us how cool you really are.

[22:41] Meg: I don't know if I want to know.

[22:43] Jessica: That's actually a very good point as well. I was thinking about what I wanted to talk about today, and in thinking about it, ran across this piece that I'm going to read from. And I was thinking about how we were, going dancing was such a very big thing and how dance trends still existed. Dance trends. If you see something in the movies or whatever, it's always like the '60s, like the Mashed Potato or the Stomp or whatever. But there were dance trends. I think that on the last podcast, I was talking about how Ale and I would drool over Mel Gibson sadly, and practice dance moves in her room. And there were, like, moves that you had to know how to do. And that by the time we were in college, I guess it was the beginning of our senior year, the incredibly famous and we've talked about it on this podcast several times, Paris Is Burning came out and it coincided with Madonna's song Vogue, and there was a real focus on that dance style at that time, but not I mean, aside from Jennie Livingston's Paris Is Burning, there wasn't a lot of information about where it came from. And the number of people, I think, who have actually seen Paris Is Burning is not as large as we would think.

[24:20] Meg: Right. I saw it when it first came out and what I remember about Vogue, Madonna's video of Vogue was that she got some backlash because it was like she was co-opting somebody else's or another community's culture and making it her own. You know, all of that kind of thought was very new to me. I was like, isn't it a celebration? I don't understand.

[24:44] Jessica: Well, particularly because the dancers in that video were from one of the houses and they wound up being her backup dancers on her Blonde Ambition tour.

[24:54] Meg: Right. But I do remember that there was just everything she did, she got a little bit of backlash.

[24:59] Jessica: Yes. And so she was doing something right.

[25:02] Meg: I mean, look, who am I to say? But it didn't seem like the worst thing in the world to me.

[25:06] Jessica: Not to me neither. So with that in mind, I'm gonna just I'm going to read a little bit from this person who I'm now kind of obsessed with, and I want to read a lot more of his work. Just as a quick aside, Tim Lawrence is the author of three books that trace the history of DJ music, dance and art culture in New York City during the '70s and early '80s. Love Saves the Day, a History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970 to 1979. Hold On to Your Dreams, Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992, and Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980 to 1983. Together they amount to an unprecedented in depth account of the importance of New York City's DJ music, dance and art culture during the '70s and early'80s. And they are all published by Duke University Press.

[26:02] Meg: Cool. And that's from the jacket of the book?

[26:06] Jessica: That is the bio that I found online. Got it. For Tim Lawrence. Not only did Vogue and drag balls and all that not start with Madonna, it didn't even start in this century. So in my usual way, I'm going to take us back in time. So this is thanks to Tim Lawrence. Here we go. Bursting into public consciousness between 1989 and 1991, the culture of drag balls and voguing can be traced back to the second half of the 19th century. Harlem's Hamilton Lodge staged its first queer masquerade ball in 1869. Wow. And some 20 years later, a medical student stumbled into another ball that was taking place in Valhalla Hall on the Lower East Side. He witnessed 500 same sex male and female couples, quote, "Waltzing sedately to the music of a good band". A rickety old building situated at 119 East 11th Street, Webster Hall, where we used to go and it still exists. I totally danced at Webster Hall. Played host to further events during the 1920s. And by the end of the decade, masquerade parties were being staged in conspicuous venues such as Madison Square Garden and the Astor Hotel (Hotel Astor) where they attracted crowds of up to 6000 people. Invited to attend another ball at Hamilton Lodge by the entrepreneur and party host A'Lelia Walker, Harlem renaissance social activist and writer Langston Hughes proclaimed the drag balls to be the, quote, "strangest and gaudiest of all Harlem spectacles in the 1920s" and described them as "spectacles in color". Noting the presence of, quote, "distinguished white celebrities" during this period, Hughes concluded that Harlem was in vogue and the negro was in vogue.

[28:04] Meg: And who said that again?

[28:05] Jessica: Langston Hughes.

[28:06] Meg: Oh, and wait, and you were saying earlier that both same sex men and same sex women were partying together.

[28:16] Jessica: Yes, which also went wildly out of fashion. Held once a year, the balls came to feature a procession known as Parade of the Fairies which included drag queen contestants sacheting through the auditorium in preparation for a costume competition. For the rest of the evening, dancers took to the floor in couples and formed partnerships that were superficially straight with men including lesbians dressed as men and gay men who favored butch style accompanying women or men dressed as women, as well as straight femmes while any number of straights watched on from the sidelines.

[28:54] Meg: It's so interesting given all this talk about outlawing drag, which is oh so interesting. I mean, as if you could?

[29:03] Jessica: Who is outlawing drag?

[29:07] Meg: That's in the news. Not New York, but some states trying to...

[29:14] Jessica: Oh, oh, oh like Florida. Ew. Okay.

[29:15] Meg: Right.

[29:16] Jessica: Well, that actually is going to come up in our little chat because it was outlawed in New York City. So here's a little quote about the Parade of Fairies from the time "About 12:30 a.m. We visited this place and found approximately 5000 people, colored and white, men attired in women's clothes and vice versa" reported a team of undercover investigators following an inspection of the Hamilton Lodge Ball held in the Manhattan Casino in February 1928. The affair, we were informed, was a, quote, "Fag masquerade ball." All these words. I know. Four years later, Broadway Brevities reported from another ball that men rivaled birds of paradise and peacocks, their plumed headdresses nodding and undulating from their shapely heads. Soon after, novelists Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler evoked the drag ball floor as, quote, "a scene whose celestial flavor and cerulean coloring no angelic painter or nectarish poet has ever conceived."

[30:30] Meg: Now, who are these undercover people who were? These parties were just for the participants or for the community? Straight people didn't come?

[30:38] Jessica: Straight people came to watch.

[30:40] Meg: So who's undercover?

[30:42] Jessica: Well, good question. Because as all of the balls gained popularity and the open expression of homosexuality gained popularity, the New York State legislature had criminalized homosexual solicitation in 1923 as part of a wider backlash around male male sexual relations. But dragball organizers found that they could continue to stage events if a neighborhood organization applied for official police sponsorship on their behalf. The hiatus lasted until the autumn of 1931, when officers, reacting to the cultural experimentation of the Prohibition years and the onset of the Depression, began to clamp down on the city's queer community and targeted the balls.

[31:30] Meg: So, interesting.

[31:31] Jessica: Indeed.

[31:33] Meg: I wonder if the resurgence of these balls happened because people knew of the history of them or just spontaneously was born again.

[31:45] Jessica: They never went away.

[31:46] Meg: Okay.

[31:47] Jessica: They just went underground.

[31:49] Meg: Okay. And then were passed down from generation to generation somehow.

[31:53] Jessica: Well, it revives full force in the very late '60s, early '70s, and I found out a piece of information that blew my mind. Because one wonders, why did New York become a haven for gay men? And the same might be said for San Francisco. Why? It's because during World War II, soldiers were being processed in and out of New York and San Francisco, and they saw already existing gay cultures from whatever their little tiny hometowns were. They were like, there's no way I'm going back.

[32:30] Meg: Oh, so you're saying because soldiers were being processed, they were coming from all over the country to one place?

[32:37] Jessica: Yes. And they saw something that they would never, ever be able to experience anyplace else. Which, by the way, is a callback to our field trip with Russell, because he said exactly the same thing. I had never seen anything like it before, and I knew that these were my people. Anyway, so it never really went away and interestingly, it fragmented further because in the '60s, it really started to break down on racial lines and one of the major bones of contention within the members of the drag community was that it became more like a pageant and there was more judging going on.

[33:22] Meg: Interesting.

[33:22] Jessica: And the judges were white, and if you were not white, you could only win if you looked white.

[33:34] Meg: Oh no! No, no, no. That's not that's not in the spirit.

[33:39] Jessica: Oh no. So in Jennie Livingston's film Paris Is Burning, we're introduced to all of the houses, the drag ball houses. That's when this started to pop up. So, founded in 1972, the first house came into existence when Lottie, a Harlem drag queen who worked in the welfare office at 125th Street, asked Crystal LaBeija to co-promote a ball. One of the few black queens to be awarded a Queen of the Ball title at a white organized ball, LaBeija had also become tired of the anti-black bias of the balls, as she made clear during a documentary that you can actually see on Netflix called The Queen by Frank Simon. Cool. And it tracks the Miss All-America Camp Beauty Contest. LaBeija and others competed in front of a panel that included Larry Rivers and Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol would have gone to the opening of an envelope. Honestly, it's crazy. He popped up everywhere. Convinced the result was a caucasian fix, LaBeija flew into a rage when host Flawless Sabrina declared the winner to be Harlow, described by The New York Times as a, quote, "frail." I mean, The New York Times was reporting on this. Crazy. Hello. "A frail, blonde, pouting young man formerly Miss Philadelphia." The experience prepared the way for LaBeija's collaboration with Lottie. Crystal agreed to do it so long as she was a highlight of the ball, notes Terrence Legend International. Lottie made the deal sweeter by convincing Crystal that they should start a group and name it the House of LaBeija with Crystal's title as mother. Crystal agreed. The event was titled Crystal & Lottie LaBeija presents the first annual House of LaBeija Ball at Up the Downstairs Case on West 115th Street and 5th Avenue in Harlem.

[35:37] Meg: What year are we?

[35:39] Jessica: 1972.

[35:40] Meg: Wow. So it's not that long ago.

[35:43] Jessica: Oh, no. Now, just because this is one of my favorite drag stories of all time and we've talked about it on this podcast before. The infamous Dorian Corey, the drag queen who had the mummified body in the naugahyde.

[35:57] Meg: Okay, but that's in the '70s, isn't it?

[36:00] Jessica: Yes. Referencing the glamorous fashion houses were glamour and style, whose glamour and style they admired. Other black drag queens started to form drag houses or families that headed by a mother and sometimes a father would socialize, look after one another and prepare for balls. Mother Dorian and Father Chipper founded the House of Corey in 1972. And two years later, Father Jay set up the House of Dior, after which La Duchess Wong and Nicole Wong established the House of Wong and Paris Dupree and Burger Dupree inaugurated the House of Dupree in 1975. And this kept going on in Manhattan until in Brooklyn, they started popping up as well. The House of Chanel sprung up in Brooklyn during 1979 and 1980. So now we are in the decade that Jennie Livingston got into in Paris Is Burning. From this point on, contestants battled to win trophies. There were multiple entrants walking along an imaginary runway. A group of scrupulous judges would cast their verdicts, sometimes rewarding optimum realness or the ability to pass as straight to the outside world. Quote "it was our goal then to look like white women," LaBeija told Cunningham reporter as she reflected on the days before the black queens organized their own balls and initiated a very particular housing boom. "They used to tell me, you have Negroid features. And I'd say, that's all right, I have white eyes. And that's how it was back then." But it was in the 1980s that diversity really came to rule. Willi Ninja founded the House of Ninja in 1981 and '82 and set out his intention to bring Asian aesthetics and philosophy into the ball world. Possibly founded by Father Hector in 1982, the House of Xtravaganza, the first Latin house, formally entered the drag ball scene when they attended the House of Omni ball in 1983. In 1987, the boutique owner and fashion designer Pat Field established the House of Field as the first white downtown house to walk the uptown balls. We call ourselves House of Field now because that is what we've evolved into. Myra Christopher, a sales clerk in the boutique who encouraged Field to create the house commented in '88, we were always around, though, as Pat Field kids and we'll evolve into something else eventually. Becoming a house was just socializing.

[38:32] Meg: So are we talking about the stylist, Patricia Field?

[38:35] Jessica: Yes.

[38:36] Meg: So she had her own house.

[38:37] Jessica: So get this. So this is another back to our past. Did you ever buy things at House of Field?

[38:44] Meg: Of course.

[38:45] Jessica: All the time. Because Patricia Field was, in my mind, the alternate if Betsy Johnson didn't have what you wanted.

[38:55] Meg: Right. No, it was super funky, like, I mean if you could afford it.

[38:59] Jessica: Yeah. And I never understood why were the shoes so big?

[39:04] Meg: Oh, that's so funny.

[39:07] Jessica: Yes. Pat Field was always outfitting drag queens.

[39:11] Meg: Well, I guess I knew that. I just didn't know that. I mean to have your own house feels like a whole other level of involvement in the community.

[39:25] Jessica: Absolutely and as many people know, Pat Field also was the stylist for Sex and the City.

[39:30] Meg: Yeah.

[39:30] Jessica: So it's a great example of how there's a trickle down of street look to fashion, to high fashion. Right. And it's sort of the opposite of what the Anna Wintour character that Meryl Streep plays in The Devil Wears Prada says to Andy. You know like, you're wearing that blue sweater because we told you to. And it's like, actually, no, the queens up in Harlem told you. And then that's how that goes.

[40:04] Meg: That's nice. I like that.

[40:04] Jessica: So, yes. I just think that's worth a moment. Now, there's another thing that I found really fascinating about where the 1980s drag culture came from. Growing out of the drag queen ritual of throwing shade or subtly insulting another queen voguing emerged as a distinctive dance of first the houses and then inevitably, the balls where specific voguing categories were eventually introduced. Quote "it all started at an after hours club called Footsteps on Second Avenue and 14th Street" which, by the way, I have been to, says David DePino, an influential DJ for the voguing community. Paris Dupree was there, and a bunch of these black queens were throwing shade at each other. Paris had a Vogue magazine in her bag and while she was dancing, she took it out, opened it up to a page where a model was posing and then stopped in the new pose again on the beat. The provocation was returned in kind and then Paris went in front of her and did another pose adds DePino. This was all shade. They were trying to make a prettier pose than each other. And it soon caught on at the balls. At first they called it posing and then because it started from Vogue magazine, they called it voguing. An alternative account has it that voguing was first practiced by the black gay inmates of Rikers Island, a New York City jail who pursued the movement as a way of attracting the attention of boys and throwing shade. Maybe they didn't have a name for it, but that's what they were doing, or so it said, notes Kevin UltraOomni, "I know Paris was an early pioneer of voguing, but I believe that vogue existed in some other form through other people as well. I also think that a lot of voguing poses come from African art and Egyptian hieroglyphics." So just to come full circle, Langston Hughes in the 1920s, the Negro is in Vogue, and then they have chosen to pose from Vogue. So nice wrap, Jessica. That is a quick.

[42:18] Meg: And tell us again the name of the book and the author.

[42:21] Jessica: Well, the author is Tim Lawrence. His books are Love Saves the Day, Hold on to Your Dreams, and Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980 to 1983.

[42:33] Meg: Nice.

[42:34] Jessica: Oh, and Love Saves the Day, the subtitle is, a history of American Dance Music Culture, 1970 to 1979. Deep in vogue we are no longer, but we can go back there. Okay.

[42:56] Meg: So I think the tie in is clear.

[42:59] Jessica: I think the tie in is very clear.

[43:01] Meg: Drag queens. Drag queens and the representation of drag queens and the history of it. And Nan Goldin certainly want to tell the drag queen story respectfully and beautifully.

[43:14] Jessica: As does Tim Lawrence, who now we have to stalk and make him our friend. But yes, drag queens. And there was another thing that occurred to me. Did you watch the TV show The Deuce?

[43:28] Meg: No, I haven't. You've talked about it on the program.

[43:30] Jessica: We've talked about it before.

[43:33] Meg: On the program. This is our program.

[43:35] Jessica: You're listening to NPR.

[43:39] Meg: No, I haven't. You know, I should obviously it comes up in so many articles I read.

[43:45] Jessica: Well, it's something that you would just love, but I think one of the characters is based on Nan Goldin.

[43:51] Meg: Oh, I absolutely know that's true because it came up in the stuff I was reading this week.

[43:56] Jessica: Yeah, yeah.

[43:56] Meg: And Tin Pan Alley, that bar which made me go yeah, she was the bartender there. And the woman who owned Tin Pan Alley primarily hired sex workers because she wanted to give them a way to provide for themselves that wasn't what they didn't necessarily want to have to do.

[44:15] Jessica: So the main character, the female character, is the one who employs sex workers on the show. And I can't remember if she is also a photographer or if they broke that out into an actual other

[44:27] Meg: Maybe 2 people.

[44:30] Jessica: But anyway, it's another reason to watch the show. Whether or not it's the best thing ever or glamorizes, whatever, it's still a hell of a trip. Watch it.[00:16] Meg: Welcome to Desperately Seeking the'80s. I am Meg.

[00:19] Jessica: And I'm Jessica. And Meg and I have been friends since 1982. We got through middle school and high school together here in New York City where we still live.

[00:30] Meg: And where we podcast about New York City in the '80s. I do ripped from the headlines

[00:35] Jessica: And I do pop culture.

[00:37] Meg: So, Jessica, last week we did our first live recording at the amazing Malt & Mold. What an adventure.

[00:44] Jessica: That was so much fun. I had no idea what to expect. We can even start with my epic insanity, which is that I showed up without any of our recording equipment and you didn't kill me.

[00:58] Meg: I didn't.

[01:00] Jessica: I locked eyes with you when I showed up, and I had this profound lack of understanding. I just looked at you with you had, like, death rays coming out of your face, and I was scared. What? Oh no.

[01:15] Meg: I was like, does the roadie, who we don't have, have all the equipment?

[01:20] Jessica: In my brain, yes that's right.

[01:23] Meg: So we jumped in an Uber and went all the way uptown again to Jessica's place and got all the equipment and then came back. And do you remember the name of our amazing Uber driver?

[01:34] Jessica: Jordy.

[01:35] Meg: Jordy. He was so supportive. He was so sweet.

[01:40] Jessica: Jordy was like the Uber angel.

[01:43] Meg: And then we were just, like, 20 minutes late getting started, and everyone was fine because they were getting their beers and their cheese, and it was fine.

[01:51] Jessica: The takeaway, as far as I'm concerned, is it's good to be on time, but people are very forgiving, and it was our first time doing it ever.

[02:00] Meg: First time doing it. And the sound quality was great. The only thing that I am sad about is that we didn't hear more of our audience. So next time I can bring our remote recorder and we can get some room tone.

[02:14] Jessica: We had a very lively audience.

[02:15] Meg: We had a really lively audience. And you can't really tell from the recording because our mics are so sensitive to us and not to other people. It's very interesting.

[02:24] Jessica: It's like they were made just for us and our little egos.

[02:29] Meg: Do you want to get started?

[02:31] Jessica: Oh, please. Okay. Yes, I do. Meg, before we begin, we have a note from a BFF of the podcast. Our friend Nick. Who, like some of the other wonderful men who listen to our podcast, cannot contain himself from correcting us. And I'm open to corrections because I know that I am frequently, I won't say poorly researched. It's just a bit sketchy.

[03:12] Meg: I like the discourse. I approve of the back and forth, for sure.

[03:16] Jessica: Well, I like that he begins like this. Hello. Fabulous episode. Wonderful way to start. What more can we ask for? He says, I am so sorry that I could not be there. He was not at Malt & Mold. He says, Mr. Pedantic strikes again. That's great self knowledge. The first building granted landmark status in New York City in 1965 was the 300 year old The Wyckoff House in Brooklyn. In fact, the first group of buildings landmarked that day, which became the very first landmarks in Manhattan, were the Merchant's House Museum, the Stuyvesant Fish House, and the remaining houses of Colonnade Row/LaGrange Terrace at 428, 430, 432 and 434 Lafayette Street, which isn't that The Public Theater.

[04:10] Meg: Everything is in the same neighborhood. The Merchant's House Museum, The Public Theater.

[04:15] Jessica: I thought that the Colonnade. Lafayette street. I thought that Colonnade Row. Anyway, then he says the former Astor Library/Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, now, The Public Theater was designated a landmark later in 1965, while the Salmagundi Club was not landmarked until 1969 and he even includes a press clipping from thevillagepreservation.org or sorry, villagepreservation.org. He goes on to say, the Merchant's House Museum was the first Manhattan building designated.

[04:51] Meg: Now we know.

[04:52] Jessica: Now we know. And as a quick plug for the Merchant's House Museum, you can visit the Merchant's House. And it is quite something. And because of Nick's involvement with the Merchant's House Museum, I had the great and good fortune of attending a seance there.

[05:09] Meg: Okay. My very good friend Dan is actually a ghost hunter, and he has done a tour of ghosts in the Merchant's House Museum.

[05:21] Jessica: Has he turned anything up?

[05:23] Meg: You know, I haven't gone on the tour so I don't. I assume so. Otherwise, why would he continue to do?

[05:29] Jessica: Is he a ghost hunter or a ghost of New York tour guide?

[05:34] Meg: I think he hunts them. I don't think he means them harm, but I think he definitely wants to find some.

[05:38] Jessica: And does he want to put them in, like, a contraption, like, ghostbusters?

[05:44] Meg: I should probably follow up before I talk too much more about it.

[05:46] Jessica: Think we need him on the show.

[05:49] Meg: Oh completely! The second I heard Merchant's House Museum, I was like, we got to get Dan.

[05:52] Jessica: Oh, my gosh. Love it.

[05:53] Meg: All right, are you ready for my engagement question?

[05:56] Jessica: Yes.

[05:57] Meg: All right. When we were little, wonderful to go on field trips from school.

[06:02] Jessica: Field trip.

[06:03] Meg: Do you have some of your favorite field trips? Do you remember? I mean, there were ones that we did regularly. We would go to The Metropolitan Museum of Art regularly. We went to the Museum of the City of New York. I remember that was kind of a regular one.

[06:17] Jessica: Yes, I actually I remember going to the Museum of the City of New York, and I remember there was some Indigenous People of the Americas display that was not called that at the time and we even had a little discussion about it way back in the '80s.

[06:35] Meg: Interesting. The American Museum of Natural History has to do a lot of, they have new plaques.

[06:40] Jessica: Oh, do they?

[06:41] Meg: Yes, they do. For the Dioramas.

[06:45] Jessica: That seems quite right. Yeah, the Dioramas were scandalous.

[06:50] Meg: By today's standards absolutely.

[06:50] Jessica: Yeah. Well, just putting someone from a different culture in a glass case, like they were a puma or an elephant, not good. Favorite field trip. I really liked going to London for our glee club field trip.

[07:11] Meg: Which I was not at.

[07:14] Jessica: For the glee clib field trip that you did not attend. We also went to DC. That was fun. That was really fun.

[07:20] Meg: And we met with Geraldine Ferraro.

[07:22] Jessica: We did. Oh, my gosh. You've got a good memory.

[07:24] Meg: I know. '80s reference much.

[07:26] Jessica: Nice. And as a child we would just go around New York, like to the aquarium or some kind of day trip. But yeah, there was fun.

[07:39] Meg: Cool. I think you will, it's going to come up at the very end of this story, but you will know why I asked that question. My sources are The Guardian, The New York Times, The New Yorker and the documentary that has recently come out called All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.

[07:57] Jessica: You must have dropped dead with joy when you heard that title.

[08:03] Meg: In the winter of 1986, Nan Goldin's slideshow, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, was published as a book by Mark Holborn, an editor at the Aperture Foundation, filled with photos of friends in their most private moments. The raw and intensely personal project had evolved over the last seven years. Its publication was not exactly a seal of approval from the exclusive, male dominated art world, but it certainly showed that some gatekeepers were ready to allow access to a new vision. Nan had a loft on the Bowery and tended bar at Tin Pan Alley on 49th Street in Times Square. She took photographs of the people she hung out with, drag queens and drug addicts and sex workers, people on the fringe, people who had come to New York because it had space for weirdos. The slideshow started as a way to entertain her friends. She played it to music in bars and clubs and performance spaces in Tribeca in the East Village. And people would shout back to the screen, either because they loved or hated a picture or were just excited to see their lives projected. The soundtrack at first was The Velvet Underground or James Brown or Nina Simone and then people started sending her music. She would change the slideshow based on her mood. It was never the same. It evolved. And of course, she kept taking more pictures. There was nothing off limits. The photos showed people doing drugs and having sex and fighting and sleeping and being sad in dark bars and hotel rooms and apartments. At one point, she had a series of photos of her friend having sex. Her friend got pretty upset, so Nan replaced them with photos of herself having sex. The goal wasn't to expose people against their wishes or to catch them in an unseemly moment. She looked for honesty. She wanted to show the drag queens as they wanted to be seen, as beautiful. Quote, "I'm not crashing. This is my party. This is my family, my history." As the slideshow became more popular, Nan got a lot of shit. The art world did not consider her work art. She was dismissed by male artists and gallerists. Someone actually told her, quote, "There is no such thing as a good woman artist." And that sounds so crazy. Who would ever say something? But I remember hearing things like that. That used to happen.

[10:39] Jessica: Well that's like women can't be funny.

[10:43] Meg: Right. Exactly. And even for those who didn't articulate their beliefs so bluntly as that, there was a presumption that women could not be voyeurs. My father once said to me that women couldn't play guitar because a guitar is an extension of a penis.

[11:02] Jessica: Well, that's not unlike Joan Jett's experience with her first and only guitar lesson. Did you ever hear that story?

[11:08] Meg: No.

[11:08] Jessica: She went to some school, I don't know what it was, but she went to have a guitar lesson. She already had a guitar and was sort of trying to pick it up. And she had a male guitar teacher who said that she had real potential. But don't bother trying to be a rock player, not a rock star, a player of rock and roll music because women just don't do that. And she was like, may I introduce you to The Runaways later on? But the idea yeah, a woman cannot touch something that is associated with maleness unless she is required to or invited to.

[11:59] Meg: Okay, so this is all from the perspective of being a visual artist. And so the idea that a woman can't be a voyeur because women are supposed to be looked at, they're not supposed to be the ones who are doing the looking.

[12:13] Jessica: Is it also because if a woman is a voyeur, that means that she is in spaces where she's not supposed to be?

[12:19] Meg: I think it's actually like I don't want to see what she sees. I don't give a fuck. Fortunately, Nan had a thick skin. Quote "I didn't care about good photography. I cared about complete honesty." And I'll tell you a little bit about her background. She'd grown up in a painfully conventional home in Maryland. Her parents didn't like each other very much, favored their sons, and were terrified of their smart, rebellious daughters. Her older sister Barbara fought with her parents and was sent to a mental institution. Ultimately, she committed suicide at 18 by lying down on the railroad tracks outside Union Station.

[12:59] Jessica: Oh my God.

[13:00] Meg: Nan was twelve.

[13:02] Jessica: Oh my God.

[13:03] Meg: Her parents response to the suicide? Move to a new town and never mention it again. This scarred Nan for life and made her hell bent on breaking free from that repression. And incidentally, there are many photos of couples in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, including her parents. Interesting. So in 1984, in small clubs around the city, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency was picking up steam. The art world didn't embrace her work, but they were pissed off by it, which helped its popularity with the counterculture. Nan had an opportunity to show it in a loft in Berlin. Now for the last three years, she'd been living with a man named Brian, who she'd met while bartending at Tin Pan Alley. He was an office worker and an ex-Marine. On their first date, Nan asked him to get her some heroin, which she was snorting at the time and he did, and they fell into each other through drugs and sex, and he became a subject of many of her photos. Their relationship was tumultuous and unhealthy, and they often tried to break up, but always came back to each other. Nan had been in Berlin showing her slideshow for a bit before Brian came to meet her there. When he found out she had cheated on him with a woman, he lost his shit and beat Nan to a pulp. He focused all of his rage specifically on her eyes. Her friend Sylvie managed to drag her out of the hotel room and get her to a hospital, saving her life. Brian left back in the room, trashed the place. He wrote bitch and cunt and lipstick on the walls and burned her diaries. Fortunately, she had left the slideshow at the loft where she was showing it, otherwise he would have destroyed that, too. All the bones in her orbital floor were broken, and she almost lost one of her eyes. It took months to recover, and she took photos of it. She says the photos of her battered face kept her from returning to him, and those photos became part of the slideshow. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency was part of the 1985 Whitney Biennial, and for those who don't know, the Whitney Biennial is a biennial exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art for up and coming artists, and it's known for setting trends and making careers. So it was a pretty big deal. A year later, when the Aperture Foundation wanted to publish The Ballad of Sexual Dependency as a book Nan wanted to include her family story in the text of the book. I mean, it's really her origin story. And her father tried to stop the publication of the book, accusing her of blaming him and her mother for her sister's suicide. And Brian tried to stop the publication, too for obvious reasons. Nan was indefatigable and the book was published, and the rest is art history. Photography curator Susan Bright says, quote "one only has to teach a class of undergraduate photography students to realize her influence. She gave legitimacy to snapshot style or diaristic. I would go so far as to say her work has come to represent an entire style" and now she has a huge influence in the art world. Case in point Nan had an operation in 2014 and was prescribed OxyContin as a painkiller. She took it as prescribed and became addicted when, by the grace of God, she managed to pull herself out of the addiction three years later, she realized that the Sackler family this is a quote "the Sackler family, whose name I knew from museums and galleries were responsible for the epidemic." A little background. The Sackler family owns Purdue Pharma, which manufactures and heavily markets Oxy. They also donate untold millions to cultural institutions like The Met, The Guggenheim, the Tate, the Louvre. Arthur Sackler funded the wing of The Met that houses The Temple of Dendur. We should do a poll of people who grew up in New York.

[17:20] Jessica: I mean, well, The Temple of Dender is like the I don't know, like the most glamorous and iconic piece of a museum in the city.

[17:27] Meg: Seriously. Me too. And the fact that the playground right outside the glass windows, I mean, that was my favorite playground. It was actually a safe playground because it was so close to the street.

[17:39] Jessica: And people who did not grow up in New York know The Temple of Dender because When Harry Met Sally is filmed there, they have their conversation about, oh, I don't know, gender politics. One of their conversations about that.

[17:54] Meg: Anyway, Nan was so incensed by this revelation that she took all the lessons she learned from her friends and ACT UP in the '80s, that's a callback to Episode Eight, The Queen of Mean + Silence = Death. And she staged a die-in's in The Temple of Dendor and The Guggenheim and other cultural institutions accepting Sackler money. And she won, thanks to P.A.I.N., which stands for Prescription Addiction Intervention Now, which she helped start, and her influence in the art world, major museums and galleries are now rejecting Sackler money and have removed their name from plaques and wings, including The Temple of Dendur.

[18:38] Jessica: Wow.

[18:39] Meg: Her art and her activism reek of integrity, honesty over secrecy. Quote, "When people talk about the immediacy in my work, that's what it's about. This need to remember and record every single thing."

[18:55] Jessica: Didn't she get some flak for taking photos of her children?

[19:00] Meg: No, I think that's a different photographer. Mann. No, no, she doesn't have children.

[19:05] Jessica: Well, then it's definitely not her. That was another woman photographer who had.

[19:11] Meg: Whose last name is Mann. Sally Mann.

[19:14] Jessica: Yeah. I thought you meant a man. No, no, Sally Mann. You're absolutely right. Sorry. Nan. Man. Sally Mann. Anyway, that's amazing. I had no idea that Nan Goldin had so much to do with bringing down in fact, almost everything to do with bringing down the Sacklers.

[19:32] Meg: Yeah, you got to see this documentary. It is so cool.

[19:36] Jessica: That's incredible.

[19:37] Meg: And it's very moving. And there was only so much that I could talk about because her story is there's so much more to her life. But, yeah, I tried to focus in on this particular piece of artwork.

[19:48] Jessica: Pretty amazing. Thank you.

[20:02] Meg: We're back.

[20:03] Jessica: We're back. I found a writer who I'm now kind of obsessed with.

[20:09] Meg: Oh.

[20:10] Jessica: His name is Tim Lawrence.

[20:12] Meg: Okay.

[20:12] Jessica: He's a Brit, but he has some very interesting things to say about the American music scene.

[20:19] Meg: Okay. How old is he?

[20:21] Jessica: Our age.

[20:22] Meg: Okay. And he's writing about music right now?

[20:25] Jessica: But he wrote a book that I'm reading from and about. "Listen and You Will Hear all the Houses that Walked There Before': A History of Drag Balls, Houses and the Culture of Voguing". So we had Seder at my dad's house last night, and it was such a joy to see the teenagers there, the kids. And I was thinking about how it's amazing that your son and Ale's son and daughter were all getting along and they're the age that we were during a lot of what we talk about on this podcast.

[21:07] Meg: That's true. Good point.

[21:08] Jessica: And I thought, like, what did they care about? What did they know? What did they not know? You and I speak so frequently about music and going out and how we socialized and all that kind of stuff. And I was wondering, what did they really know about what our nightlife was or the nightlife that we cared about? Because when I hear about what they do, I'm like, is that as boring as I think it is? It seems extraordinarily boring. Sorry, kids. And then I thought so much of what we were into has been sort of repackaged for television right now, or streaming. The most obvious example is Stranger Things. That has repackaged '80s culture into this not actually '80s, it's like '80s cosplay. What? You have a look on your face.

[22:06] Meg: Well, I feel like I'm not doing Billy justice, or Alice Justice, for that matter. It's what they tell us they're doing. They seem to be enjoying it and honestly, like, we don't know exactly what they're doing. We just know what they've said.

[22:19] Jessica: No, I'm not saying that we know. I'm saying what we see and hear is boring. But I'm sure that they are keeping us very ignorant on many, many different levels. So maybe you should see this as like I'm throwing down the gauntlet. All right, kids, tell us how cool you really are.

[22:41] Meg: I don't know if I want to know.

[22:43] Jessica: That's actually a very good point as well. I was thinking about what I wanted to talk about today, and in thinking about it, ran across this piece that I'm going to read from. And I was thinking about how we were, going dancing was such a very big thing and how dance trends still existed. Dance trends. If you see something in the movies or whatever, it's always like the '60s, like the Mashed Potato or the Stomp or whatever. But there were dance trends. I think that on the last podcast, I was talking about how Ale and I would drool over Mel Gibson sadly, and practice dance moves in her room. And there were, like, moves that you had to know how to do. And that by the time we were in college, I guess it was the beginning of our senior year, the incredibly famous and we've talked about it on this podcast several times, Paris Is Burning came out and it coincided with Madonna's song Vogue, and there was a real focus on that dance style at that time, but not I mean, aside from Jennie Livingston's Paris Is Burning, there wasn't a lot of information about where it came from. And the number of people, I think, who have actually seen Paris Is Burning is not as large as we would think.

[24:20] Meg: Right. I saw it when it first came out and what I remember about Vogue, Madonna's video of Vogue was that she got some backlash because it was like she was co-opting somebody else's or another community's culture and making it her own. You know, all of that kind of thought was very new to me. I was like, isn't it a celebration? I don't understand.

[24:44] Jessica: Well, particularly because the dancers in that video were from one of the houses and they wound up being her backup dancers on her Blonde Ambition tour.

[24:54] Meg: Right. But I do remember that there was just everything she did, she got a little bit of backlash.

[24:59] Jessica: Yes. And so she was doing something right.

[25:02] Meg: I mean, look, who am I to say? But it didn't seem like the worst thing in the world to me.

[25:06] Jessica: Not to me neither. So with that in mind, I'm gonna just I'm going to read a little bit from this person who I'm now kind of obsessed with, and I want to read a lot more of his work. Just as a quick aside, Tim Lawrence is the author of three books that trace the history of DJ music, dance and art culture in New York City during the '70s and early '80s. Love Saves the Day, a History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970 to 1979. Hold On to Your Dreams, Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992, and Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980 to 1983. Together they amount to an unprecedented in depth account of the importance of New York City's DJ music, dance and art culture during the '70s and early'80s. And they are all published by Duke University Press.

[26:02] Meg: Cool. And that's from the jacket of the book?

[26:06] Jessica: That is the bio that I found online. Got it. For Tim Lawrence. Not only did Vogue and drag balls and all that not start with Madonna, it didn't even start in this century. So in my usual way, I'm going to take us back in time. So this is thanks to Tim Lawrence. Here we go. Bursting into public consciousness between 1989 and 1991, the culture of drag balls and voguing can be traced back to the second half of the 19th century. Harlem's Hamilton Lodge staged its first queer masquerade ball in 1869. Wow. And some 20 years later, a medical student stumbled into another ball that was taking place in Valhalla Hall on the Lower East Side. He witnessed 500 same sex male and female couples, quote, "Waltzing sedately to the music of a good band". A rickety old building situated at 119 East 11th Street, Webster Hall, where we used to go and it still exists. I totally danced at Webster Hall. Played host to further events during the 1920s. And by the end of the decade, masquerade parties were being staged in conspicuous venues such as Madison Square Garden and the Astor Hotel (Hotel Astor) where they attracted crowds of up to 6000 people. Invited to attend another ball at Hamilton Lodge by the entrepreneur and party host A'Lelia Walker, Harlem renaissance social activist and writer Langston Hughes proclaimed the drag balls to be the, quote, "strangest and gaudiest of all Harlem spectacles in the 1920s" and described them as "spectacles in color". Noting the presence of, quote, "distinguished white celebrities" during this period, Hughes concluded that Harlem was in vogue and the negro was in vogue.

[28:04] Meg: And who said that again?

[28:05] Jessica: Langston Hughes.

[28:06] Meg: Oh, and wait, and you were saying earlier that both same sex men and same sex women were partying together.

[28:16] Jessica: Yes, which also went wildly out of fashion. Held once a year, the balls came to feature a procession known as Parade of the Fairies which included drag queen contestants sacheting through the auditorium in preparation for a costume competition. For the rest of the evening, dancers took to the floor in couples and formed partnerships that were superficially straight with men including lesbians dressed as men and gay men who favored butch style accompanying women or men dressed as women, as well as straight femmes while any number of straights watched on from the sidelines.

[28:54] Meg: It's so interesting given all this talk about outlawing drag, which is oh so interesting. I mean, as if you could?

[29:03] Jessica: Who is outlawing drag?

[29:07] Meg: That's in the news. Not New York, but some states trying to...

[29:14] Jessica: Oh, oh, oh like Florida. Ew. Okay.

[29:15] Meg: Right.

[29:16] Jessica: Well, that actually is going to come up in our little chat because it was outlawed in New York City. So here's a little quote about the Parade of Fairies from the time "About 12:30 a.m. We visited this place and found approximately 5000 people, colored and white, men attired in women's clothes and vice versa" reported a team of undercover investigators following an inspection of the Hamilton Lodge Ball held in the Manhattan Casino in February 1928. The affair, we were informed, was a, quote, "Fag masquerade ball." All these words. I know. Four years later, Broadway Brevities reported from another ball that men rivaled birds of paradise and peacocks, their plumed headdresses nodding and undulating from their shapely heads. Soon after, novelists Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler evoked the drag ball floor as, quote, "a scene whose celestial flavor and cerulean coloring no angelic painter or nectarish poet has ever conceived."

[30:30] Meg: Now, who are these undercover people who were? These parties were just for the participants or for the community? Straight people didn't come?

[30:38] Jessica: Straight people came to watch.

[30:40] Meg: So who's undercover?

[30:42] Jessica: Well, good question. Because as all of the balls gained popularity and the open expression of homosexuality gained popularity, the New York State legislature had criminalized homosexual solicitation in 1923 as part of a wider backlash around male male sexual relations. But dragball organizers found that they could continue to stage events if a neighborhood organization applied for official police sponsorship on their behalf. The hiatus lasted until the autumn of 1931, when officers, reacting to the cultural experimentation of the Prohibition years and the onset of the Depression, began to clamp down on the city's queer community and targeted the balls.

[31:30] Meg: So, interesting.

[31:31] Jessica: Indeed.

[31:33] Meg: I wonder if the resurgence of these balls happened because people knew of the history of them or just spontaneously was born again.

[31:45] Jessica: They never went away.

[31:46] Meg: Okay.

[31:47] Jessica: They just went underground.

[31:49] Meg: Okay. And then were passed down from generation to generation somehow.

[31:53] Jessica: Well, it revives full force in the very late '60s, early '70s, and I found out a piece of information that blew my mind. Because one wonders, why did New York become a haven for gay men? And the same might be said for San Francisco. Why? It's because during World War II, soldiers were being processed in and out of New York and San Francisco, and they saw already existing gay cultures from whatever their little tiny hometowns were. They were like, there's no way I'm going back.

[32:30] Meg: Oh, so you're saying because soldiers were being processed, they were coming from all over the country to one place?

[32:37] Jessica: Yes. And they saw something that they would never, ever be able to experience anyplace else. Which, by the way, is a callback to our field trip with Russell, because he said exactly the same thing. I had never seen anything like it before, and I knew that these were my people. Anyway, so it never really went away and interestingly, it fragmented further because in the '60s, it really started to break down on racial lines and one of the major bones of contention within the members of the drag community was that it became more like a pageant and there was more judging going on.

[33:22] Meg: Interesting.

[33:22] Jessica: And the judges were white, and if you were not white, you could only win if you looked white.

[33:34] Meg: Oh no! No, no, no. That's not that's not in the spirit.

[33:39] Jessica: Oh no. So in Jennie Livingston's film Paris Is Burning, we're introduced to all of the houses, the drag ball houses. That's when this started to pop up. So, founded in 1972, the first house came into existence when Lottie, a Harlem drag queen who worked in the welfare office at 125th Street, asked Crystal LaBeija to co-promote a ball. One of the few black queens to be awarded a Queen of the Ball title at a white organized ball, LaBeija had also become tired of the anti-black bias of the balls, as she made clear during a documentary that you can actually see on Netflix called The Queen by Frank Simon. Cool. And it tracks the Miss All-America Camp Beauty Contest. LaBeija and others competed in front of a panel that included Larry Rivers and Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol would have gone to the opening of an envelope. Honestly, it's crazy. He popped up everywhere. Convinced the result was a caucasian fix, LaBeija flew into a rage when host Flawless Sabrina declared the winner to be Harlow, described by The New York Times as a, quote, "frail." I mean, The New York Times was reporting on this. Crazy. Hello. "A frail, blonde, pouting young man formerly Miss Philadelphia." The experience prepared the way for LaBeija's collaboration with Lottie. Crystal agreed to do it so long as she was a highlight of the ball, notes Terrence Legend International. Lottie made the deal sweeter by convincing Crystal that they should start a group and name it the House of LaBeija with Crystal's title as mother. Crystal agreed. The event was titled Crystal & Lottie LaBeija presents the first annual House of LaBeija Ball at Up the Downstairs Case on West 115th Street and 5th Avenue in Harlem.

[35:37] Meg: What year are we?

[35:39] Jessica: 1972.

[35:40] Meg: Wow. So it's not that long ago.

[35:43] Jessica: Oh, no. Now, just because this is one of my favorite drag stories of all time and we've talked about it on this podcast before. The infamous Dorian Corey, the drag queen who had the mummified body in the naugahyde.

[35:57] Meg: Okay, but that's in the '70s, isn't it?

[36:00] Jessica: Yes. Referencing the glamorous fashion houses were glamour and style, whose glamour and style they admired. Other black drag queens started to form drag houses or families that headed by a mother and sometimes a father would socialize, look after one another and prepare for balls. Mother Dorian and Father Chipper founded the House of Corey in 1972. And two years later, Father Jay set up the House of Dior, after which La Duchess Wong and Nicole Wong established the House of Wong and Paris Dupree and Burger Dupree inaugurated the House of Dupree in 1975. And this kept going on in Manhattan until in Brooklyn, they started popping up as well. The House of Chanel sprung up in Brooklyn during 1979 and 1980. So now we are in the decade that Jennie Livingston got into in Paris Is Burning. From this point on, contestants battled to win trophies. There were multiple entrants walking along an imaginary runway. A group of scrupulous judges would cast their verdicts, sometimes rewarding optimum realness or the ability to pass as straight to the outside world. Quote "it was our goal then to look like white women," LaBeija told Cunningham reporter as she reflected on the days before the black queens organized their own balls and initiated a very particular housing boom. "They used to tell me, you have Negroid features. And I'd say, that's all right, I have white eyes. And that's how it was back then." But it was in the 1980s that diversity really came to rule. Willi Ninja founded the House of Ninja in 1981 and '82 and set out his intention to bring Asian aesthetics and philosophy into the ball world. Possibly founded by Father Hector in 1982, the House of Xtravaganza, the first Latin house, formally entered the drag ball scene when they attended the House of Omni ball in 1983. In 1987, the boutique owner and fashion designer Pat Field established the House of Field as the first white downtown house to walk the uptown balls. We call ourselves House of Field now because that is what we've evolved into. Myra Christopher, a sales clerk in the boutique who encouraged Field to create the house commented in '88, we were always around, though, as Pat Field kids and we'll evolve into something else eventually. Becoming a house was just socializing.

[38:32] Meg: So are we talking about the stylist, Patricia Field?

[38:35] Jessica: Yes.

[38:36] Meg: So she had her own house.

[38:37] Jessica: So get this. So this is another back to our past. Did you ever buy things at House of Field?

[38:44] Meg: Of course.

[38:45] Jessica: All the time. Because Patricia Field was, in my mind, the alternate if Betsy Johnson didn't have what you wanted.

[38:55] Meg: Right. No, it was super funky, like, I mean if you could afford it.

[38:59] Jessica: Yeah. And I never understood why were the shoes so big?

[39:04] Meg: Oh, that's so funny.

[39:07] Jessica: Yes. Pat Field was always outfitting drag queens.

[39:11] Meg: Well, I guess I knew that. I just didn't know that. I mean to have your own house feels like a whole other level of involvement in the community.

[39:25] Jessica: Absolutely and as many people know, Pat Field also was the stylist for Sex and the City.

[39:30] Meg: Yeah.

[39:30] Jessica: So it's a great example of how there's a trickle down of street look to fashion, to high fashion. Right. And it's sort of the opposite of what the Anna Wintour character that Meryl Streep plays in The Devil Wears Prada says to Andy. You know like, you're wearing that blue sweater because we told you to. And it's like, actually, no, the queens up in Harlem told you. And then that's how that goes.

[40:04] Meg: That's nice. I like that.

[40:04] Jessica: So, yes. I just think that's worth a moment. Now, there's another thing that I found really fascinating about where the 1980s drag culture came from. Growing out of the drag queen ritual of throwing shade or subtly insulting another queen voguing emerged as a distinctive dance of first the houses and then inevitably, the balls where specific voguing categories were eventually introduced. Quote "it all started at an after hours club called Footsteps on Second Avenue and 14th Street" which, by the way, I have been to, says David DePino, an influential DJ for the voguing community. Paris Dupree was there, and a bunch of these black queens were throwing shade at each other. Paris had a Vogue magazine in her bag and while she was dancing, she took it out, opened it up to a page where a model was posing and then stopped in the new pose again on the beat. The provocation was returned in kind and then Paris went in front of her and did another pose adds DePino. This was all shade. They were trying to make a prettier pose than each other. And it soon caught on at the balls. At first they called it posing and then because it started from Vogue magazine, they called it voguing. An alternative account has it that voguing was first practiced by the black gay inmates of Rikers Island, a New York City jail who pursued the movement as a way of attracting the attention of boys and throwing shade. Maybe they didn't have a name for it, but that's what they were doing, or so it said, notes Kevin UltraOomni, "I know Paris was an early pioneer of voguing, but I believe that vogue existed in some other form through other people as well. I also think that a lot of voguing poses come from African art and Egyptian hieroglyphics." So just to come full circle, Langston Hughes in the 1920s, the Negro is in Vogue, and then they have chosen to pose from Vogue. So nice wrap, Jessica. That is a quick.

[42:18] Meg: And tell us again the name of the book and the author.

[42:21] Jessica: Well, the author is Tim Lawrence. His books are Love Saves the Day, Hold on to Your Dreams, and Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980 to 1983.

[42:33] Meg: Nice.

[42:34] Jessica: Oh, and Love Saves the Day, the subtitle is, a history of American Dance Music Culture, 1970 to 1979. Deep in vogue we are no longer, but we can go back there. Okay.

[42:56] Meg: So I think the tie in is clear.

[42:59] Jessica: I think the tie in is very clear.

[43:01] Meg: Drag queens. Drag queens and the representation of drag queens and the history of it. And Nan Goldin certainly want to tell the drag queen story respectfully and beautifully.

[43:14] Jessica: As does Tim Lawrence, who now we have to stalk and make him our friend. But yes, drag queens. And there was another thing that occurred to me. Did you watch the TV show The Deuce?

[43:28] Meg: No, I haven't. You've talked about it on the program.

[43:30] Jessica: We've talked about it before.

[43:33] Meg: On the program. This is our program.

[43:35] Jessica: You're listening to NPR.

[43:39] Meg: No, I haven't. You know, I should obviously it comes up in so many articles I read.

[43:45] Jessica: Well, it's something that you would just love, but I think one of the characters is based on Nan Goldin.

[43:51] Meg: Oh, I absolutely know that's true because it came up in the stuff I was reading this week.

[43:56] Jessica: Yeah, yeah.

[43:56] Meg: And Tin Pan Alley, that bar which made me go yeah, she was the bartender there. And the woman who owned Tin Pan Alley primarily hired sex workers because she wanted to give them a way to provide for themselves that wasn't what they didn't necessarily want to have to do.

[44:15] Jessica: So the main character, the female character, is the one who employs sex workers on the show. And I can't remember if she is also a photographer or if they broke that out into an actual other

[44:27] Meg: Maybe 2 people.

[44:30] Jessica: But anyway, it's another reason to watch the show. Whether or not it's the best thing ever or glamorizes, whatever, it's still a hell of a trip. Watch it.[00:16] Meg: Welcome to Desperately Seeking the'80s. I am Meg.

[00:19] Jessica: And I'm Jessica. And Meg and I have been friends since 1982. We got through middle school and high school together here in New York City where we still live.

[00:30] Meg: And where we podcast about New York City in the '80s. I do ripped from the headlines

[00:35] Jessica: And I do pop culture.

[00:37] Meg: So, Jessica, last week we did our first live recording at the amazing Malt & Mold. What an adventure.

[00:44] Jessica: That was so much fun. I had no idea what to expect. We can even start with my epic insanity, which is that I showed up without any of our recording equipment and you didn't kill me.

[00:58] Meg: I didn't.

[01:00] Jessica: I locked eyes with you when I showed up, and I had this profound lack of understanding. I just looked at you with you had, like, death rays coming out of your face, and I was scared. What? Oh no.

[01:15] Meg: I was like, does the roadie, who we don't have, have all the equipment?

[01:20] Jessica: In my brain, yes that's right.

[01:23] Meg: So we jumped in an Uber and went all the way uptown again to Jessica's place and got all the equipment and then came back. And do you remember the name of our amazing Uber driver?

[01:34] Jessica: Jordy.

[01:35] Meg: Jordy. He was so supportive. He was so sweet.

[01:40] Jessica: Jordy was like the Uber angel.

[01:43] Meg: And then we were just, like, 20 minutes late getting started, and everyone was fine because they were getting their beers and their cheese, and it was fine.

[01:51] Jessica: The takeaway, as far as I'm concerned, is it's good to be on time, but people are very forgiving, and it was our first time doing it ever.

[02:00] Meg: First time doing it. And the sound quality was great. The only thing that I am sad about is that we didn't hear more of our audience. So next time I can bring our remote recorder and we can get some room tone.

[02:14] Jessica: We had a very lively audience.

[02:15] Meg: We had a really lively audience. And you can't really tell from the recording because our mics are so sensitive to us and not to other people. It's very interesting.

[02:24] Jessica: It's like they were made just for us and our little egos.

[02:29] Meg: Do you want to get started?

[02:31] Jessica: Oh, please. Okay. Yes, I do. Meg, before we begin, we have a note from a BFF of the podcast. Our friend Nick. Who, like some of the other wonderful men who listen to our podcast, cannot contain himself from correcting us. And I'm open to corrections because I know that I am frequently, I won't say poorly researched. It's just a bit sketchy.

[03:12] Meg: I like the discourse. I approve of the back and forth, for sure.

[03:16] Jessica: Well, I like that he begins like this. Hello. Fabulous episode. Wonderful way to start. What more can we ask for? He says, I am so sorry that I could not be there. He was not at Malt & Mold. He says, Mr. Pedantic strikes again. That's great self knowledge. The first building granted landmark status in New York City in 1965 was the 300 year old The Wyckoff House in Brooklyn. In fact, the first group of buildings landmarked that day, which became the very first landmarks in Manhattan, were the Merchant's House Museum, the Stuyvesant Fish House, and the remaining houses of Colonnade Row/LaGrange Terrace at 428, 430, 432 and 434 Lafayette Street, which isn't that The Public Theater.

[04:10] Meg: Everything is in the same neighborhood. The Merchant's House Museum, The Public Theater.

[04:15] Jessica: I thought that the Colonnade. Lafayette street. I thought that Colonnade Row. Anyway, then he says the former Astor Library/Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, now, The Public Theater was designated a landmark later in 1965, while the Salmagundi Club was not landmarked until 1969 and he even includes a press clipping from thevillagepreservation.org or sorry, villagepreservation.org. He goes on to say, the Merchant's House Museum was the first Manhattan building designated.

[04:51] Meg: Now we know.

[04:52] Jessica: Now we know. And as a quick plug for the Merchant's House Museum, you can visit the Merchant's House. And it is quite something. And because of Nick's involvement with the Merchant's House Museum, I had the great and good fortune of attending a seance there.

[05:09] Meg: Okay. My very good friend Dan is actually a ghost hunter, and he has done a tour of ghosts in the Merchant's House Museum.

[05:21] Jessica: Has he turned anything up?

[05:23] Meg: You know, I haven't gone on the tour so I don't. I assume so. Otherwise, why would he continue to do?

[05:29] Jessica: Is he a ghost hunter or a ghost of New York tour guide?

[05:34] Meg: I think he hunts them. I don't think he means them harm, but I think he definitely wants to find some.

[05:38] Jessica: And does he want to put them in, like, a contraption, like, ghostbusters?

[05:44] Meg: I should probably follow up before I talk too much more about it.

[05:46] Jessica: Think we need him on the show.

[05:49] Meg: Oh completely! The second I heard Merchant's House Museum, I was like, we got to get Dan.

[05:52] Jessica: Oh, my gosh. Love it.

[05:53] Meg: All right, are you ready for my engagement question?

[05:56] Jessica: Yes.

[05:57] Meg: All right. When we were little, wonderful to go on field trips from school.

[06:02] Jessica: Field trip.

[06:03] Meg: Do you have some of your favorite field trips? Do you remember? I mean, there were ones that we did regularly. We would go to The Metropolitan Museum of Art regularly. We went to the Museum of the City of New York. I remember that was kind of a regular one.

[06:17] Jessica: Yes, I actually I remember going to the Museum of the City of New York, and I remember there was some Indigenous People of the Americas display that was not called that at the time and we even had a little discussion about it way back in the '80s.

[06:35] Meg: Interesting. The American Museum of Natural History has to do a lot of, they have new plaques.

[06:40] Jessica: Oh, do they?

[06:41] Meg: Yes, they do. For the Dioramas.

[06:45] Jessica: That seems quite right. Yeah, the Dioramas were scandalous.

[06:50] Meg: By today's standards absolutely.

[06:50] Jessica: Yeah. Well, just putting someone from a different culture in a glass case, like they were a puma or an elephant, not good. Favorite field trip. I really liked going to London for our glee club field trip.

[07:11] Meg: Which I was not at.

[07:14] Jessica: For the glee clib field trip that you did not attend. We also went to DC. That was fun. That was really fun.

[07:20] Meg: And we met with Geraldine Ferraro.

[07:22] Jessica: We did. Oh, my gosh. You've got a good memory.

[07:24] Meg: I know. '80s reference much.

[07:26] Jessica: Nice. And as a child we would just go around New York, like to the aquarium or some kind of day trip. But yeah, there was fun.

[07:39] Meg: Cool. I think you will, it's going to come up at the very end of this story, but you will know why I asked that question. My sources are The Guardian, The New York Times, The New Yorker and the documentary that has recently come out called All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.

[07:57] Jessica: You must have dropped dead with joy when you heard that title.

[08:03] Meg: In the winter of 1986, Nan Goldin's slideshow, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, was published as a book by Mark Holborn, an editor at the Aperture Foundation, filled with photos of friends in their most private moments. The raw and intensely personal project had evolved over the last seven years. Its publication was not exactly a seal of approval from the exclusive, male dominated art world, but it certainly showed that some gatekeepers were ready to allow access to a new vision. Nan had a loft on the Bowery and tended bar at Tin Pan Alley on 49th Street in Times Square. She took photographs of the people she hung out with, drag queens and drug addicts and sex workers, people on the fringe, people who had come to New York because it had space for weirdos. The slideshow started as a way to entertain her friends. She played it to music in bars and clubs and performance spaces in Tribeca in the East Village. And people would shout back to the screen, either because they loved or hated a picture or were just excited to see their lives projected. The soundtrack at first was The Velvet Underground or James Brown or Nina Simone and then people started sending her music. She would change the slideshow based on her mood. It was never the same. It evolved. And of course, she kept taking more pictures. There was nothing off limits. The photos showed people doing drugs and having sex and fighting and sleeping and being sad in dark bars and hotel rooms and apartments. At one point, she had a series of photos of her friend having sex. Her friend got pretty upset, so Nan replaced them with photos of herself having sex. The goal wasn't to expose people against their wishes or to catch them in an unseemly moment. She looked for honesty. She wanted to show the drag queens as they wanted to be seen, as beautiful. Quote, "I'm not crashing. This is my party. This is my family, my history." As the slideshow became more popular, Nan got a lot of shit. The art world did not consider her work art. She was dismissed by male artists and gallerists. Someone actually told her, quote, "There is no such thing as a good woman artist." And that sounds so crazy. Who would ever say something? But I remember hearing things like that. That used to happen.

[10:39] Jessica: Well that's like women can't be funny.

[10:43] Meg: Right. Exactly. And even for those who didn't articulate their beliefs so bluntly as that, there was a presumption that women could not be voyeurs. My father once said to me that women couldn't play guitar because a guitar is an extension of a penis.

[11:02] Jessica: Well, that's not unlike Joan Jett's experience with her first and only guitar lesson. Did you ever hear that story?

[11:08] Meg: No.

[11:08] Jessica: She went to some school, I don't know what it was, but she went to have a guitar lesson. She already had a guitar and was sort of trying to pick it up. And she had a male guitar teacher who said that she had real potential. But don't bother trying to be a rock player, not a rock star, a player of rock and roll music because women just don't do that. And she was like, may I introduce you to The Runaways later on? But the idea yeah, a woman cannot touch something that is associated with maleness unless she is required to or invited to.

[11:59] Meg: Okay, so this is all from the perspective of being a visual artist. And so the idea that a woman can't be a voyeur because women are supposed to be looked at, they're not supposed to be the ones who are doing the looking.

[12:13] Jessica: Is it also because if a woman is a voyeur, that means that she is in spaces where she's not supposed to be?

[12:19] Meg: I think it's actually like I don't want to see what she sees. I don't give a fuck. Fortunately, Nan had a thick skin. Quote "I didn't care about good photography. I cared about complete honesty." And I'll tell you a little bit about her background. She'd grown up in a painfully conventional home in Maryland. Her parents didn't like each other very much, favored their sons, and were terrified of their smart, rebellious daughters. Her older sister Barbara fought with her parents and was sent to a mental institution. Ultimately, she committed suicide at 18 by lying down on the railroad tracks outside Union Station.

[12:59] Jessica: Oh my God.

[13:00] Meg: Nan was twelve.

[13:02] Jessica: Oh my God.

[13:03] Meg: Her parents response to the suicide? Move to a new town and never mention it again. This scarred Nan for life and made her hell bent on breaking free from that repression. And incidentally, there are many photos of couples in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, including her parents. Interesting. So in 1984, in small clubs around the city, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency was picking up steam. The art world didn't embrace her work, but they were pissed off by it, which helped its popularity with the counterculture. Nan had an opportunity to show it in a loft in Berlin. Now for the last three years, she'd been living with a man named Brian, who she'd met while bartending at Tin Pan Alley. He was an office worker and an ex-Marine. On their first date, Nan asked him to get her some heroin, which she was snorting at the time and he did, and they fell into each other through drugs and sex, and he became a subject of many of her photos. Their relationship was tumultuous and unhealthy, and they often tried to break up, but always came back to each other. Nan had been in Berlin showing her slideshow for a bit before Brian came to meet her there. When he found out she had cheated on him with a woman, he lost his shit and beat Nan to a pulp. He focused all of his rage specifically on her eyes. Her friend Sylvie managed to drag her out of the hotel room and get her to a hospital, saving her life. Brian left back in the room, trashed the place. He wrote bitch and cunt and lipstick on the walls and burned her diaries. Fortunately, she had left the slideshow at the loft where she was showing it, otherwise he would have destroyed that, too. All the bones in her orbital floor were broken, and she almost lost one of her eyes. It took months to recover, and she took photos of it. She says the photos of her battered face kept her from returning to him, and those photos became part of the slideshow. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency was part of the 1985 Whitney Biennial, and for those who don't know, the Whitney Biennial is a biennial exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art for up and coming artists, and it's known for setting trends and making careers. So it was a pretty big deal. A year later, when the Aperture Foundation wanted to publish The Ballad of Sexual Dependency as a book Nan wanted to include her family story in the text of the book. I mean, it's really her origin story. And her father tried to stop the publication of the book, accusing her of blaming him and her mother for her sister's suicide. And Brian tried to stop the publication, too for obvious reasons. Nan was indefatigable and the book was published, and the rest is art history. Photography curator Susan Bright says, quote "one only has to teach a class of undergraduate photography students to realize her influence. She gave legitimacy to snapshot style or diaristic. I would go so far as to say her work has come to represent an entire style" and now she has a huge influence in the art world. Case in point Nan had an operation in 2014 and was prescribed OxyContin as a painkiller. She took it as prescribed and became addicted when, by the grace of God, she managed to pull herself out of the addiction three years later, she realized that the Sackler family this is a quote "the Sackler family, whose name I knew from museums and galleries were responsible for the epidemic." A little background. The Sackler family owns Purdue Pharma, which manufactures and heavily markets Oxy. They also donate untold millions to cultural institutions like The Met, The Guggenheim, the Tate, the Louvre. Arthur Sackler funded the wing of The Met that houses The Temple of Dendur. We should do a poll of people who grew up in New York.

[17:20] Jessica: I mean, well, The Temple of Dender is like the I don't know, like the most glamorous and iconic piece of a museum in the city.

[17:27] Meg: Seriously. Me too. And the fact that the playground right outside the glass windows, I mean, that was my favorite playground. It was actually a safe playground because it was so close to the street.

[17:39] Jessica: And people who did not grow up in New York know The Temple of Dender because When Harry Met Sally is filmed there, they have their conversation about, oh, I don't know, gender politics. One of their conversations about that.

[17:54] Meg: Anyway, Nan was so incensed by this revelation that she took all the lessons she learned from her friends and ACT UP in the '80s, that's a callback to Episode Eight, The Queen of Mean + Silence = Death. And she staged a die-in's in The Temple of Dendor and The Guggenheim and other cultural institutions accepting Sackler money. And she won, thanks to P.A.I.N., which stands for Prescription Addiction Intervention Now, which she helped start, and her influence in the art world, major museums and galleries are now rejecting Sackler money and have removed their name from plaques and wings, including The Temple of Dendur.

[18:38] Jessica: Wow.

[18:39] Meg: Her art and her activism reek of integrity, honesty over secrecy. Quote, "When people talk about the immediacy in my work, that's what it's about. This need to remember and record every single thing."

[18:55] Jessica: Didn't she get some flak for taking photos of her children?

[19:00] Meg: No, I think that's a different photographer. Mann. No, no, she doesn't have children.

[19:05] Jessica: Well, then it's definitely not her. That was another woman photographer who had.

[19:11] Meg: Whose last name is Mann. Sally Mann.

[19:14] Jessica: Yeah. I thought you meant a man. No, no, Sally Mann. You're absolutely right. Sorry. Nan. Man. Sally Mann. Anyway, that's amazing. I had no idea that Nan Goldin had so much to do with bringing down in fact, almost everything to do with bringing down the Sacklers.

[19:32] Meg: Yeah, you got to see this documentary. It is so cool.

[19:36] Jessica: That's incredible.

[19:37] Meg: And it's very moving. And there was only so much that I could talk about because her story is there's so much more to her life. But, yeah, I tried to focus in on this particular piece of artwork.

[19:48] Jessica: Pretty amazing. Thank you.

[20:02] Meg: We're back.

[20:03] Jessica: We're back. I found a writer who I'm now kind of obsessed with.

[20:09] Meg: Oh.

[20:10] Jessica: His name is Tim Lawrence.

[20:12] Meg: Okay.

[20:12] Jessica: He's a Brit, but he has some very interesting things to say about the American music scene.

[20:19] Meg: Okay. How old is he?

[20:21] Jessica: Our age.

[20:22] Meg: Okay. And he's writing about music right now?

[20:25] Jessica: But he wrote a book that I'm reading from and about. "Listen and You Will Hear all the Houses that Walked There Before': A History of Drag Balls, Houses and the Culture of Voguing". So we had Seder at my dad's house last night, and it was such a joy to see the teenagers there, the kids. And I was thinking about how it's amazing that your son and Ale's son and daughter were all getting along and they're the age that we were during a lot of what we talk about on this podcast.

[21:07] Meg: That's true. Good point.

[21:08] Jessica: And I thought, like, what did they care about? What did they know? What did they not know? You and I speak so frequently about music and going out and how we socialized and all that kind of stuff. And I was wondering, what did they really know about what our nightlife was or the nightlife that we cared about? Because when I hear about what they do, I'm like, is that as boring as I think it is? It seems extraordinarily boring. Sorry, kids. And then I thought so much of what we were into has been sort of repackaged for television right now, or streaming. The most obvious example is Stranger Things. That has repackaged '80s culture into this not actually '80s, it's like '80s cosplay. What? You have a look on your face.

[22:06] Meg: Well, I feel like I'm not doing Billy justice, or Alice Justice, for that matter. It's what they tell us they're doing. They seem to be enjoying it and honestly, like, we don't know exactly what they're doing. We just know what they've said.

[22:19] Jessica: No, I'm not saying that we know. I'm saying what we see and hear is boring. But I'm sure that they are keeping us very ignorant on many, many different levels. So maybe you should see this as like I'm throwing down the gauntlet. All right, kids, tell us how cool you really are.

[22:41] Meg: I don't know if I want to know.

[22:43] Jessica: That's actually a very good point as well. I was thinking about what I wanted to talk about today, and in thinking about it, ran across this piece that I'm going to read from. And I was thinking about how we were, going dancing was such a very big thing and how dance trends still existed. Dance trends. If you see something in the movies or whatever, it's always like the '60s, like the Mashed Potato or the Stomp or whatever. But there were dance trends. I think that on the last podcast, I was talking about how Ale and I would drool over Mel Gibson sadly, and practice dance moves in her room. And there were, like, moves that you had to know how to do. And that by the time we were in college, I guess it was the beginning of our senior year, the incredibly famous and we've talked about it on this podcast several times, Paris Is Burning came out and it coincided with Madonna's song Vogue, and there was a real focus on that dance style at that time, but not I mean, aside from Jennie Livingston's Paris Is Burning, there wasn't a lot of information about where it came from. And the number of people, I think, who have actually seen Paris Is Burning is not as large as we would think.

[24:20] Meg: Right. I saw it when it first came out and what I remember about Vogue, Madonna's video of Vogue was that she got some backlash because it was like she was co-opting somebody else's or another community's culture and making it her own. You know, all of that kind of thought was very new to me. I was like, isn't it a celebration? I don't understand.

[24:44] Jessica: Well, particularly because the dancers in that video were from one of the houses and they wound up being her backup dancers on her Blonde Ambition tour.

[24:54] Meg: Right. But I do remember that there was just everything she did, she got a little bit of backlash.

[24:59] Jessica: Yes. And so she was doing something right.

[25:02] Meg: I mean, look, who am I to say? But it didn't seem like the worst thing in the world to me.

[25:06] Jessica: Not to me neither. So with that in mind, I'm gonna just I'm going to read a little bit from this person who I'm now kind of obsessed with, and I want to read a lot more of his work. Just as a quick aside, Tim Lawrence is the author of three books that trace the history of DJ music, dance and art culture in New York City during the '70s and early '80s. Love Saves the Day, a History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970 to 1979. Hold On to Your Dreams, Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992, and Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980 to 1983. Together they amount to an unprecedented in depth account of the importance of New York City's DJ music, dance and art culture during the '70s and early'80s. And they are all published by Duke University Press.

[26:02] Meg: Cool. And that's from the jacket of the book?

[26:06] Jessica: That is the bio that I found online. Got it. For Tim Lawrence. Not only did Vogue and drag balls and all that not start with Madonna, it didn't even start in this century. So in my usual way, I'm going to take us back in time. So this is thanks to Tim Lawrence. Here we go. Bursting into public consciousness between 1989 and 1991, the culture of drag balls and voguing can be traced back to the second half of the 19th century. Harlem's Hamilton Lodge staged its first queer masquerade ball in 1869. Wow. And some 20 years later, a medical student stumbled into another ball that was taking place in Valhalla Hall on the Lower East Side. He witnessed 500 same sex male and female couples, quote, "Waltzing sedately to the music of a good band". A rickety old building situated at 119 East 11th Street, Webster Hall, where we used to go and it still exists. I totally danced at Webster Hall. Played host to further events during the 1920s. And by the end of the decade, masquerade parties were being staged in conspicuous venues such as Madison Square Garden and the Astor Hotel (Hotel Astor) where they attracted crowds of up to 6000 people. Invited to attend another ball at Hamilton Lodge by the entrepreneur and party host A'Lelia Walker, Harlem renaissance social activist and writer Langston Hughes proclaimed the drag balls to be the, quote, "strangest and gaudiest of all Harlem spectacles in the 1920s" and described them as "spectacles in color". Noting the presence of, quote, "distinguished white celebrities" during this period, Hughes concluded that Harlem was in vogue and the negro was in vogue.

[28:04] Meg: And who said that again?

[28:05] Jessica: Langston Hughes.

[28:06] Meg: Oh, and wait, and you were saying earlier that both same sex men and same sex women were partying together.

[28:16] Jessica: Yes, which also went wildly out of fashion. Held once a year, the balls came to feature a procession known as Parade of the Fairies which included drag queen contestants sacheting through the auditorium in preparation for a costume competition. For the rest of the evening, dancers took to the floor in couples and formed partnerships that were superficially straight with men including lesbians dressed as men and gay men who favored butch style accompanying women or men dressed as women, as well as straight femmes while any number of straights watched on from the sidelines.

[28:54] Meg: It's so interesting given all this talk about outlawing drag, which is oh so interesting. I mean, as if you could?

[29:03] Jessica: Who is outlawing drag?

[29:07] Meg: That's in the news. Not New York, but some states trying to...

[29:14] Jessica: Oh, oh, oh like Florida. Ew. Okay.

[29:15] Meg: Right.

[29:16] Jessica: Well, that actually is going to come up in our little chat because it was outlawed in New York City. So here's a little quote about the Parade of Fairies from the time "About 12:30 a.m. We visited this place and found approximately 5000 people, colored and white, men attired in women's clothes and vice versa" reported a team of undercover investigators following an inspection of the Hamilton Lodge Ball held in the Manhattan Casino in February 1928. The affair, we were informed, was a, quote, "Fag masquerade ball." All these words. I know. Four years later, Broadway Brevities reported from another ball that men rivaled birds of paradise and peacocks, their plumed headdresses nodding and undulating from their shapely heads. Soon after, novelists Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler evoked the drag ball floor as, quote, "a scene whose celestial flavor and cerulean coloring no angelic painter or nectarish poet has ever conceived."

[30:30] Meg: Now, who are these undercover people who were? These parties were just for the participants or for the community? Straight people didn't come?

[30:38] Jessica: Straight people came to watch.

[30:40] Meg: So who's undercover?

[30:42] Jessica: Well, good question. Because as all of the balls gained popularity and the open expression of homosexuality gained popularity, the New York State legislature had criminalized homosexual solicitation in 1923 as part of a wider backlash around male male sexual relations. But dragball organizers found that they could continue to stage events if a neighborhood organization applied for official police sponsorship on their behalf. The hiatus lasted until the autumn of 1931, when officers, reacting to the cultural experimentation of the Prohibition years and the onset of the Depression, began to clamp down on the city's queer community and targeted the balls.

[31:30] Meg: So, interesting.

[31:31] Jessica: Indeed.

[31:33] Meg: I wonder if the resurgence of these balls happened because people knew of the history of them or just spontaneously was born again.

[31:45] Jessica: They never went away.

[31:46] Meg: Okay.

[31:47] Jessica: They just went underground.

[31:49] Meg: Okay. And then were passed down from generation to generation somehow.

[31:53] Jessica: Well, it revives full force in the very late '60s, early '70s, and I found out a piece of information that blew my mind. Because one wonders, why did New York become a haven for gay men? And the same might be said for San Francisco. Why? It's because during World War II, soldiers were being processed in and out of New York and San Francisco, and they saw already existing gay cultures from whatever their little tiny hometowns were. They were like, there's no way I'm going back.

[32:30] Meg: Oh, so you're saying because soldiers were being processed, they were coming from all over the country to one place?

[32:37] Jessica: Yes. And they saw something that they would never, ever be able to experience anyplace else. Which, by the way, is a callback to our field trip with Russell, because he said exactly the same thing. I had never seen anything like it before, and I knew that these were my people. Anyway, so it never really went away and interestingly, it fragmented further because in the '60s, it really started to break down on racial lines and one of the major bones of contention within the members of the drag community was that it became more like a pageant and there was more judging going on.

[33:22] Meg: Interesting.

[33:22] Jessica: And the judges were white, and if you were not white, you could only win if you looked white.

[33:34] Meg: Oh no! No, no, no. That's not that's not in the spirit.

[33:39] Jessica: Oh no. So in Jennie Livingston's film Paris Is Burning, we're introduced to all of the houses, the drag ball houses. That's when this started to pop up. So, founded in 1972, the first house came into existence when Lottie, a Harlem drag queen who worked in the welfare office at 125th Street, asked Crystal LaBeija to co-promote a ball. One of the few black queens to be awarded a Queen of the Ball title at a white organized ball, LaBeija had also become tired of the anti-black bias of the balls, as she made clear during a documentary that you can actually see on Netflix called The Queen by Frank Simon. Cool. And it tracks the Miss All-America Camp Beauty Contest. LaBeija and others competed in front of a panel that included Larry Rivers and Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol would have gone to the opening of an envelope. Honestly, it's crazy. He popped up everywhere. Convinced the result was a caucasian fix, LaBeija flew into a rage when host Flawless Sabrina declared the winner to be Harlow, described by The New York Times as a, quote, "frail." I mean, The New York Times was reporting on this. Crazy. Hello. "A frail, blonde, pouting young man formerly Miss Philadelphia." The experience prepared the way for LaBeija's collaboration with Lottie. Crystal agreed to do it so long as she was a highlight of the ball, notes Terrence Legend International. Lottie made the deal sweeter by convincing Crystal that they should start a group and name it the House of LaBeija with Crystal's title as mother. Crystal agreed. The event was titled Crystal & Lottie LaBeija presents the first annual House of LaBeija Ball at Up the Downstairs Case on West 115th Street and 5th Avenue in Harlem.

[35:37] Meg: What year are we?

[35:39] Jessica: 1972.

[35:40] Meg: Wow. So it's not that long ago.

[35:43] Jessica: Oh, no. Now, just because this is one of my favorite drag stories of all time and we've talked about it on this podcast before. The infamous Dorian Corey, the drag queen who had the mummified body in the naugahyde.

[35:57] Meg: Okay, but that's in the '70s, isn't it?

[36:00] Jessica: Yes. Referencing the glamorous fashion houses were glamour and style, whose glamour and style they admired. Other black drag queens started to form drag houses or families that headed by a mother and sometimes a father would socialize, look after one another and prepare for balls. Mother Dorian and Father Chipper founded the House of Corey in 1972. And two years later, Father Jay set up the House of Dior, after which La Duchess Wong and Nicole Wong established the House of Wong and Paris Dupree and Burger Dupree inaugurated the House of Dupree in 1975. And this kept going on in Manhattan until in Brooklyn, they started popping up as well. The House of Chanel sprung up in Brooklyn during 1979 and 1980. So now we are in the decade that Jennie Livingston got into in Paris Is Burning. From this point on, contestants battled to win trophies. There were multiple entrants walking along an imaginary runway. A group of scrupulous judges would cast their verdicts, sometimes rewarding optimum realness or the ability to pass as straight to the outside world. Quote "it was our goal then to look like white women," LaBeija told Cunningham reporter as she reflected on the days before the black queens organized their own balls and initiated a very particular housing boom. "They used to tell me, you have Negroid features. And I'd say, that's all right, I have white eyes. And that's how it was back then." But it was in the 1980s that diversity really came to rule. Willi Ninja founded the House of Ninja in 1981 and '82 and set out his intention to bring Asian aesthetics and philosophy into the ball world. Possibly founded by Father Hector in 1982, the House of Xtravaganza, the first Latin house, formally entered the drag ball scene when they attended the House of Omni ball in 1983. In 1987, the boutique owner and fashion designer Pat Field established the House of Field as the first white downtown house to walk the uptown balls. We call ourselves House of Field now because that is what we've evolved into. Myra Christopher, a sales clerk in the boutique who encouraged Field to create the house commented in '88, we were always around, though, as Pat Field kids and we'll evolve into something else eventually. Becoming a house was just socializing.

[38:32] Meg: So are we talking about the stylist, Patricia Field?

[38:35] Jessica: Yes.

[38:36] Meg: So she had her own house.

[38:37] Jessica: So get this. So this is another back to our past. Did you ever buy things at House of Field?

[38:44] Meg: Of course.

[38:45] Jessica: All the time. Because Patricia Field was, in my mind, the alternate if Betsy Johnson didn't have what you wanted.

[38:55] Meg: Right. No, it was super funky, like, I mean if you could afford it.

[38:59] Jessica: Yeah. And I never understood why were the shoes so big?

[39:04] Meg: Oh, that's so funny.

[39:07] Jessica: Yes. Pat Field was always outfitting drag queens.

[39:11] Meg: Well, I guess I knew that. I just didn't know that. I mean to have your own house feels like a whole other level of involvement in the community.

[39:25] Jessica: Absolutely and as many people know, Pat Field also was the stylist for Sex and the City.

[39:30] Meg: Yeah.

[39:30] Jessica: So it's a great example of how there's a trickle down of street look to fashion, to high fashion. Right. And it's sort of the opposite of what the Anna Wintour character that Meryl Streep plays in The Devil Wears Prada says to Andy. You know like, you're wearing that blue sweater because we told you to. And it's like, actually, no, the queens up in Harlem told you. And then that's how that goes.

[40:04] Meg: That's nice. I like that.

[40:04] Jessica: So, yes. I just think that's worth a moment. Now, there's another thing that I found really fascinating about where the 1980s drag culture came from. Growing out of the drag queen ritual of throwing shade or subtly insulting another queen voguing emerged as a distinctive dance of first the houses and then inevitably, the balls where specific voguing categories were eventually introduced. Quote "it all started at an after hours club called Footsteps on Second Avenue and 14th Street" which, by the way, I have been to, says David DePino, an influential DJ for the voguing community. Paris Dupree was there, and a bunch of these black queens were throwing shade at each other. Paris had a Vogue magazine in her bag and while she was dancing, she took it out, opened it up to a page where a model was posing and then stopped in the new pose again on the beat. The provocation was returned in kind and then Paris went in front of her and did another pose adds DePino. This was all shade. They were trying to make a prettier pose than each other. And it soon caught on at the balls. At first they called it posing and then because it started from Vogue magazine, they called it voguing. An alternative account has it that voguing was first practiced by the black gay inmates of Rikers Island, a New York City jail who pursued the movement as a way of attracting the attention of boys and throwing shade. Maybe they didn't have a name for it, but that's what they were doing, or so it said, notes Kevin UltraOomni, "I know Paris was an early pioneer of voguing, but I believe that vogue existed in some other form through other people as well. I also think that a lot of voguing poses come from African art and Egyptian hieroglyphics." So just to come full circle, Langston Hughes in the 1920s, the Negro is in Vogue, and then they have chosen to pose from Vogue. So nice wrap, Jessica. That is a quick.

[42:18] Meg: And tell us again the name of the book and the author.

[42:21] Jessica: Well, the author is Tim Lawrence. His books are Love Saves the Day, Hold on to Your Dreams, and Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980 to 1983.

[42:33] Meg: Nice.

[42:34] Jessica: Oh, and Love Saves the Day, the subtitle is, a history of American Dance Music Culture, 1970 to 1979. Deep in vogue we are no longer, but we can go back there. Okay.

[42:56] Meg: So I think the tie in is clear.

[42:59] Jessica: I think the tie in is very clear.

[43:01] Meg: Drag queens. Drag queens and the representation of drag queens and the history of it. And Nan Goldin certainly want to tell the drag queen story respectfully and beautifully.

[43:14] Jessica: As does Tim Lawrence, who now we have to stalk and make him our friend. But yes, drag queens. And there was another thing that occurred to me. Did you watch the TV show The Deuce?

[43:28] Meg: No, I haven't. You've talked about it on the program.

[43:30] Jessica: We've talked about it before.

[43:33] Meg: On the program. This is our program.

[43:35] Jessica: You're listening to NPR.

[43:39] Meg: No, I haven't. You know, I should obviously it comes up in so many articles I read.

[43:45] Jessica: Well, it's something that you would just love, but I think one of the characters is based on Nan Goldin.

[43:51] Meg: Oh, I absolutely know that's true because it came up in the stuff I was reading this week.

[43:56] Jessica: Yeah, yeah.

[43:56] Meg: And Tin Pan Alley, that bar which made me go yeah, she was the bartender there. And the woman who owned Tin Pan Alley primarily hired sex workers because she wanted to give them a way to provide for themselves that wasn't what they didn't necessarily want to have to do.

[44:15] Jessica: So the main character, the female character, is the one who employs sex workers on the show. And I can't remember if she is also a photographer or if they broke that out into an actual other

[44:27] Meg: Maybe 2 people.

[44:30] Jessica: But anyway, it's another reason to watch the show. Whether or not it's the best thing ever or glamorizes, whatever, it's still a hell of a trip. Watch it.[00:16] Meg: Welcome to Desperately Seeking the'80s. I am Meg.

[00:19] Jessica: And I'm Jessica. And Meg and I have been friends since 1982. We got through middle school and high school together here in New York City where we still live.

[00:30] Meg: And where we podcast about New York City in the '80s. I do ripped from the headlines

[00:35] Jessica: And I do pop culture.

[00:37] Meg: So, Jessica, last week we did our first live recording at the amazing Malt & Mold. What an adventure.

[00:44] Jessica: That was so much fun. I had no idea what to expect. We can even start with my epic insanity, which is that I showed up without any of our recording equipment and you didn't kill me.

[00:58] Meg: I didn't.

[01:00] Jessica: I locked eyes with you when I showed up, and I had this profound lack of understanding. I just looked at you with you had, like, death rays coming out of your face, and I was scared. What? Oh no.

[01:15] Meg: I was like, does the roadie, who we don't have, have all the equipment?

[01:20] Jessica: In my brain, yes that's right.

[01:23] Meg: So we jumped in an Uber and went all the way uptown again to Jessica's place and got all the equipment and then came back. And do you remember the name of our amazing Uber driver?

[01:34] Jessica: Jordy.

[01:35] Meg: Jordy. He was so supportive. He was so sweet.

[01:40] Jessica: Jordy was like the Uber angel.

[01:43] Meg: And then we were just, like, 20 minutes late getting started, and everyone was fine because they were getting their beers and their cheese, and it was fine.

[01:51] Jessica: The takeaway, as far as I'm concerned, is it's good to be on time, but people are very forgiving, and it was our first time doing it ever.

[02:00] Meg: First time doing it. And the sound quality was great. The only thing that I am sad about is that we didn't hear more of our audience. So next time I can bring our remote recorder and we can get some room tone.

[02:14] Jessica: We had a very lively audience.

[02:15] Meg: We had a really lively audience. And you can't really tell from the recording because our mics are so sensitive to us and not to other people. It's very interesting.

[02:24] Jessica: It's like they were made just for us and our little egos.

[02:29] Meg: Do you want to get started?

[02:31] Jessica: Oh, please. Okay. Yes, I do. Meg, before we begin, we have a note from a BFF of the podcast. Our friend Nick. Who, like some of the other wonderful men who listen to our podcast, cannot contain himself from correcting us. And I'm open to corrections because I know that I am frequently, I won't say poorly researched. It's just a bit sketchy.

[03:12] Meg: I like the discourse. I approve of the back and forth, for sure.

[03:16] Jessica: Well, I like that he begins like this. Hello. Fabulous episode. Wonderful way to start. What more can we ask for? He says, I am so sorry that I could not be there. He was not at Malt & Mold. He says, Mr. Pedantic strikes again. That's great self knowledge. The first building granted landmark status in New York City in 1965 was the 300 year old The Wyckoff House in Brooklyn. In fact, the first group of buildings landmarked that day, which became the very first landmarks in Manhattan, were the Merchant's House Museum, the Stuyvesant Fish House, and the remaining houses of Colonnade Row/LaGrange Terrace at 428, 430, 432 and 434 Lafayette Street, which isn't that The Public Theater.

[04:10] Meg: Everything is in the same neighborhood. The Merchant's House Museum, The Public Theater.

[04:15] Jessica: I thought that the Colonnade. Lafayette street. I thought that Colonnade Row. Anyway, then he says the former Astor Library/Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, now, The Public Theater was designated a landmark later in 1965, while the Salmagundi Club was not landmarked until 1969 and he even includes a press clipping from thevillagepreservation.org or sorry, villagepreservation.org. He goes on to say, the Merchant's House Museum was the first Manhattan building designated.

[04:51] Meg: Now we know.

[04:52] Jessica: Now we know. And as a quick plug for the Merchant's House Museum, you can visit the Merchant's House. And it is quite something. And because of Nick's involvement with the Merchant's House Museum, I had the great and good fortune of attending a seance there.

[05:09] Meg: Okay. My very good friend Dan is actually a ghost hunter, and he has done a tour of ghosts in the Merchant's House Museum.

[05:21] Jessica: Has he turned anything up?

[05:23] Meg: You know, I haven't gone on the tour so I don't. I assume so. Otherwise, why would he continue to do?

[05:29] Jessica: Is he a ghost hunter or a ghost of New York tour guide?

[05:34] Meg: I think he hunts them. I don't think he means them harm, but I think he definitely wants to find some.

[05:38] Jessica: And does he want to put them in, like, a contraption, like, ghostbusters?

[05:44] Meg: I should probably follow up before I talk too much more about it.

[05:46] Jessica: Think we need him on the show.

[05:49] Meg: Oh completely! The second I heard Merchant's House Museum, I was like, we got to get Dan.

[05:52] Jessica: Oh, my gosh. Love it.

[05:53] Meg: All right, are you ready for my engagement question?

[05:56] Jessica: Yes.

[05:57] Meg: All right. When we were little, wonderful to go on field trips from school.

[06:02] Jessica: Field trip.

[06:03] Meg: Do you have some of your favorite field trips? Do you remember? I mean, there were ones that we did regularly. We would go to The Metropolitan Museum of Art regularly. We went to the Museum of the City of New York. I remember that was kind of a regular one.

[06:17] Jessica: Yes, I actually I remember going to the Museum of the City of New York, and I remember there was some Indigenous People of the Americas display that was not called that at the time and we even had a little discussion about it way back in the '80s.

[06:35] Meg: Interesting. The American Museum of Natural History has to do a lot of, they have new plaques.

[06:40] Jessica: Oh, do they?

[06:41] Meg: Yes, they do. For the Dioramas.

[06:45] Jessica: That seems quite right. Yeah, the Dioramas were scandalous.

[06:50] Meg: By today's standards absolutely.

[06:50] Jessica: Yeah. Well, just putting someone from a different culture in a glass case, like they were a puma or an elephant, not good. Favorite field trip. I really liked going to London for our glee club field trip.

[07:11] Meg: Which I was not at.

[07:14] Jessica: For the glee clib field trip that you did not attend. We also went to DC. That was fun. That was really fun.

[07:20] Meg: And we met with Geraldine Ferraro.

[07:22] Jessica: We did. Oh, my gosh. You've got a good memory.

[07:24] Meg: I know. '80s reference much.

[07:26] Jessica: Nice. And as a child we would just go around New York, like to the aquarium or some kind of day trip. But yeah, there was fun.

[07:39] Meg: Cool. I think you will, it's going to come up at the very end of this story, but you will know why I asked that question. My sources are The Guardian, The New York Times, The New Yorker and the documentary that has recently come out called All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.

[07:57] Jessica: You must have dropped dead with joy when you heard that title.

[08:03] Meg: In the winter of 1986, Nan Goldin's slideshow, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, was published as a book by Mark Holborn, an editor at the Aperture Foundation, filled with photos of friends in their most private moments. The raw and intensely personal project had evolved over the last seven years. Its publication was not exactly a seal of approval from the exclusive, male dominated art world, but it certainly showed that some gatekeepers were ready to allow access to a new vision. Nan had a loft on the Bowery and tended bar at Tin Pan Alley on 49th Street in Times Square. She took photographs of the people she hung out with, drag queens and drug addicts and sex workers, people on the fringe, people who had come to New York because it had space for weirdos. The slideshow started as a way to entertain her friends. She played it to music in bars and clubs and performance spaces in Tribeca in the East Village. And people would shout back to the screen, either because they loved or hated a picture or were just excited to see their lives projected. The soundtrack at first was The Velvet Underground or James Brown or Nina Simone and then people started sending her music. She would change the slideshow based on her mood. It was never the same. It evolved. And of course, she kept taking more pictures. There was nothing off limits. The photos showed people doing drugs and having sex and fighting and sleeping and being sad in dark bars and hotel rooms and apartments. At one point, she had a series of photos of her friend having sex. Her friend got pretty upset, so Nan replaced them with photos of herself having sex. The goal wasn't to expose people against their wishes or to catch them in an unseemly moment. She looked for honesty. She wanted to show the drag queens as they wanted to be seen, as beautiful. Quote, "I'm not crashing. This is my party. This is my family, my history." As the slideshow became more popular, Nan got a lot of shit. The art world did not consider her work art. She was dismissed by male artists and gallerists. Someone actually told her, quote, "There is no such thing as a good woman artist." And that sounds so crazy. Who would ever say something? But I remember hearing things like that. That used to happen.

[10:39] Jessica: Well that's like women can't be funny.

[10:43] Meg: Right. Exactly. And even for those who didn't articulate their beliefs so bluntly as that, there was a presumption that women could not be voyeurs. My father once said to me that women couldn't play guitar because a guitar is an extension of a penis.

[11:02] Jessica: Well, that's not unlike Joan Jett's experience with her first and only guitar lesson. Did you ever hear that story?

[11:08] Meg: No.

[11:08] Jessica: She went to some school, I don't know what it was, but she went to have a guitar lesson. She already had a guitar and was sort of trying to pick it up. And she had a male guitar teacher who said that she had real potential. But don't bother trying to be a rock player, not a rock star, a player of rock and roll music because women just don't do that. And she was like, may I introduce you to The Runaways later on? But the idea yeah, a woman cannot touch something that is associated with maleness unless she is required to or invited to.

[11:59] Meg: Okay, so this is all from the perspective of being a visual artist. And so the idea that a woman can't be a voyeur because women are supposed to be looked at, they're not supposed to be the ones who are doing the looking.

[12:13] Jessica: Is it also because if a woman is a voyeur, that means that she is in spaces where she's not supposed to be?

[12:19] Meg: I think it's actually like I don't want to see what she sees. I don't give a fuck. Fortunately, Nan had a thick skin. Quote "I didn't care about good photography. I cared about complete honesty." And I'll tell you a little bit about her background. She'd grown up in a painfully conventional home in Maryland. Her parents didn't like each other very much, favored their sons, and were terrified of their smart, rebellious daughters. Her older sister Barbara fought with her parents and was sent to a mental institution. Ultimately, she committed suicide at 18 by lying down on the railroad tracks outside Union Station.

[12:59] Jessica: Oh my God.

[13:00] Meg: Nan was twelve.

[13:02] Jessica: Oh my God.

[13:03] Meg: Her parents response to the suicide? Move to a new town and never mention it again. This scarred Nan for life and made her hell bent on breaking free from that repression. And incidentally, there are many photos of couples in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, including her parents. Interesting. So in 1984, in small clubs around the city, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency was picking up steam. The art world didn't embrace her work, but they were pissed off by it, which helped its popularity with the counterculture. Nan had an opportunity to show it in a loft in Berlin. Now for the last three years, she'd been living with a man named Brian, who she'd met while bartending at Tin Pan Alley. He was an office worker and an ex-Marine. On their first date, Nan asked him to get her some heroin, which she was snorting at the time and he did, and they fell into each other through drugs and sex, and he became a subject of many of her photos. Their relationship was tumultuous and unhealthy, and they often tried to break up, but always came back to each other. Nan had been in Berlin showing her slideshow for a bit before Brian came to meet her there. When he found out she had cheated on him with a woman, he lost his shit and beat Nan to a pulp. He focused all of his rage specifically on her eyes. Her friend Sylvie managed to drag her out of the hotel room and get her to a hospital, saving her life. Brian left back in the room, trashed the place. He wrote bitch and cunt and lipstick on the walls and burned her diaries. Fortunately, she had left the slideshow at the loft where she was showing it, otherwise he would have destroyed that, too. All the bones in her orbital floor were broken, and she almost lost one of her eyes. It took months to recover, and she took photos of it. She says the photos of her battered face kept her from returning to him, and those photos became part of the slideshow. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency was part of the 1985 Whitney Biennial, and for those who don't know, the Whitney Biennial is a biennial exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art for up and coming artists, and it's known for setting trends and making careers. So it was a pretty big deal. A year later, when the Aperture Foundation wanted to publish The Ballad of Sexual Dependency as a book Nan wanted to include her family story in the text of the book. I mean, it's really her origin story. And her father tried to stop the publication of the book, accusing her of blaming him and her mother for her sister's suicide. And Brian tried to stop the publication, too for obvious reasons. Nan was indefatigable and the book was published, and the rest is art history. Photography curator Susan Bright says, quote "one only has to teach a class of undergraduate photography students to realize her influence. She gave legitimacy to snapshot style or diaristic. I would go so far as to say her work has come to represent an entire style" and now she has a huge influence in the art world. Case in point Nan had an operation in 2014 and was prescribed OxyContin as a painkiller. She took it as prescribed and became addicted when, by the grace of God, she managed to pull herself out of the addiction three years later, she realized that the Sackler family this is a quote "the Sackler family, whose name I knew from museums and galleries were responsible for the epidemic." A little background. The Sackler family owns Purdue Pharma, which manufactures and heavily markets Oxy. They also donate untold millions to cultural institutions like The Met, The Guggenheim, the Tate, the Louvre. Arthur Sackler funded the wing of The Met that houses The Temple of Dendur. We should do a poll of people who grew up in New York.

[17:20] Jessica: I mean, well, The Temple of Dender is like the I don't know, like the most glamorous and iconic piece of a museum in the city.

[17:27] Meg: Seriously. Me too. And the fact that the playground right outside the glass windows, I mean, that was my favorite playground. It was actually a safe playground because it was so close to the street.

[17:39] Jessica: And people who did not grow up in New York know The Temple of Dender because When Harry Met Sally is filmed there, they have their conversation about, oh, I don't know, gender politics. One of their conversations about that.

[17:54] Meg: Anyway, Nan was so incensed by this revelation that she took all the lessons she learned from her friends and ACT UP in the '80s, that's a callback to Episode Eight, The Queen of Mean + Silence = Death. And she staged a die-in's in The Temple of Dendor and The Guggenheim and other cultural institutions accepting Sackler money. And she won, thanks to P.A.I.N., which stands for Prescription Addiction Intervention Now, which she helped start, and her influence in the art world, major museums and galleries are now rejecting Sackler money and have removed their name from plaques and wings, including The Temple of Dendur.

[18:38] Jessica: Wow.

[18:39] Meg: Her art and her activism reek of integrity, honesty over secrecy. Quote, "When people talk about the immediacy in my work, that's what it's about. This need to remember and record every single thing."

[18:55] Jessica: Didn't she get some flak for taking photos of her children?

[19:00] Meg: No, I think that's a different photographer. Mann. No, no, she doesn't have children.

[19:05] Jessica: Well, then it's definitely not her. That was another woman photographer who had.

[19:11] Meg: Whose last name is Mann. Sally Mann.

[19:14] Jessica: Yeah. I thought you meant a man. No, no, Sally Mann. You're absolutely right. Sorry. Nan. Man. Sally Mann. Anyway, that's amazing. I had no idea that Nan Goldin had so much to do with bringing down in fact, almost everything to do with bringing down the Sacklers.

[19:32] Meg: Yeah, you got to see this documentary. It is so cool.

[19:36] Jessica: That's incredible.

[19:37] Meg: And it's very moving. And there was only so much that I could talk about because her story is there's so much more to her life. But, yeah, I tried to focus in on this particular piece of artwork.

[19:48] Jessica: Pretty amazing. Thank you.

[20:02] Meg: We're back.

[20:03] Jessica: We're back. I found a writer who I'm now kind of obsessed with.

[20:09] Meg: Oh.

[20:10] Jessica: His name is Tim Lawrence.

[20:12] Meg: Okay.

[20:12] Jessica: He's a Brit, but he has some very interesting things to say about the American music scene.

[20:19] Meg: Okay. How old is he?

[20:21] Jessica: Our age.

[20:22] Meg: Okay. And he's writing about music right now?

[20:25] Jessica: But he wrote a book that I'm reading from and about. "Listen and You Will Hear all the Houses that Walked There Before': A History of Drag Balls, Houses and the Culture of Voguing". So we had Seder at my dad's house last night, and it was such a joy to see the teenagers there, the kids. And I was thinking about how it's amazing that your son and Ale's son and daughter were all getting along and they're the age that we were during a lot of what we talk about on this podcast.

[21:07] Meg: That's true. Good point.

[21:08] Jessica: And I thought, like, what did they care about? What did they know? What did they not know? You and I speak so frequently about music and going out and how we socialized and all that kind of stuff. And I was wondering, what did they really know about what our nightlife was or the nightlife that we cared about? Because when I hear about what they do, I'm like, is that as boring as I think it is? It seems extraordinarily boring. Sorry, kids. And then I thought so much of what we were into has been sort of repackaged for television right now, or streaming. The most obvious example is Stranger Things. That has repackaged '80s culture into this not actually '80s, it's like '80s cosplay. What? You have a look on your face.

[22:06] Meg: Well, I feel like I'm not doing Billy justice, or Alice Justice, for that matter. It's what they tell us they're doing. They seem to be enjoying it and honestly, like, we don't know exactly what they're doing. We just know what they've said.

[22:19] Jessica: No, I'm not saying that we know. I'm saying what we see and hear is boring. But I'm sure that they are keeping us very ignorant on many, many different levels. So maybe you should see this as like I'm throwing down the gauntlet. All right, kids, tell us how cool you really are.

[22:41] Meg: I don't know if I want to know.

[22:43] Jessica: That's actually a very good point as well. I was thinking about what I wanted to talk about today, and in thinking about it, ran across this piece that I'm going to read from. And I was thinking about how we were, going dancing was such a very big thing and how dance trends still existed. Dance trends. If you see something in the movies or whatever, it's always like the '60s, like the Mashed Potato or the Stomp or whatever. But there were dance trends. I think that on the last podcast, I was talking about how Ale and I would drool over Mel Gibson sadly, and practice dance moves in her room. And there were, like, moves that you had to know how to do. And that by the time we were in college, I guess it was the beginning of our senior year, the incredibly famous and we've talked about it on this podcast several times, Paris Is Burning came out and it coincided with Madonna's song Vogue, and there was a real focus on that dance style at that time, but not I mean, aside from Jennie Livingston's Paris Is Burning, there wasn't a lot of information about where it came from. And the number of people, I think, who have actually seen Paris Is Burning is not as large as we would think.

[24:20] Meg: Right. I saw it when it first came out and what I remember about Vogue, Madonna's video of Vogue was that she got some backlash because it was like she was co-opting somebody else's or another community's culture and making it her own. You know, all of that kind of thought was very new to me. I was like, isn't it a celebration? I don't understand.

[24:44] Jessica: Well, particularly because the dancers in that video were from one of the houses and they wound up being her backup dancers on her Blonde Ambition tour.

[24:54] Meg: Right. But I do remember that there was just everything she did, she got a little bit of backlash.

[24:59] Jessica: Yes. And so she was doing something right.

[25:02] Meg: I mean, look, who am I to say? But it didn't seem like the worst thing in the world to me.

[25:06] Jessica: Not to me neither. So with that in mind, I'm gonna just I'm going to read a little bit from this person who I'm now kind of obsessed with, and I want to read a lot more of his work. Just as a quick aside, Tim Lawrence is the author of three books that trace the history of DJ music, dance and art culture in New York City during the '70s and early '80s. Love Saves the Day, a History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970 to 1979. Hold On to Your Dreams, Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992, and Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980 to 1983. Together they amount to an unprecedented in depth account of the importance of New York City's DJ music, dance and art culture during the '70s and early'80s. And they are all published by Duke University Press.

[26:02] Meg: Cool. And that's from the jacket of the book?

[26:06] Jessica: That is the bio that I found online. Got it. For Tim Lawrence. Not only did Vogue and drag balls and all that not start with Madonna, it didn't even start in this century. So in my usual way, I'm going to take us back in time. So this is thanks to Tim Lawrence. Here we go. Bursting into public consciousness between 1989 and 1991, the culture of drag balls and voguing can be traced back to the second half of the 19th century. Harlem's Hamilton Lodge staged its first queer masquerade ball in 1869. Wow. And some 20 years later, a medical student stumbled into another ball that was taking place in Valhalla Hall on the Lower East Side. He witnessed 500 same sex male and female couples, quote, "Waltzing sedately to the music of a good band". A rickety old building situated at 119 East 11th Street, Webster Hall, where we used to go and it still exists. I totally danced at Webster Hall. Played host to further events during the 1920s. And by the end of the decade, masquerade parties were being staged in conspicuous venues such as Madison Square Garden and the Astor Hotel (Hotel Astor) where they attracted crowds of up to 6000 people. Invited to attend another ball at Hamilton Lodge by the entrepreneur and party host A'Lelia Walker, Harlem renaissance social activist and writer Langston Hughes proclaimed the drag balls to be the, quote, "strangest and gaudiest of all Harlem spectacles in the 1920s" and described them as "spectacles in color". Noting the presence of, quote, "distinguished white celebrities" during this period, Hughes concluded that Harlem was in vogue and the negro was in vogue.

[28:04] Meg: And who said that again?

[28:05] Jessica: Langston Hughes.

[28:06] Meg: Oh, and wait, and you were saying earlier that both same sex men and same sex women were partying together.

[28:16] Jessica: Yes, which also went wildly out of fashion. Held once a year, the balls came to feature a procession known as Parade of the Fairies which included drag queen contestants sacheting through the auditorium in preparation for a costume competition. For the rest of the evening, dancers took to the floor in couples and formed partnerships that were superficially straight with men including lesbians dressed as men and gay men who favored butch style accompanying women or men dressed as women, as well as straight femmes while any number of straights watched on from the sidelines.

[28:54] Meg: It's so interesting given all this talk about outlawing drag, which is oh so interesting. I mean, as if you could?

[29:03] Jessica: Who is outlawing drag?

[29:07] Meg: That's in the news. Not New York, but some states trying to...

[29:14] Jessica: Oh, oh, oh like Florida. Ew. Okay.

[29:15] Meg: Right.

[29:16] Jessica: Well, that actually is going to come up in our little chat because it was outlawed in New York City. So here's a little quote about the Parade of Fairies from the time "About 12:30 a.m. We visited this place and found approximately 5000 people, colored and white, men attired in women's clothes and vice versa" reported a team of undercover investigators following an inspection of the Hamilton Lodge Ball held in the Manhattan Casino in February 1928. The affair, we were informed, was a, quote, "Fag masquerade ball." All these words. I know. Four years later, Broadway Brevities reported from another ball that men rivaled birds of paradise and peacocks, their plumed headdresses nodding and undulating from their shapely heads. Soon after, novelists Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler evoked the drag ball floor as, quote, "a scene whose celestial flavor and cerulean coloring no angelic painter or nectarish poet has ever conceived."

[30:30] Meg: Now, who are these undercover people who were? These parties were just for the participants or for the community? Straight people didn't come?

[30:38] Jessica: Straight people came to watch.

[30:40] Meg: So who's undercover?

[30:42] Jessica: Well, good question. Because as all of the balls gained popularity and the open expression of homosexuality gained popularity, the New York State legislature had criminalized homosexual solicitation in 1923 as part of a wider backlash around male male sexual relations. But dragball organizers found that they could continue to stage events if a neighborhood organization applied for official police sponsorship on their behalf. The hiatus lasted until the autumn of 1931, when officers, reacting to the cultural experimentation of the Prohibition years and the onset of the Depression, began to clamp down on the city's queer community and targeted the balls.

[31:30] Meg: So, interesting.

[31:31] Jessica: Indeed.

[31:33] Meg: I wonder if the resurgence of these balls happened because people knew of the history of them or just spontaneously was born again.

[31:45] Jessica: They never went away.

[31:46] Meg: Okay.

[31:47] Jessica: They just went underground.

[31:49] Meg: Okay. And then were passed down from generation to generation somehow.

[31:53] Jessica: Well, it revives full force in the very late '60s, early '70s, and I found out a piece of information that blew my mind. Because one wonders, why did New York become a haven for gay men? And the same might be said for San Francisco. Why? It's because during World War II, soldiers were being processed in and out of New York and San Francisco, and they saw already existing gay cultures from whatever their little tiny hometowns were. They were like, there's no way I'm going back.

[32:30] Meg: Oh, so you're saying because soldiers were being processed, they were coming from all over the country to one place?

[32:37] Jessica: Yes. And they saw something that they would never, ever be able to experience anyplace else. Which, by the way, is a callback to our field trip with Russell, because he said exactly the same thing. I had never seen anything like it before, and I knew that these were my people. Anyway, so it never really went away and interestingly, it fragmented further because in the '60s, it really started to break down on racial lines and one of the major bones of contention within the members of the drag community was that it became more like a pageant and there was more judging going on.

[33:22] Meg: Interesting.

[33:22] Jessica: And the judges were white, and if you were not white, you could only win if you looked white.

[33:34] Meg: Oh no! No, no, no. That's not that's not in the spirit.

[33:39] Jessica: Oh no. So in Jennie Livingston's film Paris Is Burning, we're introduced to all of the houses, the drag ball houses. That's when this started to pop up. So, founded in 1972, the first house came into existence when Lottie, a Harlem drag queen who worked in the welfare office at 125th Street, asked Crystal LaBeija to co-promote a ball. One of the few black queens to be awarded a Queen of the Ball title at a white organized ball, LaBeija had also become tired of the anti-black bias of the balls, as she made clear during a documentary that you can actually see on Netflix called The Queen by Frank Simon. Cool. And it tracks the Miss All-America Camp Beauty Contest. LaBeija and others competed in front of a panel that included Larry Rivers and Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol would have gone to the opening of an envelope. Honestly, it's crazy. He popped up everywhere. Convinced the result was a caucasian fix, LaBeija flew into a rage when host Flawless Sabrina declared the winner to be Harlow, described by The New York Times as a, quote, "frail." I mean, The New York Times was reporting on this. Crazy. Hello. "A frail, blonde, pouting young man formerly Miss Philadelphia." The experience prepared the way for LaBeija's collaboration with Lottie. Crystal agreed to do it so long as she was a highlight of the ball, notes Terrence Legend International. Lottie made the deal sweeter by convincing Crystal that they should start a group and name it the House of LaBeija with Crystal's title as mother. Crystal agreed. The event was titled Crystal & Lottie LaBeija presents the first annual House of LaBeija Ball at Up the Downstairs Case on West 115th Street and 5th Avenue in Harlem.

[35:37] Meg: What year are we?

[35:39] Jessica: 1972.

[35:40] Meg: Wow. So it's not that long ago.

[35:43] Jessica: Oh, no. Now, just because this is one of my favorite drag stories of all time and we've talked about it on this podcast before. The infamous Dorian Corey, the drag queen who had the mummified body in the naugahyde.

[35:57] Meg: Okay, but that's in the '70s, isn't it?

[36:00] Jessica: Yes. Referencing the glamorous fashion houses were glamour and style, whose glamour and style they admired. Other black drag queens started to form drag houses or families that headed by a mother and sometimes a father would socialize, look after one another and prepare for balls. Mother Dorian and Father Chipper founded the House of Corey in 1972. And two years later, Father Jay set up the House of Dior, after which La Duchess Wong and Nicole Wong established the House of Wong and Paris Dupree and Burger Dupree inaugurated the House of Dupree in 1975. And this kept going on in Manhattan until in Brooklyn, they started popping up as well. The House of Chanel sprung up in Brooklyn during 1979 and 1980. So now we are in the decade that Jennie Livingston got into in Paris Is Burning. From this point on, contestants battled to win trophies. There were multiple entrants walking along an imaginary runway. A group of scrupulous judges would cast their verdicts, sometimes rewarding optimum realness or the ability to pass as straight to the outside world. Quote "it was our goal then to look like white women," LaBeija told Cunningham reporter as she reflected on the days before the black queens organized their own balls and initiated a very particular housing boom. "They used to tell me, you have Negroid features. And I'd say, that's all right, I have white eyes. And that's how it was back then." But it was in the 1980s that diversity really came to rule. Willi Ninja founded the House of Ninja in 1981 and '82 and set out his intention to bring Asian aesthetics and philosophy into the ball world. Possibly founded by Father Hector in 1982, the House of Xtravaganza, the first Latin house, formally entered the drag ball scene when they attended the House of Omni ball in 1983. In 1987, the boutique owner and fashion designer Pat Field established the House of Field as the first white downtown house to walk the uptown balls. We call ourselves House of Field now because that is what we've evolved into. Myra Christopher, a sales clerk in the boutique who encouraged Field to create the house commented in '88, we were always around, though, as Pat Field kids and we'll evolve into something else eventually. Becoming a house was just socializing.

[38:32] Meg: So are we talking about the stylist, Patricia Field?

[38:35] Jessica: Yes.

[38:36] Meg: So she had her own house.

[38:37] Jessica: So get this. So this is another back to our past. Did you ever buy things at House of Field?

[38:44] Meg: Of course.

[38:45] Jessica: All the time. Because Patricia Field was, in my mind, the alternate if Betsy Johnson didn't have what you wanted.

[38:55] Meg: Right. No, it was super funky, like, I mean if you could afford it.

[38:59] Jessica: Yeah. And I never understood why were the shoes so big?

[39:04] Meg: Oh, that's so funny.

[39:07] Jessica: Yes. Pat Field was always outfitting drag queens.

[39:11] Meg: Well, I guess I knew that. I just didn't know that. I mean to have your own house feels like a whole other level of involvement in the community.

[39:25] Jessica: Absolutely and as many people know, Pat Field also was the stylist for Sex and the City.

[39:30] Meg: Yeah.

[39:30] Jessica: So it's a great example of how there's a trickle down of street look to fashion, to high fashion. Right. And it's sort of the opposite of what the Anna Wintour character that Meryl Streep plays in The Devil Wears Prada says to Andy. You know like, you're wearing that blue sweater because we told you to. And it's like, actually, no, the queens up in Harlem told you. And then that's how that goes.

[40:04] Meg: That's nice. I like that.

[40:04] Jessica: So, yes. I just think that's worth a moment. Now, there's another thing that I found really fascinating about where the 1980s drag culture came from. Growing out of the drag queen ritual of throwing shade or subtly insulting another queen voguing emerged as a distinctive dance of first the houses and then inevitably, the balls where specific voguing categories were eventually introduced. Quote "it all started at an after hours club called Footsteps on Second Avenue and 14th Street" which, by the way, I have been to, says David DePino, an influential DJ for the voguing community. Paris Dupree was there, and a bunch of these black queens were throwing shade at each other. Paris had a Vogue magazine in her bag and while she was dancing, she took it out, opened it up to a page where a model was posing and then stopped in the new pose again on the beat. The provocation was returned in kind and then Paris went in front of her and did another pose adds DePino. This was all shade. They were trying to make a prettier pose than each other. And it soon caught on at the balls. At first they called it posing and then because it started from Vogue magazine, they called it voguing. An alternative account has it that voguing was first practiced by the black gay inmates of Rikers Island, a New York City jail who pursued the movement as a way of attracting the attention of boys and throwing shade. Maybe they didn't have a name for it, but that's what they were doing, or so it said, notes Kevin UltraOomni, "I know Paris was an early pioneer of voguing, but I believe that vogue existed in some other form through other people as well. I also think that a lot of voguing poses come from African art and Egyptian hieroglyphics." So just to come full circle, Langston Hughes in the 1920s, the Negro is in Vogue, and then they have chosen to pose from Vogue. So nice wrap, Jessica. That is a quick.

[42:18] Meg: And tell us again the name of the book and the author.

[42:21] Jessica: Well, the author is Tim Lawrence. His books are Love Saves the Day, Hold on to Your Dreams, and Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980 to 1983.

[42:33] Meg: Nice.

[42:34] Jessica: Oh, and Love Saves the Day, the subtitle is, a history of American Dance Music Culture, 1970 to 1979. Deep in vogue we are no longer, but we can go back there. Okay.

[42:56] Meg: So I think the tie in is clear.

[42:59] Jessica: I think the tie in is very clear.

[43:01] Meg: Drag queens. Drag queens and the representation of drag queens and the history of it. And Nan Goldin certainly want to tell the drag queen story respectfully and beautifully.

[43:14] Jessica: As does Tim Lawrence, who now we have to stalk and make him our friend. But yes, drag queens. And there was another thing that occurred to me. Did you watch the TV show The Deuce?

[43:28] Meg: No, I haven't. You've talked about it on the program.

[43:30] Jessica: We've talked about it before.

[43:33] Meg: On the program. This is our program.

[43:35] Jessica: You're listening to NPR.

[43:39] Meg: No, I haven't. You know, I should obviously it comes up in so many articles I read.

[43:45] Jessica: Well, it's something that you would just love, but I think one of the characters is based on Nan Goldin.

[43:51] Meg: Oh, I absolutely know that's true because it came up in the stuff I was reading this week.

[43:56] Jessica: Yeah, yeah.

[43:56] Meg: And Tin Pan Alley, that bar which made me go yeah, she was the bartender there. And the woman who owned Tin Pan Alley primarily hired sex workers because she wanted to give them a way to provide for themselves that wasn't what they didn't necessarily want to have to do.

[44:15] Jessica: So the main character, the female character, is the one who employs sex workers on the show. And I can't remember if she is also a photographer or if they broke that out into an actual other

[44:27] Meg: Maybe 2 people.

[44:30] Jessica: But anyway, it's another reason to watch the show. Whether or not it's the best thing ever or glamorizes, whatever, it's still a hell of a trip. Watch it.