1. Starting location: Corner of East 7th Street and Avenue A
Greeting everyone! My name is McKenzie Wark, and I’ll be your guide for today’s walking tour. I’m the author of the books Raving (2023) and Reverse Cowgirl (2020), among other things. This walking tour was commissioned by Extra Extra magazine as part of its contribution to Performa 25.
Today’s walk explores the history of queer and trans performance here in the East Village. We will head down Avenue A, and as we go I’ll point out some historic sites, nearly all gone now. We’ll end at East Houston, seven blocks downtown, at the former home of Participant Inc. Participant Inc has always drawn on the creative energy of the downtown scene, and we’ll end by celebrating some extraordinary performances that happened at Participant Inc twenty years ago for Performa.
Our theme for the day is “trans fem performance,” including trans, drag, and gender-variant artists and work. While drag and trans-femininity are not the same thing, the borders between them have always been porous. I’m going to take a very relaxed approach to what counts as “trans fem” and what counts as “performance.”
East 7th Street, Tompkins Square Park
Leight Bowery | Connie Girl
The Wigstock drag festival started here in 1984. Legend has it that it began by accident, when Lady Bunny and some other drag queens left the nearby Pyramid bar and did an impromptu show. It became an annual event. Mayor Rudy Giuliani wasn’t a fan, and it moved to other locations in the 90s. Two of the more memorable performances were by Leight Bowery. In 1993 he “gave birth” to his assistant Nicola Bowery. The following year he did an iconic version of the Beatles’ “All You Need is Love.”
Up a couple of blocks is the location of Boy Bar (15 St Mark’s Place), a gay and perhaps proto-queer bar that lasted from the mid-1980s to mid-90s. An important venue for the evolution of New York drag. Connie Girl, aka Connie Fleming, is one of the icons who found a home there. “There are only a few employment options available to trans people,” she explained. “You’re a whore, or you can be on stage and perform. There’s no room in society for us. I was super lucky and thankful that I had drag because it was a safe environment for me to transition. [The drag community] took a broken child and rebuilt her. They gave me confidence and a voice, and lifted my head up off the ground, but I had to solidify myself within.” Connie worked as a fashion model and at Patricia Field’s clothing store, also uptown a bit at 10 East 8th Street. Many trans, queer, and gender-nonconforming artists worked there over the years, and drag style found its way into the mainstream through that portal. Field famously did costumes for the TV show Sex and the City.
Even further uptown from here, and a bit west, on 2nd Avenue and East 12 Street, was the bar owned by Slugger Ann. The significance of this I’ll reveal a bit later.
Head straight down Avenue A, with stories about each of the following, which are mostly off to the east or west a block or two from there.
2. East 6th Street, Pyramid Club (101 Avenue A)
Black Lips | Anthony and the Johnsons | International Crysis | Vaginal Davis
Pyramid Club opened in 1979 right here and was one of the key venues for downtown proto-queer and trans performance art and New York style drag. RuPaul’s first New York show was here in 1982. Pyramid was an eclectic place. It was the site of Nirvana’s first New York performance too (lead singer Kurt Cobain later took to performing in a dress). Trans artists International Crysis and Vaginal Davis aka Vaginal Cream Davis also performed here. From 1992 to 1995 The Black Lips Performance Cult performed played here – a group founded by ANOHNI that included Joanna Constantine.
3. East 5th Street
Valerie Solanas
Here is an opportune time to mention Valerie Solanas. Valerie Solanas is famous for two things, her text SCUM Manifesto and shooting Andy Warhol. Less well known is her play, Up Your Ass (1965), although you can now get it from Sternberg Press. Solanas gave it to Warhol, hoping he’d produce it, but he “lost” it. It showed up many years later in his archive. In the movie I Shot Andy Warhol (1996) there’s a scene where Solanas directs a performance of the play in an all-night hamburger joint, with Candy Darling in one of the roles. That never happened, although Solanas did want Candy to perform in the play.
Another fiction: Leslie Feinberg, the author of Transgender Warriors (1996) and the novel Stone Butch Blues (1993), wrote a second novel, Drag King Dreams (2006). It’s partly set in a drag bar somewhere here in the village, before and after 9/11.
4. East 4th Street, La Mama (74 East 4th Street)
Jackie Curtis and Candy Darling in several plays by Jackie
Down that-a-way a bit is the experimental theater venue La Mama. This is an opportune moment to mention the stage work of Candy Darling. She is best known as Andy Warhol’s first superstar, and for acting in the Warhol/Morrissey films Flesh (1968) and Women in Revolt (1971). She also had a stage career.
She was in Vain Victory by Jackie Curtis in 1971, at La Mana on East 4th Street. She was also in the last Tennessee Williams’ play performed in his lifetime: Small Craft Warnings (1972). Neither the male nor female cast would allow her in their dressing rooms. She had to use a broom closet. She put a star on the door. Williams would often join her in there – which probably didn’t help the performance.
Jackie Curtis, like Candy Darling, was a Warhol superstar. She also wrote several plays, including Glamour, Glory and Gold (1967), Vain Victory (1971), and Heaven Grand in Amber Orbit (1970). The last took all its character names from the racing guide.
In Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” we famously learn that “Candy came from out on the island,” as did Reed, but Jackie Curtis grew up here in the village, mostly in and around the bar run by her grandmother, Slugger Ann. While we can think of Candy as a trans woman in the contemporary sense of the word, Jackie Curtis was doing some kind of genderfuck performance before there was a name for it.
East 4th Street, Club 82 (82 East 4th Street)
Where Lou Reed met Rachel Humphries | Angie Stardust
The 181 Club was a venue for female impersonators that ran from 1945 to 1953. It lost its liquor license in one of the periodic crackdowns in the city. It was replaced by the 82 Club. It was connected to the Genovese family, which is to say, the mob. It wasn’t a gay club. It was for straight tourists, although a lot of gay performers got work there, including trans women. Angie Stardust is one of the better known. She was fired when she started hormones. It was common for trans women to lose work in drag if they came out. Angie Stardust is immortalized in Rosa von Praunheim’s film City of Lost Souls (1983).
Club 82 is also famous as the place where Lou Reed met Rachel Humphries, the trans woman who was his lover from 1973 until 1978. His album Coney Island Baby (1976) has songs probably addressed to her. Reed dumped her when she wanted to get bottom surgery. It’s unclear what happened to Rachel after they broke up. It’s not been common for trans women to lead long lives.
5. East 3rd Street, Mercer Arts Center (240 Mercer Street)
New York Dolls
Drag was such a feature of 1960s downtown that it ended up as the stage costume of the New York Dolls, which you could call “transvestite-hoodlum.” They played early shows at the Mercer Arts Center, not long before the entire building collapsed. New York Dolls rhythm guitarist Sylvain Sylvain credits Holly Woodlawn with helping his drag look and persona. Holly was the third in the downtown trans triumvirate of Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis, and Holly Woodlawn.
In 1973 the Dolls played a double bill with Jayne County, the trans / gender-nonconforming performer and author of the book Man Enough to be a Woman (1995). One could think of Jayne as the bridge between, say, Jackie Curtis and later trans performers like Justin Vivian Bond.
East 3rd Street, The Loft (647 Broadway)
Larry Levan and Frankie Knuckles in drag
If one had to nominate a starting point for New York dance culture as we know it today, it would have to be The Loft, over on 647 Broadway. Its founder was David Mancuso, and its famous slogan was “Love Saves the Day.” Two legendary DJs started out as patrons there –
Frankie Knuckles and Larry Levan, who would later anchor two important clubs in the history of queer nightlife: The Warehouse and Paradise Garage. Legend has it that they would come to The Loft in drag. The Loft is a key moment in the move toward contemporary queer nightlife performativity.
6. East 2nd Street, STAR House (213 East 2nd Street)
Marsha P. Johnson
Marsha P. Johnson and Silvia Rivera ran STAR House on East 2nd street from 1970 to 1971 as a home for trans people. STAR stood for Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. Marsha sewed some of their banners there. We can think of Marsha as, among other things, a performance artist who took the whole of downtown New York as her stage. She also appeared in performances by the Angels of Light, an offshoot of the Cockettes.
In Tourmaline’s recent biography of Marsha, she emerges as, among other things, an artist of everyday life. An inspiration for many of us who choose not to hide our transsexuality, but to make it a public fact. One needs to re-
member, however, that she was very likely murdered for it.
East 2nd Street, Lucky Cheng’s (24 1st Avenue)
Laverne Cox, Jamie Clayton, Bob the Drag Queen, Yuhua Hamasaki
Lucky Cheng’s was a restaurant where all of the wait staff were drag queens and/or trans women. Laverne Cox, Jamie Clayton, Bob the Drag Queen, and Yuhua Hamasaki all worked there at one time or another. I once took the writer Kathy Acker there. She took one look and declared it “bridge and tunnel.” Meaning for tourists from Long Island or New Jersey. She wasn’t wrong. However, it did provide work for queer and trans people for many years.
It appears in the pilot episode of Sex and the City as the location for Miranda’s 30th birthday. That pretty much ruined it. Like a lot of gay nightlife, it became infested with bachelorette parties.
7. East 1st Street, CBGBs (315 Bowery)
Jayne County
Over on the Bowery is the former site of CBGBs. Jayne County came up through downtown performance, and was in Andy Warhol’s Pork (1971). She founded her first band in 1974, and is in the film City of Lost Souls (1983) by Rosa von Praunheim, alongside Angie Stardust. She later became a visual artist.
At 47 East Houston Street is the Knitting Factory, probably best known for contemporary jazz, but it was also home to one of the early runs of Kiki and Herb, the long–running creation of Kenny Mellman and Justin Vivian Bond. The Kiki character is a fading nightclub singer whose act has seen better days, and Herb is her long-suffering piano accompanist.
8. East Houston, Participant Inc (253 East Houston Street)
Genesis P–Orridge | Vaginal Davis
The last stop on our tour is one of the former homes of Participant Inc, a nonprofit gallery and performance space founded in 2001, originally on Rivington street before it moved here to East Houston. It is now at 116 Elizabeth Street.
Participant Inc has been an important space for connecting the arts of queer nightlife to performance. It’s probably curated shows by more trans artists than any other New York venue. This includes shows or performances by Justin Vivian Bond (2011 and 2018), Vaginal Davis (2012, 2020), Conrad Ventur’s tribute to Mario Montez 92013), Greer Lankton (2014), Jayne County (2018), Tuesday Smilie (2018), Nash Glyn (2019), Keioui Keijaun Thomas (2021), Christeene (2020), Sofia Moreno (2021), Blacklips (2022), Chloe Dzubilo (2025), and Gavilan Rayna Russom (2025).
There’s one moment when Participant Inc, transsexuality and Performa intersect, and that’s in 2005. Participant Inc hosted a performance by Breyer P–Orridge called Change Thee Way to Perceive and Change All Memory (2005), curated by Lia Gangitano. This was a joint work by Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, who merged their identities into Breyer P-Orridge in the early 1990s. They used various modern medical procedures to resemble one another as much as possible toward creating “the ‘I’ of consciousness as a fictional assembly or collage that resides in the environment of the body.”
In the same 2005 Performa at Participant Inc, Vaginal Davis gathered a group of NYU coeds of varying body types and asked them to wear makeshift costumes and stand motionless as “living sculpture” in a parody of Vanessa Beecroft’s fashion model spectacles. “VD as VB” delivered instructions to the performers and to the photographers and videographers who were invited to document the gathering. She also allowed the public to touch the performers, “if they asked nicely.”
And where does the story go from there? I think the story of trans fem performance continues but not here in downtown Manhattan. Things moved to an indefinable area between East Williamsburg and Bushwick in Brooklyn, and over into parts of Ridgewood, Queens. After Wigstock came Bushwig, and the emergence of drag by trans women. I’ll just mention Charlene incarnate and Macy Rodman. Other contemporary trans artists I’d like to include are Juliana Huxtable and Kay Gabriel, who between them hold up different corners of contemporary trans and queer nightlife, in the spirit of The Loft.
That’s our tour! I’d like to thank Shawn Dickerson, Hugh Ryan, and Elyssa Goodman for historical research, and Jeanette Bisschops for Performa archival help. If you’re interested in reading more about the Village and its artistic history, I recommend Villageworks bookstore on St Marks Place, or, for contemporary queer and trans art and literature, come out to Bushwick and visit Hive Mind Books.
