Guy to Goddess: An Intimate Look at Drag Queens

by Rosamond Norbury (Photographs), Bill Richardson (Text)

Guy to An Intimate Look at Drag Queens

Genres: LGBT

117 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1994

Reviews

[Liralen]

Drag is its own country. For a while, I traveled there, learning this and that in a haphazard way by talking informally with some of the locals. I'm happy I went, and happy to be home again. All travel is, by definition, unsettling. It is particularly so when you are a tourist in a country where you think you may have been born, a country full of strange familiarities, where you wake up and know you have been dreaming in the language, but where you can never, not in a million years, ever come to live. (8)

There's a gradual progression, here, from men devoid of makeup and men half made up to fully realised drag characters, hair and makeup done, tucked and padded and onstage. I'm not sure how much of the 'behind the scenes' we really see, as although this book is largely about transformation (and about, as Richardson mentions over and over again, smoke and mirrors, illusion), it's much less about the personal. Still...lots of interesting questions here, and interesting answers. Text! I love it when photography books have text.

[landon vaughan]

Loved it! So cute