LIFE’S A DRAG WITHOUT YOU!

I never met them. I didn’t see them come in, and I never saw them leave. But somehow, still, I knew them.

More often than not, the Goodwill backrooms don’t leave much to the imagination, but even after all of the loose vibrators, spit-up baby blankets, and torn up garbage bags, you can get lucky.

There’s been a lot of thrift centric content online in the last decade or so. I’d be a liar, dirtier than the unwashed carpets underneath the racks, if I said that it had not been influential. Between an attempt at healthier methods of [over]consumption and an alternative energy behind content creation, by the time I was in high school, I was a sucker for shopping secondhand. Growing up, The Salvation Army had “family days” each Wednesday, and every week after school, my mother and I would pack into the car, frequently toting an iced coffee and a teenager’s idea of disposable income, to make it to the store with a couple of hours to spare before closing. We were regulars, enough to say, “You’re here again?”

My mom’s favorite aisle was the “tchotchkes,” as she’d like to refer to them. The back wall had shelving units, color coded by its red coffee mugs, pink ceramic pigs, and blue clown figurines. So on and so forth, we’d run down the rainbow of junk and potentially non-functional kitchen appliances. The place I’d tend to linger most would be the picture frames, in a way that felt bittersweet on every outing, begging the question, “Who would donate this?” This, being a memoriam to a lost pet, some kind of award, or a family photo, all of which were forgotten at the bottom of a box and sent to unfamiliar processors.

I started working for Goodwill in March of 2024. I’m not sure that I had any expectations. I was about to hit one year in drag, but I hadn’t made any real strides. I was just getting by, or at least finally actually trying to. For a while, it was fun. I maintained the same thrill of scoring the coolest vintage top as I had when I was a teenager, and I had already been building a closet based on the sentiment of clothing being “one of a kind.” Soon though, stuck with entire closets and lifetimes at the bottoms of my bins, I started to feel each person in the fabric they had once worn. Removed from identity, I could feel their personalities.

Right after the 2025 presidential election, and while working with a predominately queer staff, I don’t think anyone was feeling hopeful about anything. Frankly, we had just been existing, or trying to, asking each other if we knew how to shoot a gun and where we’d want to go to seek asylum, but we weren’t really living, even though we had to.

One of my coworkers called my name from across the floor. I was elbows deep in sized small activewear, expecting to return to the surface to see yet another faded and deeply disturbed babydoll, or something else haunting enough to get a laugh out of the lot of us. Instead, they handed me a photo album, thick enough to contain a broken zipper, but with lots of gaps in time between the plastic inner casings. Most of the shots were landscapes, presumably vacation photos or someone’s slice of life. But there were a few that were something more: a postcard, a stamp, and even photos of a patron, presumably the owner of the album, from inside the club.

Tragically, there was not much information on these photos, if any at all. Reverse searches led to empty message screens and even more questions. \

The stamp was never used, and now it had been collecting dust with the headshot of a drag queen, adorned in a blonde wig, big red lips, and eyeliner akin to Bette Davis’s portrayal of pure hatred in the 1962 film, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? This image, however, didn’t feel sinister in the ways of Baby Jane Hudson, in fact, it felt more like an old friend. It felt the way family was supposed to, passed down, and luckily enough, given to me. This queen, nameless, was still an icon. She stared back at me, boxed in by baby pink, and seemingly custom ordered online with a credit to stamps.com.

I didn’t know her, and I didn’t recognize her, but somewhere, somehow, she meant something to someone.

While the stamp was labeled for the US postage system, the only other text came from the postcard. Yet, the message was never sent, never addressed to anyone, no return address, and no one claimed as a recipient. All there was to see was a small bird, perched in a ring, stating: “MADE IN AUSTRALIA,”as well as a bar of text including a seemingly untraceable company, identification numbers, but most importantly, an address:

23 DARLINGHURST RD., KINGS CROSS

Naturally, this led me back to Australia. Kings Cross, a suburb in Sydney hailed as their red-light district, still houses the history of performance, art, and music. 23 Darlinghurst seemed to be a bar by the name of The Elk, though it is currently permanently closed. With little information available, I won’t speak on the queer presence of this location in specific, but with the help of a blog belonging to retired Sydney showgirl, Colleen Windsor, I was able to discover the potential origin of this particular and peculiar image.

The “drag queen scene” of late 70’s Kings Cross was a phenomenon. This era bred a significantly higher population of not just typical drag entertainers, but transfeminine showgirls. While most of these performers lived their entire lives as women, Windsors states in a 2015 blog post, “we were all dubbed as drag queens…” These dolls didn’t only function in the bars, though. Trans women performed as quiet strippers, hiding their voices and their identities behind their captivating dances and bodies, and according to Windsor, making a good bit of cash too. The women even took to the streets, specifically Darley Street, causing traffic jams soliciting men for sexual favors. But by the 1980’s, the culture almost entirely dissipated, most of the women opted for a purposefully quiet life, entering the suburbs and seeking equal, and much safer, employment with the changing political climate. This “still remains an unexplainable social occurrence.”

Documentation on these women, as individuals, is few and far between, the most notable reference as mentioned by name in Windsor’s entry, being a book released after the decline called “The ‘Drag Queen’ Scene,” written by sociologist, activist, and transfemme author, Roberta Perkins. Yet, here I was, standing at a metal work bench, staring at a black and white photo of artists I would never get to meet, each of them reflecting each other in a shared curly skirt with their own individuality in the rest of their appearances. Nevertheless, they all still felt like family. I could hear the clacking of the fans, all in a row. I could smell the rubber of the platform boots. I could see myself, and I could even see my sisters, inside each spike on the middle headpiece and in their collectively, sharply defined faces.

The only words, written on the back in black ink pen: “Life’s a drag without you!”

As mentioned, there were a couple of other photos. Both featured the same man, the same crisp white tank top, and presumably, both taken on the same night. He was holding a queen, by her waist and by her hand, standing in front of a collection of Warhol-esc yellow bananas. She was stiff, cut in a red mini dress, tights, big black boots, and facially framed by teased, straight, brown hair. With a matching red lip, they both shared soft smiles, a seemingly innocent connection in comparison to the documentation in a history of prostitution, but indicative of queer comfortability. In the second photo, he was with another queen, entangled with her by their outstretched arms. His expression was a mouth wide and open with bliss. The queen’s strap had fallen to her shoulders, and her teeth pushed past her lips as if she were about to speak. I couldn’t hear the conversation, but I could feel it. I could feel the energy within it, having waited so long to escape.

Everyone in these photos and whoever would have been partying behind them, currently existed in a bubble. They were wrapped in plastic, removed from their books, and shoved into a trans masculine American drag queen’s backpack, miles away from their inception. But even in these photographs, they still existed with intention. The documentation of queerness, in any format, is as crucial in our current political climate as it was then. I fear that it may become a bit convoluted to describe the entirety of transgender history in this piece alone, but there’s always going to be a lot to be said, specifically about the level of power from the transgender women who have been fighting for every queer person’s right to take up space. These images are living proof; while not inherently political in nature, their expression, and the love emanating from them, is! In their discovery, the family within these photos was able to be reborn, and reformatted for a wider audience. They touch each other, gently, and extend themselves onto me.

Connected by identity and by hands, I was lucky to be given these photos.

I will never know the queens, the patrons, the photographers, or anything beyond this, but that impossibility could never deny their existence. Drag, past and present, has become tangible.

In the back of Goodwill, after what had felt like a lifetime of digging through mostly trash, I carried home with me a golden age, no longer forgotten. Most importantly, though, I carried the truth. We are here now, we always have been, and we always will be. Life is only a drag without us.

________________

LINK TO COLLEEN WINDSOR’S BLOG: http://www.colleenwindsor.com/2015/05/remembering-sydneys-drag-queen-scene-of.html?sc=1739426708824#c2942780252357369916