You're not something that's to be kept under wraps. “With that movie, you had a lot of the queens, including me, who were in it with male action stars in drag. “That was a tipping point,” Lady Bunny said. Lady Bunny said another high point was the 1995 release “ To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar,” a major studio production starring Patrick Swayze, Wesley Snipes and John Leguizamo as drag queens. “On any given night, you could get in the cab and go to three or four clubs where there was drag everywhere.”Īnother part of this drag explosion was Lady Bunny's Wigstock, which started as a do-it-yourself outdoor festival in the East Village in 1984 but became a major live event in the ‘90s with a move to the West Side piers, a crowd that numbered in the thousands and its own documentary. “There were queens in all of these clubs,” recalled Witherspoon, who was a regular host as Lahoma Van Zandt at Peter Gatien's infamous Limelight. “A lot of people felt like they were home when they were at The Pyramid,” according to Lady Bunny, who said the supportive environment fostered experimentation. She arrived from Atlanta in 1983 with a band called The Now Explosion featuring Jon Witherspoon (who would later become the ditzy, party-girl drag performer Lahoma Van Zandt) and a tall, skinny boy with a radiant smile by the name of RuPaul Charles. Simpson, who had arrived in New York in the early 1980s to attend New York University, recalled drag being at an ebb at the time, noting that the “prevalent atmosphere of the gay scene was macho, and drag queens were looked at as kinda freaky.” But that began to change at the Pyramid's wild nights, which provided a home and a stage for future drag fixtures like Lady Bunny (née Jon Ingle). “I really was in the thick of things, and I was lucky, because my entry into the world of drag coincided with the amazing changes that happened over the next several years.”

Lady Bunny and Tabboo! were go-go dancers,” recalled Linda Simpson, whose new photo book, “ The Drag Explosion,” explores this downtown scene, which she not only documented with hundreds of 35 mm photos but also performed in. Hapi Phace was the emcee, and Sister Dimension was the DJ. Lady Bunny, Misstress Formika, Sweetie, Anna Conda and Tabboo! in dressing room at The Pyramid Club in 1992.

Pop up video vh1 1990&#39;s

Pop up video vh1 1990's