Boy George - Why Drag?

Copyright 2016 by Magnus Hastings.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form
without written permission from the publisher.

ISBN 978-1-4521-4928-8 (epub. mobi)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hastings, Magnus, photographer.

[Photographs. Selections]

Why drag? / Magnus Hastings ; foreword by Boy George.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-4521-4897-7 (alk. paper)

1. Female impersonators--Portraits. 2. Portrait photography. I. Boy George, 1961- writer of foreword. II. Title.

TR681.F45H37 2016

770.92--dc23

2015030341

Design by Michael Morris

FRONTMATTER PHOTOS
: Courtney Act
: Bianca Del Rio
: Magnus Hastings and Courtney Act
: Dallas Dellaforce (right and left) Maxi Shields (Center)
: Boy George

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BY MAGNUS HASTINGS

i like to say that i was a child of drag. I grew up coveting all the girly gifts that were lavished on my sister, longing for my own Barbie to play with. I would regularly dress up and put on shows for my parents, always casting myself as the female lead and relegating my sister and stepsister to supporting roles. During my umpteenth rendition of My name is Tallulah, from Bugsy Malone, my mother finally snapped in exasperation: Will you ever play the boy?

I took the question as rhetorical.

My favorite game was to run up and down our street, naked, except for my sisters silver clogs, carrying my mothers giant white ostrich feather fan. I would sing tirelessly along to the songs of Abba, wallowing in their melodrama, never quite able to decide between Agnetha or Frida. (Agnetha was so obvious, but she got all the best parts to sing.) And I would dig out my mothers old hairpieces (her 60s glamour now consigned to obscurity at the bottom of a drawer) and attach them to my head somehow, slip a trash bag over my legs, and, once settled on top of our big blue beanbag, become the most beautiful mermaid in all of the land. Im a mermaid, I would deadpan to any of my parents friends whom I encountered, while dreamily brushing my long, rather lumpy, blonde hair.

Then, somehow, I grew up. I grew out of dressing up and drag slipped into my past.

But it couldnt have been buried too deep. In 2003, I arrived in Sydney, Australia, and stumbled into a drag show at the nightclub Arq. There in front of me was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen, dressed up to perfection as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. She was performing a not-quite-so-perfect lip synch to Somewhere Over the Rainbow, and I was transfixed. It felt like coming home. The fantasy world of my childhoodall that color and life and beautywas spread out before me once again, only now I wanted to capture it. Document it. Celebrate it!

That queens name was Vanity Faire, and she was to become my first drag muse. It turned out that Vanity was queen bee at the time, and once I had her seal of approval I could pretty much shoot whomever I wanted. Sydney at that time was a very exciting place. It was filled with really talented queens, including Dallas Dellaforce, Maxi Shield, and of course Courtney Act. And the shows were epic. Midnight Shift would regularly have big staged numbers with huge production values and slickly choreographed routines by Ashley Swift. Even the smallest shows would have about four backup dancers and a costume change. They were full-on productions and nothing like what I had seen in London; I may have been fresh off the boat, but I felt I was witnessing something special, and I was hooked.

So I set up my shoot with Vanity. She was to meet me dressed as Dorothy at a local caf, where she would drink beer and do generally un-Dorothy-like things. I nervously waited for her to showand I waited... and waited... for three hours! Then finally, just before sunset, she emerged. Shame theres no light, she drawled at me. I took one shot and silently showed her the image on the back of my camera. Her whole demeanor changed, and within those twenty minutes of fading light we managed to take what is still my personal favorite image ever.

As my reputation as a photographer grew, work with celebrities and pop stars flooded in, but with it came restrictions from publicists and managers, who were always careful and rarely willing to try anything they didnt consider family friendly. I tried to hand Hilary Duff a bottle of vodka to hold once and her Disney minder was not amused! Of course that work can be exciting and fun, but for me nothing touches the artistic freedom that the drag world offers me.

To me, drag is an art form with no rules, and my shots are a celebration of that. I want to provide access to a subculture that is often difficult to reach, a peek behind the velvet rope into the VIP lounge that is Drag World, a chance to explain exactly what it is that I love so much. So I use my eyes and my camera to capture this worlds incredible power and diversity in all its glorious technicolor.

The drag world of course includes traditional queens with heavy lip lines and huge lashes, their makeup almost mask-like in its precision. But it also encompasses everything from fishy queens, whose gorgeous bodies and ultra-feminine images confuse the observer, to bearded ladies, who play with gender stereotypes and have come to represent the new, confrontational face of drag, as if to say just when you were getting comfortable.... This is a world peopled by the bold and the beautiful and is not for the fainthearted.

When I first toyed with the idea of a book on drag, I contacted an interested publisher who, in our first meeting, suggested I find a psychiatrista psychiatrist!to write the foreword. Okay, I said politely. Then I made my excuses and fled.

Thankfully, since then, the popularity of drag has exploded around the world, thanks in large part to Broadway and TV. A drag queen is now viable as a person in her own right, no longer dismissed as a man in a dress.

But in fact, there is motivation behind drag, and as I worked on this project, I asked all of my subjects the same question: Why drag? The answers provide fascinating insight into each subject and enrich the imagery of each photo shoot.

This book has been very much a collaboration between the queens and myself. We made these photos work in the strangest of circumstances, seizing our moment wherever possible: in a hotel corridor, on the streets of San Francisco, or running away from West Hollywoods permit police, cameras and costumes flying.

A final note: As I worked on this project, there seemed to arise some confusion with viewers among the terms