Tag Archives: Drag Queens

Avery Willard

The Sirens by

Untitled portrait by Avery Willard

In our last posting on Avery Willard, we spoke with the legendary drag performer Adrian about his friendship with Willard. This week, we turn to Amanda Hammett, one of the members of the hard-working team helping to put together In Search of Avery Willard. In the following post, Amanda gives us a little more background on Willard’s talents as a photographer and how he was seen by the photography community at the time. She also shares four astonishing shots of female impersonators from Willard’s never-before-seen collection. Here’s Amanda…

We were overwhelmed when we attempted to highlight Avery’s photographic work. The New York Public Library has ten boxes of his photos. As we started to examine the work, we noticed that Avery’s reputation as a master of the portrait was well earned – and he earned his income from it – most notably for stars on Broadway. But he didn’t stop there, moving from actors to friends, ad models to female impersonators to animals.

In one of our interviews for the documentary, photographer John Cox, who was Avery’s friend and collaborator, reflected on Avery’s work: More…

Gay New York

Behind the Scenes with the Bloolips by

The Bloolips were a popular drag performance group from England which took their cues from other drag-focused performance groups like Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company and the Hot Peaches. The group’s founder, the brilliant Bette Bourne performed with Hot Peaches on their European tour and then went back to England to form Bloolips. When the group arrived in New York in 1993 to present their show Get Hur, filmmaker Michael Kasino documented their performance and back-stage musings in this quietly thrilling video.