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“That’s not at the front of my brain when I’m working with them. I don’t think of them as fragile, or that the fact that they are elders means that our time with them is more finite,” says Hanson. “I have a deep love for each of my models. Four - Phatima Rude, who used to be roommates with Antheus, Lady Red Couture, the Goddess Bunny, and Tina Devore - are with the ancestors now.
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Not all of the queens in Legends of Drag will see the photo book’s publication. “Harmonica is literally sitting on a dumpster.” “Coco looks like she’s at the Met, but it’s actually the post office,” Hanson says. They each transform even the most mundane spaces. Witti Repartee holds a bouquet of lollipops (“Whores don’t like cut flowers!”) at the entrance to Luna Park in Coney Island. They are saturated in color and brimming with jubilation, in rich regional flavor: In Herr’s portrait, the Chrysler Building is foreground by sprays of purple and lavender florals in a bright-red dress, Simone beams in front of Village Cigars, across the street from the landmark Stonewall Inn. That sense of knowing, of motherly love, features prominently in the portraits of the five New York queens excerpted below - Barbra Herr, Coco LaChine, Harmonica Sunbeam, Simone, and Witti Repartee. “And she was like, ‘I can tell! I can tell you have a love unlike any other that no one can break.’” “She told us she was going to officiate our wedding, and we were like, ‘Actually, we’re not a couple,’” Hanson says. So what’s it like shooting legends? “A love fest,” says Hanson, who got so close with the Goddess Bunny (“a very picky bitch,” per Hanson) that she “informally adopted” Hanson and Antheus as her children. “Even during the AIDS crisis, people were still loving and celebrating.” It’s that capacity for joy that they want to capture: “This book underscores the power that queer people hold, not only individually but collectively, throughout time, forever.” “I not only think of how many entertainers we’ve lost, but also just the communities that were decimated, the mentors and mothers and collaborators and relationships that don’t exist because they were just wiped off the map.” But Hanson and Antheus don’t want to linger on darkness queer history is too often framed by “tragic events,” Hanson says, and drag is about resistance and celebration. “As queer people, we inherit a lot of generational trauma from various sources, but of course the AIDS epidemic is a big one,” says Hanson.
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Legends of Drag addresses the lack of intergenerational connection within the community: a broken lineage that’s often rooted in loss. The images, and interviews with each queen, are published in Legends of Drag (June 21), a tome of living history that pays homage to queer icons who shaped what drag is today - and to the ancestors who shaped them. With the help of a “subterranean network” of queens across the country, they tracked down their subjects through word of mouth and on Facebook, where, Antheus says, “generationally speaking, the queens of a certain age tend to be,” as opposed to other social-media platforms. “At the time there was this slogan that came out of the trans-liberation movement, where the girls are basically saying, Give us our flowers while we’re still here, and that struck home for me,” says Antheus. Hanson took the photographs, while Antheus paired each queen with a signature floral arrangement. So Hanson and Antheus - friends since they were teenagers in Milwaukee, pregaming for Hanson’s Rocky Horror Show performances - decided to do just that: seek out stories of drag “back when.” The duo traveled to 16 cities across the country, taking portraits of 81 legendary queens. I’ve never heard stories of what things were like back in the day. I do remember a time before Drag Race, but many kids today don’t. “I’ve had drag sisters, but never a mother.
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“I was never part of any traditional drag house,” Hanson tells me. They were awestruck to see so many queens of a certain age. Antheus, who lives in San Francisco, was used to seeing older queens at the show, but Hanson, themselves a drag artist, mostly ran in circles of fellow millennial performers. They’d come for “church,” which is to say, a drag show. On the night of the winter solstice in 2017, Brooklyn-based artist Harry James Hanson and floral stylist Devin Antheus, both 32, paid a visit to Aunt Charlie’s Lounge, a queer bar in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. Photo: Harry James Hanson and Devin Antheus