Discussing craigs new book. Who does that think she is . Doris fish. And the rise of the drag. Doris fish and rise the rise of drag lolo. Before we get started, theres a few House Keeping notes, tips. Firstly to silence cell phones. If i hear them ringing, im going to come take it. I might give it back. If youre nice. Also book for tonight is for sale at the front register. So after the conversation you can go to the front register and come back here and well have a signing. Please consider checking out on social media. Maybe joining our email. You can learn about all of the other that will be hosting throughout the month and through the summer. Also tonight is being recorded, as we had said earlier. So please keep your questions until the end. And then when you a question, someone will bring you a microphone and you can speak right into that microphone. All right. Lets just get a few words for our special guests. Liz brown is the author of twilight man. Also written for book forum eldercare, london review of books, los angeles times, new times, book review and other publications and she never sleeps. Craig seligman has written for and edited at a host of magazines, journals, newspapers, website sites. Now. So there is so many i not list them all or wed be here all night. He is the author of sontag and how opposites attract me. And now his new book is about the history of drag. Yes. And im not talking. So further ado, liz and craig. Hi, everybody thanks for coming. Im going to read very briefly from the introduction, the book, and then liz and i are going to have conversation about it and. Then ill open the floor to questions. I really love embarrassing questions. So. I chose the introduction because its something i dont have to context juls and im guessing that not all of you know, who doris fish was. Doris was drag who was born in australia. Sydney in 1952 and died in San Francisco in 1991. Doris fish was a made up person in both senses, invented and cosmetically enhanced who became one of those characters who defined an era. That era from the early 1970s to the early nineties, when he was variously shocking public with his bad girl drag and cracking it up with his aggressive glamor has receded so quickly in collective consciousness that it can be hard to remember how totally beyond pale drag queens used to be, and not just queens across a large chunk of the globe, gay men and lesbians who were in a far shakier place at the beginning of those years than they were at the end. Drag were a flashpoint in the culture that raged during era of change. Doris was brazen, the delight he took in his frocks, his wigs, his high heels, and above all his make up. Id paint eyeballs if i could, he said. He had to settle for painting his teeth, but he was nothing like the stereotyped, ditzy drag queen. He had a sharp intelligence sense and reservoirs of kindness hidden behind his quick cutting, and he was extremely grounded. He touched. He encountered, including me. I was only on the periphery of his world. Why does his memory still haunt me all these years after his death . Perhaps because doris, the freest person ive ever known, even while as an artist, he was also one of the most discipline and everybody who knew him was aware of the way he compartmentalized his life. There were three doriss the artist the drag queen and the prostitute. And he embraced them all. Ive never known anyone who loved being himself so much. All three of those personas centered on his at a time when homosexuality was just beginning to make its way toward the center of the conversation in both of the countries he called home. But if doris was in some ways emblematic of gay generation in the end, he was too exceptional a person to be emblematic of anything himself. Back then, our understood ending of gender fluidity wasnt what it is now. And a person who called himself herself a drag queen might occupy a wide range of places on the sexual spectrum within the a gogo the San Francisco drag troupe, the doris, the fragile and ebullient tippi was a person we would now easily as trans while. The formidable miss x was a bisexual man whose most profound detachments were with women. Doris himself had no uncertainty about his own gender, his sexuality, though he was thoughtful about his feminine side and a student, of all things, womanly in cosmetics and apparel. He loved his male body it and got tremendous out of it. And so did a lot of other men. His influence on drag style is very much with us in the drag queens of today performers like peaches christ, bianca del rio and sasha, to name only a few. Doris was playing with notions gender at a moment when those notions had started to shift toward what we currently the nonbinary. He wasnt what we would now identify as trans. Far from it. But he did give a lot of thought to masculine entity and femininity and. The liberating thrill of traveling those two continents. His strong sense of self encompassed an unusually fluid concept of identity. Previous drag queens had presented themselves as women. Manque. Nobody in his first group, sylvia and jacintha bought into that esthetic. As doris matured, his drag got more complex. But it always remained to his term. Kruk. The aim was never to pass for a woman, which, as he pointed out wouldnt get him the he craved because nobody would notice him then, but rather to savor the freedom of being who you wanted to be and not who somebody thought you were supposed to be. He was a walking of the gamut of identities available to us and the rush that comes with getting to choose for yourself. Thank you. Can you hear me . Okay . Okay. Well it is lovely to be here on this rainy day and to be with craig this incredibly, deeply researched book, which is heartfelt and sometimes extremely. And i love that the title a question. So i a question about that question, which is why title the title has actually a few meanings. It was the title of the benefit that was held for doris when he was in 1990, in San Francisco. Instead of having memorials for people with aids we had parties and benefits for them so they could kind of enjoy own funerals. And also so we could earn money for them that they could use before they died. So who do you who does that think she is . Im not sure. No sure anymore. Who came up with the title of the benefit . But its typical drag queen talk at the same time as mentioned. Who does . Who does that think she is . Has a has the meaning of who was doris at any one time in his life since there were really three such separate doris. There was doris the larger than life drag and he really did seem to grow two or three feet and not just because the heels of the wigs when he got into drag. And there was doris the very quiet studious disciplined artist who people his on the movie set for the movie he made vegas in space who really had very to say because he was so focused on his work. And then there was doris the prostitute whom most of his friends really didnt know except when he was taking phone, that he would say, hi this phil . Yeah, very versatile versatile. So its that title isnt meant to be funny, but at the same time theres that layer of sadness under it. Yeah. And did you come to know doris and decide to his story . I came to know doris because. Went to work for mother magazine in 1983. And this outrage queen named silvana nova came to work in the Art Department and we got to be friends and now been together for 40 years. In any case, he was at that time with doris in series a an ongoing soap opera called naked brunch. So the first time i met doris was at a cocktail party. Silvana threw doris and his colleague miss x arrived from a photo shoot. They were models for west graphics, greeting cards, and they were dressed. They were still dressed for the shoot in blue space alien makeup. I was impressed. Doris kind to me, but didnt pay a lot of attention to me. Really, because doris didnt have a lot of time for people who were not useful to him. When doris learned that i was a journalist, he became much friendlier. And why . Why you decide to tell the story when . Why did you think we need this story . I decided for a number of. First of all, i was afraid that if i didnt record the story of doris, nobody would that doris would be lost to history. And i think doris is an important of history. The history, Gay Liberation in this country, as almost always told a new york perspective, because new york is where the media are. But San Francisco was a very different place, both in the seventies and especially in the eighties, when aids struck. So i had the chance, both to tell the story of this remarkable who had an increased event filled life and. Also, the history of an era that i thought people should know until is as to as to who doris is influences were who inspired doris. Doris loved more than anything female and there is a serious there because doris couldnt sing note as in a sex. You always want what you cant as a teenager. Doris was obsessed. Grace slick. So when he came to San Francisco and, entered a Talent Contest in the seventies with his friend mr. Abood and others. Sidney queen. They were. They were doing the martyrdom of maria, the italian saint. They used a lot of catch up for the blood as maria stabbed 20 times by the farmhand who she refused to sleep with. Neither of them wanted to play farmhand. So turned him into a lesbian and to doris grace, slick was judging contest, gave them a thousand points out of a possible hundred. So doris died at 38, which is kind of unthinkable just. Can you hear me . Sorry. So doris died, at 38, which, given much he produced in terms of art and performance is kind of a astonishing how much he was able to pack into his life. And one of the things that really struck me reading the book was actually his early life in sydney as a member of sylvia in the synthetics. And i was wondering, you could talk a little bit about that group and also, i mean, those were the most shocking to me in the book were. Some of their antics on stage. So i think they were, if anybody is familiar with hats in San Francisco. Sylvia and then synthetic were a very similar group. They they certainly knew about the cockatoo. So though they werent directly connected to them in any way and the cockatoo dissolved, i think in 1972. And sylvia and the synthetics formed the same month, and they lasted exactly the same amount of time that the cats did two years because these crazy drag groups were not really good at making enough money to sustain themselves. The idea of sylvia and the synthetics was what we at that time called gender bending or much less politely but more familiarly gender. And it was for for people to crossdress but in ways that did not disguise their their biological gender. So in other words, you saw a lot of dresses on guys with harry legs and hairy chests. You saw a lot of sequins although in in the hats, you saw a lot of beards. You didnt see that so much in sylvia john waters described cockatoo shows as being something that we now cannot imagine, performances in which everyone on stage and everyone in the audience on drugs and that was true of sylvia and the synthetic, too. They would get up on stage and do the wackiest wildest, most undisciplined and often some of the most incompetent are trying to trying to stack a lot of drag queens on, forget what cheerleaders do, what that move called. But trying to do that when youve had a lot of quaaludes is not is not a very good idea. Nevertheless critics saw what they were doing and thought it was Performance Art and so they were they were taken seriously by critics on the one hand. On the other hand, they were beloved by a population of people, gay and straight who were getting over the victorian ism that still lasted into their parents generation and were really themselves. Can you talk a little bit about how the family that doris grew up in and how they to his life. Doris came from a conservative family or at least his parents were conservative catholics. He was one of six siblings when. He came out to them as gay at around the age of 18. No. Was remotely surprised. He had already been doing his sisters make up for some years. And little by little his parents conservatism changed. I shouldnt say little by little because they they werent shocked by doriss sexuality and. They supported him from the very beginning. Incredibly, to me, no one in the family was shocked by. His drag either. His brothers, who were younger sister, fertile lips, invited him to perform at their 21st birthday parties. They thought he was fabulous, which he was. And his parents, his mother actually became as well known on the gay in sydney as doris was was always at his shows when doris was and the gay pride parades they were called mardi gras parades in. His mother was on the float. So there was and one of the one of the things im writing about in the book, one of my theories about what happened that time was that goes back to stonewall and the events of Gay Liberation in the late sixties and seventies and. Its this we have read many stories about kids who were rejected by their families for being. And those stories are true. And it happened. And we know weve read those stories. But my impression and i have no figures to back this up is that there were a lot people like me and like doris and like silvana, whose parents and families totally accepted them. And so my own belief is that stonewall came about because my own generation had grown up without shame about sexuality. My parents didnt raise me to think it would be okay to be gay, but they did raise me to have a really positive attitude about sex. And i think thats true of a lot of people and, my generation. Interesting. Yeah. That its nice to have another narrative like that out there to kind of counter the sense of pushing through shame all the time. Thats the story. Im curious about process of researching, writing the book and what what was the most pleasurable part. There were there are two kinds of research. Of course, theres going to libraries and archives and theres talking to people and the most was talking to people. It was fun for two reasons. One was that it took me all over the world. Doriss friends are now spread out in. San francisco and los angeles and phenix. And paris. And of. There are lots still in australia and the other thing was i came to realize talking to all these people what great taste. Doris had in people i was on the periphery of doriss circle. So i vaguely knew these people, but i really didnt know what great people they were. I didnt come out of a single interview. I think thinking to, oh, what a jerk. Im glad thats over. In fact, i made a lot of friends in the course of doing book including with doris siblings who who really are now friends. Thats nice. What would doris think of rupaul and our current drag industrial complex. I am absolute at least certain that doris would be thrilled would be a part of it. I dont know how doris had a are a deficit as a performer, which is that he couldnt sing and he couldnt dance. But he had an incredible presence. And once rupaul, with his talents, opened the world to drag, im doris would have been there hogging the spotlight as much as he possibly could have. Doris was really generous performer. He was. I think he had such self that he never had to about upstaging other people because your eye went naturally to him. Unless, of course, silvana on the stage. And so he he was a big supporter of drag. He liked people do drag and i think he would be very, very happy to see Younger Generation have really run with it. What i think what astonished now is the amazing professor analyzation of drag and what about the current onslaught of antitrans antidrug legislation. Yeah, thats thats something thats always interesting to talk about because its something that never really dies. You think that youve you think that youve buried that beast and then that beast raises its head. Its the same with antisemitic. Those things never truly die. And you have just got to keep fighting because politicians will always find an othering. Or gay people or trans people or people of color are a way rile up a crowd. Its a really good way to rile up a crowd. And so those of us on other side have to make sure that that the information gets out and that the crowd gets calmed down again to i think we can open it up for. Questions from the audience. One request is that you wait. Ask your question until you have the microphone which gentleman will provide for you so we can begin any anyone a question right here at the front and here you go. When did you start . Start your research and how so . How long it till the book was finished . The question is when did i start my research . I actually started it in 2005, a long time ago. But i cant to have been working on the book full. Since 2005. I also to earn a living, which i did mainly an as an editor and a writer book reviews. So we used the writing of the book as an excuse for for a vacation in paris, a vacation in phenix. And little by little, the book came. It didnt really off in a truly serious way until 2011, when we went to australia and met a lot of doriss friends from sylvia, the synthetics and his family there. Anyone other questions in the audience right at the back. I know you of course, mainly as a critic and. Your first book was a great piece of criticism about pauline kael and susan sontag. What was it like to approach a biography of how where did you get the confidence to do that . Im. Sure i still have the confidence to do it. Its its very different in a way. Its lot harder because if youre writing criticism, you dont have to go out of the house, whereas if youre writing a biography, you have to use a lot of shoe leather as the expression is. And in i thought as i was writing the book for a long time that there was really no relation between the two books. But the more i worked on it, the more i came to understand how intimately the two books are related, especially with pauline kael, but also with susan. You what made . What made these people critics was their ability show the the relationship between art culture with kael especially she showed us how american movies and international were were intimately related to the life we were living. And what i came to understand that duras had done was bunch of crazy drag shows that none of us took seriously. We would go to them and we would order a lot of drinks and we would laugh and we would have a good time and only in retrospect that i understand that these shows were really satirizing the life we as americans were living. And in satirizing that life, they were actually a bringing a new kind of world into existence. Those drag shows, they were essentially aimed at the queer community, but they were so good that a lot of straight were coming to them too. And. And so little little i think drag queens really led the way in in queer visibility. Theres a lot i could say about that in lot of directions. There was there was a lot of anger at drag in the seventies from from the gay community, because at that time we were fighting for equal rights and a lot of gay politicians in jackets and ties didnt want drag queens be the people that were seen on tv. Thats an understandable point of view. I think it was also a very point of view. The other thing i thought a lot about as i was writing the book was was the meaning of art. I tend to be an esthete myself. And so i was i was a little in fact i will admit it. I was dismissive of kind of things doris did as a drag. I thought there were a lot of fun and. I didnt really think much more about them. And the book is, in a sense, an act of expiation, to say to doris what you were doing was extremely important. Your shows were changing the world. I didnt see it, but you saw it. Thats lovely. Yes. Right in the back. Yeah. Since you knew doris in a peripheral way and socially you when she was working after all your research what was that surprised you the most. You learned from that research research. The thing that was constant was surprising to me all through writing, doris, was how incredibly smart he was i was. As i said earlier, had been dismissive of of. The kind of art that doris did. I didnt really think of it as art. I just thought of it as fun. But in fact there was an extreme artistic intelligence thats going on there. Doris was a very good painter. He actually, was classically trained artist. He went to art school. He was an amazing painter of sets, but doris really excelled, was in painting faces. He i havent talked about his movie vegas in space, and i probably should. He did all the and costumes for that movie and the the costumes in in which he was turning people into glamorous queens on a pleasure planet, an all female pleasure planet in the 23rd century. He made every one of those queens, and he would do it by completely erasing their face and putting on an another face on top of it in a multitude of colors. He also himself assumed a series of disguises. A greeting card Company Called west graphics in San Francisco that was just a little nothing of a company. When doris became a model for it and then took off as one of the most successful greeting card in the country during the eighties, when doris took on a series of personas for for the company. If you around in the eighties, then you probably got a birthday card or an anniversary record or a get well card with doris on the front of maybe in the guise of nancy, maybe in the guise of barbara bush or more, probably in the guise of some crazy person who you were. Not exactly sure was is this a woman or a man or something in between . So, so, yeah. So i, i guess doriss intelligence as an artist was, was what struck most would talk a little about vegas in space. Tell us if i should talk about vegas work art, because this was actually the great work and the great of doriss life. In 1983, doris and his housemaid on oak street in San Francisco threw a party. Doris, with his as a sex worker, had gone to new york and bought 1,000 worth of fun, fur and mylar. And they lined the house. With these fabrics and then they painted their faces. Fluorescent makeup and lined the house with black lights. And then they threw what was apparently one of the wildest parties San Francisco has ever seen. And when doris woke up the next day, he said, this is just good to tear down. Now we to do something about that. Lets make a movie. His idea was a 15 minute movie john waters style. Somebody would come in, they would, you know, do something crazy. Theyd show it at the roxy in San Francisco making a movie in the eighties was a lot different and a lot more complicated than. Making a movie now, my sort of nephew, aaron katz, said at the premiere of one of his movies in new york, he was asked how much it would cost make the movie, and he answered that. They had taken in more at the door that night than it had cost to make the movie vegas space cost well into the six figures to make by the time it was made, which is why it took 1983 when they began filming it to 1991, when was released just a few months after. Doriss death. Its its a crazy cult populated by drag queens. It isnt a good movie in the way that normally judge movies, but it is one of the weirdest, wildest most inspiring visions ive ever seen on screen. If anybody has ever seen the movie pink narcissus, which was also made by a crazy queen in new york much earlier. Thats the movie thats to me most comparable. Its really doris is vision. And doris did the make up the sets and favorite thing about the movie he built miniatures he built this miniature city called vegas and spaced out of lipstick and perfume bottles and powder puffs. And theyre really a joy to look at. I was at a screening of the movie in sydney just a few weeks ago, a big turned out for it and it actually holds up remarkably. I think it looks a lot better today than it did when it first came out 30 years ago. Okay. How are we on time . Whats our okay. Other questions . Yes yes. First of all, i want to thank you for writing. I really thought she was someone that was he was forgotten. And i was really excited to see. Well, the book i ive watched vegas in space very many times. Its the kind of, you know, visual light that you can watch over and over and get something out of it. But theres so much detail in it not knowing anything about doors. Ive looked at that and wondered what is her accent . And i would have never thought she was from australia. So i was wondering, did she neutralized her australian accent to speak like that or was that just way she spoke up . Did everybody hear the question . The question was partly about vegas and space, but it was largely about doriss accent and whether whether it was a typical australian accent or doris had neutralized it off performance. In fact, had a very cultivated australian accent and and sounded very much like his mother, mildred. Doris never tried tone down his accent except unless it was for a role he he could do an american accent if, if necessary. But no, that was really the way that doris. To. Well, im going to chime in with question i have which is. We know doris fish the drag queen, but the sex worker is less known that part of his life. And i was wondering if you could talk a little bit that that part of his life and how he viewed that were work. Yeah im happy to talk that and i do talk about it a lot. The book. Doris was a person, a voracious libido and he discovered sex work when he was, i dont know, probably around 20 or 21. He went home with a guy and so im a massage table in his bedroom and said, whats that for . And the next day, doris was taking clients and he told me i wrote a story on doris for the San Francisco examiner in the eighties. And when i was interviewing doris, he told me, i know youre not supposed to like your work, but i love my work. As soon as i started doing this, i knew it was for me and doris remained a sex worker. Really for for all his life. He hes. It never occurred to me that you couldnt finance a feature film on a prostitute, which is in fact, how it was financed. Are stories about doris being in a meeting for the movie and then getting a phone call. Hi, this is phil. Excuse me. Have to go down stairs half an hour. Coming back up, giving the movies director of philip ford a check for 50. There. There. Theres, of course, a lot of controversy about sex work and what i can say about doris is as a sex worker, is he chose it freely. He never had a pimp. He was never forced into it. Doris came from a middle class background and could have any other kind of day job if he had wanted to. Sex, work him the freedom to do the kind art he wanted to do. Also to satisfy his obviously immensely. Though. Yeah. Yeah. I, i loved that part of the book in, that part of doris just sort of his very Expansive Library today idea and i should that if doris was open with his family about a gay man and a drag queen, he was also quite open being a sex worker. He would write them letters saying, i have a date with a guy tomorrow and im going to get 100 bucks from it. 100 bucks in the eighties was a lot of money. More questions from our audience there. Doris, do sex in drag or is it exclusively male . Thats thats actually a great question to, doris. Ever do sex work in drag . In fact, when someone would come on to doris when he was in, he would say, oh, would you like to caress my brothers socks . Doris. Doris was truly a drag queen and not a and not a trans person. He he had interest in doing sex work in drag. He said, if you do sex work in drag, thats the kind theatrical performance and they, you know, they tear your dress and they your wig awry. But the interesting thing is, doris doris hung out with a crowd that really ran the sexual spectrum. So, in fact, for a couple of doriss colleagues im thinking of tippi and, my favorite drag queen name all time, jacqueline hyde, who has lived as a woman in paris for the last 40 years. Drag was really liberating and. They i dont want to say that they had sex drag. I want to say that drag brought out the the womanhood in them that allowed them to have sex as the as female beings they saw as. Other questions. Yes. One, we have time for one more question before we have to make it a good one. Its challenge. Okay. What is your next book going to be . What is my next book going to be be . You tell me. Im waiting for. Im waiting for an idea. Yeah. Yeah. The the idea of a book about doris came up pretty quickly. My first book. What going to do next is put my feet up and relax a while. Thank you very much,