David Furst: It's All Of It on WNYC. I'm David Furst in for Alison Stewart. This fall marks 30 years since the book The Drag Queens of New York: An Illustrated Field Guide first hit shelves, giving readers a front-row seat to the city's underground performance scene in the 1990s. Now there is an exhibit celebrating the book, and all of the drag queens who contributed to that era. There are lots of never before seen photos, audio interviews, and handwritten notes showing how they shaped the scene. You'll see names like Lypsinka, Lady Bunny, Aphrodite, and one of our next guests, Charles Busch. The Drag Queens of New York 30th anniversary exhibition is on display through Sunday, November 30th, at Howl Arts on the second floor of their 250 Bowery street location. Joining us to discuss is Charles Busch. He's an actor, screenwriter, drag performer, and playwright. Charles, welcome to All Of It.

Charles Busch: Wonderful being here.

[00:01:09] David Furst: Also with us, singer, writer, producer, performer, and author of The Drag Queens of New York: An Illustrated Field Guide, Julian Fleisher, who also helped to curate the new show. Welcome to All Of It.

Julian Fleisher: Thank you very much. Happy to be here.

David Furst: After all those titles, I think we're out of time. [laughs]

Julian Fleisher: Well, I'm also a previous host here on WNYC.

David Furst: Fantastic.

Julian Fleisher: Well, QXR, to be very specific.

David Furst: I clearly didn't have enough room in all this.

Julian Fleisher: I know, I'm sorry. I get bored.

[laughter]

David Furst: Tell me about this book. This is going back 30 years now. The Drag Queens of New: An Illustrated Field Guide. This was published all the way back in 1996.

Julian Fleisher: Correct.

David Furst: How did the idea for this 30th anniversary exhibition come about?

Julian Fleisher: Well, to be honest, it was one of those unexpected moments of serendipity. I was hanging out with some friends. I recently moved to the East Village, the East village of yore and lore of yesteryear. I've lived in the same apartment in the East Village now for over 30 years. When I first moved there, I was going out at night. I was a young man, out there having a good time, checking out the scene. I wandered into a couple of the best nightclubs in the area, The Pyramid and the Boy Bar, and discovered these incredible drag performances. After regaling a friend of mine over drinks one night, she was an editor at Riverhead, she said, "You know, you should write a book about this scene. You should write a book about it."

I said, "If you can give me an advance, I will do that." That's what happened. She offered me a contract with Riverhead, which is a Penguin imprint, and the next thing I knew, I was spending almost three years working on this book.

David Furst: What was the impact of the book when it first came out?

Julian Fleisher: Small.

[laughter]

Julian Fleisher: I think-- No, I mean, I think the impact grew--

Charles Busch: I have a copy, or you gave it to me.

Julian Fleisher: I made you take it. I put it in your purse.

David Furst: Wow, that is small. You're really getting micro impact there.

Julian Fleisher: I think the impact of it over time has grown.

Charles Busch: It's really good.

[laughter]

David Furst: That's all that matters. It's really good. Well, Charles, you're one of the many performers included in this exhibition. Tell us about your introduction into the drag scene.

Charles Busch: Well, the thing is, actually, when-

Julian Fleisher: Julian.

Charles Busch: -Justin--

Julian Fleisher: Come on, grandma.

Charles Busch: He asked if I'd be part of this book. At that point, oh, I did not identify with being a drag queen. I was so trying to impress upon everyone that I was a playwright and a actor who did all these plays and played a character, different character in each play. It just happened most of them I played a female character, but I didn't see my costume as being drag. I'm wearing the costume, so I was kicking and screaming going into it. At the same time, I thought, "Gee, I don't want to be a part of it, but I'll be really upset if I'm not included in it."

[laughter]

David Furst: Isn't that life, anyway, in general?

Julian Fleisher: I would say so. I think it's fair to say that, Charles, the beautiful thing about the New York drag scene, especially as it was in the '90s, is that it encompassed legends. Charles is really, I think, a product of the theater, as is Lypsinka, who's also in the book. Whereas most of the queens came up through the club scene, which is a very different kind of aesthetic, a different vibe, but there's room for everybody in this book.

Charles Busch: That, I thought, was so interesting, the way you structured it as this bird field guide that-- It was so clever. I didn't really understand when first, I knew that Julian-

Julian Fleisher: Julian.

Charles Busch: -was this accomplished jazz singer. He's writing a book? How's he writing a book? It's so clever that it works on all these different levels. I was really glad that you talked me into it.

David Furst: Charles, what else was special about the New York City drag scene in the 1990s?

Charles Busch: Maybe, because it was so varied. That's really, I think, what the exhibit and the book shows, that there was cable tv drag, there was theater drag, there's these certain different clubs that were little fiefdoms where these different drag performers reigned and wouldn't move to another place. It was fascinating that there was so much. This is all pre RuPaul's Drag Race, right?

Julian Fleisher: Yes.

Charles Busch: There was such a wide variety.

Julian Fleisher: I was going to say there was a sense, both all the way from downtown up to midtown, that drag was bubbling up in a way that was undeniable. It was exciting. Everybody could feel it. Drag queens were starting to show up in gossip pages and in magazines. RuPaul was midway through that crazy climb. There was a real sense that, "Wow, drag might not get bigger than this, so let's get it into a book now." There was a sense that this is it. We are riding the wave.

David Furst: Julian, what can people see when they come to this show, this exhibition? What do you want people to feel when they come to this show?

Julian Fleisher: God, that's a really good question. I want them to feel joy and delight and a sense of wonder and a sense of pride, I guess, in what New York is capable of delivering to itself and its people. When you come to the show, which has been curated beautifully by Aldo Hernández and Kevin Maloney and myself with the help of Doug [unintelligible 00:06:57] the first thing you'll see is all of the portraits of the queens. These portraits were taken by my friend Brooke Williams, a wonderful artist and multi-hyphenate herself at the time she was taking beautiful pictures when I hired her to do this. The photos and the portraits are all outtakes from the sessions that we did at the time.

David Furst: For the book.

Julian Fleisher: Yes. While anybody who has a copy of the book will know these portraits well, these are different shots from the same sessions, and they are gloriously reproduced, 24 inches tall. These were shot on film, so the look of them is extraordinary. I mean, the film holds up in a way that's very different from digital photography. As we said earlier, I don't want to be an old man shaking my fists at young people, but film has a way of really leaping off the page. First thing you'll notice are these extraordinary photographs taken by my friend Brooke.

Then under glass are all the notes and the ephemera, the surveys, the correspondences between me and the drag queens over the two and a half Years I was writing the book, and some of it truly has to be seen to be believed. Some of the letters from the lawyers, for example, at the publishing house asking me to justify the things that I wrote about in the book. These are my responses to those lawyers. For example, "Mr. Fleisher, please justify the statement that Joey Arias fellates the microphone."

Charles Busch: Because he might have sued you, you mean?

Julian Fleisher: That's what they're afraid of. I mean, Joey Arias would be the last person to sue you over that. It's because you have to say to the lawyer, "Well, go see Joey Arias." Part of Joey's genius is how he folds this ribald stuff into these beautiful concerts of his, et cetera.

David Furst: We're speaking with Julian Fleisher and Charles Busch about this new exhibition, The Drag Queens of New York at 30. I want to play a clip. This is an interview that you had with a drag performer named Sweetie, aka Daniel Booth.

Julian Fleisher: Correct.

David Furst: Who unfortunately passed away in 2017. In this clip, he's sharing what his mother thought of drag at the time.

Sweetie: My mother doesn't really understand drag because she's never seen it. She's seen my television show.

Julian Fleisher: What, on video?

Sweetie: Yes, I brought her a videotape of my television show. She's entertained by it, but I think drag to her has the stigma of being like transvestism, which it's not. No, I don't see drag and transvestism even really close to each other, except you're in a dress.

Julian Fleisher: I tried to make some of those points.

Sweetie: Drag is very much an attitude and style and play-acting where I really believe transvestism, I have some friends who I would consider transvestites, they get a sexual feeling from putting on the clothes. That's not for me.

Julian Fleisher: I call that cross-dressing. Oh my God.

David Furst: Julian, Charles, do you want to respond to--

Julian Fleisher: Do I want to respond?

David Furst: -these thoughts?

Julian Fleisher: First of all, I'm overwhelmed listening to 30 year old me. I mean, 30 years ago, 20-something year old me, back then trying to eat the berber chicken at Yaffa Cafe while talking with Sweetie about stuff I was learning about for the first time myself. I was figuring out how to write about drag. I was interviewing these queens and I think this is a rather typical sentiment that Sweetie, the late, great Sweetie, may she rest in peace, describes, that there's a lot of confusion when it comes to gender play. I spend a lot of time early in the book, and this is why the field guide trope seems to work, trying to tease out what I'm not talking about in the book.

David Furst: I should mention, at the exhibition, we hear audio playing in certain spaces, right?

Julian Fleisher: Correct.

David Furst: There's also video elements as well.

Julian Fleisher: Correct. We unearthed everything there was in the archive of my work to lay bare the process of putting the book together for people, and including dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of hours of audio like you just listened to. Although much of it I couldn't bring here today because when you interview a drag queen or a bunch of them, it's all unbroadcastable.

David Furst: I see.

Julian Fleisher: Sadly, what I brought you all comes off sounding a little bit austere, kind of a little serious, because those are the few moments we could actually put on the air.

David Furst: Charles, throughout its history, drag was often driven underground due to anti LGBTQ+ persecution, but people knew about it.

Charles Busch: Yes.

Julian Fleisher: You really put her on the spot.

Charles Busch: Well, yes. There's always some adventurous person who's--

David Furst: What parts of drag culture were mainstream, if any, in the 1990s?

Charles Busch: Me.

David Furst: You.

Julian Fleisher: Fair enough. You're speaking to a legend. Someone--

David Furst: Well, it's great to have a legend with us.

Charles Busch: I wrote this play with a wild title, Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, and we actually started it off at a club in Alphabet City, the Limbo Lounge. It wasn't a drag club. It was a art gallery, kind of after hours bar. Then we transferred it rather quickly to a regular Off-Broadway theater, the Provincetown Playhouse at MacDougal Street. It ran for five years. That was certainly very mainstream.

Julian Fleisher: There was also the television episodes of TV that had drag feature, but the butt of the joke was different on a national stage.

Charles Busch: The thing was, what became difficult for people like Lypsinka and me was that you were kind of patronized. If there was any element of drag in what you're doing, it was like you're dismissed in a way. That's why I took umbrage at the time. I get embarrassed when I look at old interviews I gave were, oh my God, I was so defensive about the word drag queen. Never use that word around me, because I was not convinced that when I would be called a drag queen by a critic reviewing a play of mine, that there wasn't some sort of patronization, dismissal in it.

David Furst: Can you talk more about that evolution and perhaps what this new exhibition captures about the changes over the past 30 years?

Julian Fleisher: I think I can. I think I can. When I was thinking about the exhibit and what I wanted it to convey, the big difference is that back then in the '90s, and obviously before then, drag was not for general consumption. It was all happening in that room, on that night, between the performer and the audience. There was a sense of something very private, very unique, very-

David Furst: Ephemeral.

Julian Fleisher: -ephemeral about it, and that was the beauty of it. Now that drag has become an international phenomenon, and drag queens no longer joke about getting rich, they are getting rich, it's a very different vibe. How it subverts, if it even can, is different now than it used to. I'm not saying it's not good or fun or important, it's just very different because it was underground. Underground means underground.

Charles Busch: Well, it might be pushed underground, the way things are going. I think in places outside of New York, I think, from what I read about and hear about, that so many people are being bullied out of performing.

Julian Fleisher: Attending events like drag storytelling events.

Charles Busch: I think it's going back to 1952.

David Furst: Well, how did you first decide when you were working on this book, when you're starting to profile this community and learning about it, how did you just-- what drew you to thinking, "This is something I have to cover"? How did you decide who to profile?

Julian Fleisher: I decided whom to profile based purely on my own taste. Once I got the gig and it was basically a side hustle at the time. It was a way to make some money to support my burgeoning singing career, which is still burgeoning, I'm afraid, but at any rate--

Charles Busch: He's very good.

Julian Fleisher: Thank you [unintelligible 00:15:38]

David Furst: Where do you sing?

Julian Fleisher: I appear a lot at Joe's Pub, at the Public or at BAM, or Symphony Space, all the not for profit joints in town, including The Greene Space, when it used to be a thing.

David Furst: The Green Space down at the bottom floor.

Julian Fleisher: Downstairs here at WNYC, at New York Public Radio. I started just going to see more drag than ever. I was spending a lot of money on cover charges, a lot of money on drinks, and then a lot of money on meals, taking drag queen performers out to eat.

David Furst: That's how you blew that whole advance.

Julian Fleisher: Oh, yes.

[laughter]

Julian Fleisher: There was nothing left at that event. Let me just be clear, that 20,000 does not last long over three years and taxes and cover charges. It was just the people I was drawn to, but I think if you were to do it today, you would find yourself drawn to the same people because they emerge undeniably out of the fauna, out of the flora comes the fauna. You say, oh, these are the people you have to write about.

Charles Busch: You really do have a wonderful cross section of who really were the prominent voices.

Julian Fleisher: Who the best drag queens really were, the best lip-synchers, the best dancers, the best looks

Charles Busch: The archetypes, and then the people fanning out from that.

David Furst: In our last few seconds here, how do you think the art form has changed over the years?

Charles Busch: Well, again, I don't want to be the old person who's like, "Oh, back in the day, we were--" No, but I mean, I think what-- really, RuPaul's Drag Race has become this international phenomenon. Generations of young people have been inspired by it, but there does become a certain uniform element of what it is to be a drag queen doing the splits and the death drop.

David Furst: Oh, that we lose some of the diversity of--

Julian Fleisher: The drag queen scene in the '90s, if I may, was like an art school scene in a way. A lot of these queens, the taboos and the happy faces and the hatties were artists. They were creating something very vivid and unique.

David Furst: All right, well, The Drag Queens of New York 30th anniversary exhibition is on display through Sunday, November 30th, oh, my birthday, at Howl Arts on the second floor of their 250 Bowery street location.

Julian Fleisher: Sagittarius.

David Furst: [laughs] Julian Fleisher and Charles Busch, thank you for joining us today.

Julian Fleisher: What a pleasure. Thanks for having us.