Now, this was not the typical drag magazine I was used to seeing back home ― magazines that featured hemis, gassers, headers, blowers, mag wheels, Garlits, funny cars, etc. No, this drag magazine featured guys in gowns, boys in bras, men in minis, fellows in fishnets, males in marabou, etc.
Wow! I had found a magazine just for me!
I looked around me to see if anyone was looking at me looking at the magazine sitting on the rack. The coast was clear, so I reached for the magazine and flipped through it quickly to make sure it really was a magazine about trannies and not trannies. Satisfied, I handed it to the newsdealer and paid the exorbitant (for circa 1970) cover price of $3 (that's almost $20 in 2016 money).
As the newsdealer put the magazine in a brown paper bag and handed it to me, he gave me a dirty look. No fan of drag was he, but I did not care because I had in my hands something I hoped would expand my knowledge of the world that I seemed to be part of.
Drag never showed up on the local magazine racks, so I did not buy the magazine unless I was in NYC and could dp so surreptitiously if I happened to have any company on those trips. As a result, I only acquired two or three issues of the magazine and cherished them until "The Great Purge of 1983," when they went out to the trash with all my other gurly paraphenalia.
Over the years, I saw clippings from Drag on various Internet places and I even saw complete issues for sale on eBay at exorbitant prices that I was unwilling to pay. But last week, Diana of Little Corner of the Nutmeg State fame e-mailed me with some good news: complete issues of Drag were now available for downloading from Internet Archive.
So I plan to reverse "The Great Purge of 1983" and rebuild my small collection of Drag.
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| Wearing JustFab. |
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| Two pretty femulators from San Francisco, circa 1970 |
I take it, then, you never visited the "boutique" run by Drag's publisher, Lee? It was on the second floor of a building across Ninth Ave. on the rear side of the Port Authority Bus Terminal.
ReplyDeleteAfter buying and reading Drag, I became aware of Lee's, but all my subsequent trips to NYC were with friends, who would not understand. (And I'm not sure I completely understood at the time either!)
DeleteYou should also check out: https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/
ReplyDeleteThank you for that link.
DeleteDon't you just hate the purges, your great purge of 1983 sounds like my great purge of 1995 and the worst purge of 2010! I swear I will never purge again, just find a secure place to lock it all up because this never ends even if I deny myself. I had so many fashion magazines that today would be worth hundreds on eBay. A 1969 Seventeen with all the fashions for that year!
ReplyDeleteThe Great Purge of 1983 was the worst and the last purge... worst because I trashed all the Polaroids and Super 8 movies I had taken during the previous 15 years! After that, I swore never to purge again and I have not.
Deletethanks for the link (: lots of downloading to come....oh to have digital versions of transvestia and men in skirts!
ReplyDeleteThanks so much for the link, Stana. These issues do bring back fond and not so fond memories of the 70's. I was reading the early issues, and it is fascinating to see the call by Lee Brewster et al. for an inclusion and sisterhood, rather than setting drag queens, transsexuals and crossdressers against one another as has too often be done in the years since.
ReplyDelete"The great purge of 1983"
ReplyDeleteThey still talk about it every now and then to this day.
Some of the old-timers say that there will never be another as bad, at least they hope not.
I dream of a world where purging does not exist