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It got so large that we had to move it to the West Side pier to accommodate the crowds - especially after "Wigstock: The Movie" came out in 1995. The festival got bigger and bigger, attracting stars like Debbie Harry and Boy George who joined the mostly drag queen cast. The festival was also neighborhood marketing for the Pyramid, where most of the performers came from in it’s early years. I thought surely I could put on a better show than that. Sometimes their masturbatory guitar solos would go on for 15 minutes of ear-splitting crap. Bands would often get permits and “jam” playing screeching death metal in the park all day. So when I got to the Pyramid and saw all of these wild and wonderful performers, my instinct was to showcase them to a larger audience than the couple of hundred regulars that the Pyramid could hold. Why did you decide to create Wigstock? How did this seminal drag festival develop?Īs a child, I always put on silly shows in my backyard for the horrified neighbors. NYC was creating the underground culture that the whole world was vibing to.
And then stars like Deee-Lite, RuPaul, Barbara Tucker, John Cameron Mitchell aka Hedwig, Kevin Aviance and Antony And The Johnsons began to spring from our downtown scene. Much of the music that the whole world was dancing do was created by NY DJ/producers like Masters At Work and Def Jam with Frankie Knuckles. The music was the best I’d ever heard and that led me to dabble in DJing, a side career which I never dreamt would take me to Tokyo, Morocco, Bangkok and even the club atop the Eiffel Tower. From the Pyramid, I branched out to other clubs and was generally enthralled by the vibrant scene of the time. I became a resident go-go dancer at this drag queen owned-and-operated venue for the next few years. A van carted me to NYC in drag to appear at the Pyramid Club as a guest star in RuPaul’s booking there. The Huffington Post: Talk to me about your experiences in the NYC nightlife scene - what did your journey to becoming one of the most prominent drag queens in the world entail?ĭrugs! Booze! Sex in toilet stalls! It’s largely a blur.