In 1974 Andy Warhol was commissioned by Luciano Anselmino, an Italian art dealer, to capture the portraits of the queens of NYC’s drag scene. The series of photos turned screenprints was titled “Ladies and Gentlemen 135”
There are lives that do not conform to the world but confront it.
When someone moves through the world in a body they have claimed for themselves, in a gender they have authored, they are disrupting established norms. A society organised around conformity experiences authentic self-creation as threat.
These Polaroid portraits of Marsha P. Johnson by Andy Warhol derive from his series Ladies and Gentlemen, which focuses on drag queens and trans women, primarily of colour in 1974.
Such lives expose the fragility of identities built through compromise and obedience. Instead of interrogating our own buried desires, we often become defensive. We ridicule or attempt to erase those who embody what we have long denied within ourselves.
Castro Street Fair, San Francisco, CA, August 1980. Photo by Paul Fusco.
Their existence becomes intolerable because it raises questions we’ve spent our whole lives trying to avoid; Could I be more than this? Could I live more freely? Could I reclaim parts of myself I have locked away?
Zanele Muholi, Charlottesville, Virginia, 2015. © Zanele Muholi. Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yancey Richardson, New York.
Faced with such questions, introspection becomes unbearable. Beneath the identities we perform, we begin to sense the possibility that much of what we accepted as truth was imposed rather than chosen.
We fear the freedom of others because it reveals our own imprisonment.