puzzles & pieces

Me and Brian at Senior Homecoming

P.S. Burn This Letter Please is a documentary about a friend group of drag queens who lived in 1950s New York City, whose stories came to light after the discovery of a collection of letters that they wrote to a friend who moved away from the city. The documentary and book include many samples of the letters themselves, plus interviews with some of the surviving queens who they were able to track down.

Particularly of interest to fans of the show Pose is the story of how several of the queens broke into the Metropolitan Opera House in 1958 and stole 33 expensive wigs. The police never figured out how they got in but one of the masterminds of the heist finally reveals their secret in the doc!

Anyway, it's just a really incredible look at what life was like for queer and trans people in the 1950s. Some of the slang and camp and sarcasm they use feels incredibly familiar in ways that are shocking and delightful. But to me this documentary is one of the best presentations that I have found that really shows what it was like to be queer/trans in the 50s, at least in one specific friend group. There is a lot of oppression, marginalization, and violence they experienced, but also an incredible amount of fun. The subjects of the film were just...incredibly normal queens, who had parties and boyfriends and intra-community spats and daily struggles and occasional tragedies and everything else you might expect.

if your without and you put nuts on it I don't make the rules snowflake

TRUCK

Textiles + math + modernism in 1970s handicraft trend. This how-to-booklet by Elisabeth Hellmann was published in Germany in 1975.