EP. 59

  • THE SCARSDALE DIE(T) + KLUTZ TO KING

    [00:16] Meg: Welcome to Desperately Seeking the '80s. I am Meg.

    [00:19] Jessica: And I'm Jessica. And Meg and I have been friends since 1982. We got through middle school and high school together here in New York City, where we still live.

    [00:29] Meg: And where we podcast about New York City in the '80s. I do ripped from the headlines 

    [00:34] Jessica: And I do pop culture. 

    [00:36] Meg: Jessica, spring has sprung.

    [00:37] Jessica: It is a little slice of heaven here in New York City.

    [00:41] Meg: Isn't it just the best?

    [00:43] Jessica: Yes. And being up on my roof right before we started podcasting, was that not the sunny, breezy heaven of your dreams?

    [00:51] Meg: It was wonderful. And I go now to my garden every morning to water it on my roof, and it's just blissful.

    [00:58] Jessica: And how are your tomato plants or whatever you're growing now?

    [01:01] Meg: Well, I had to order some tomato plants because I transferred my seedlings too early and it froze. So now I'm sort of cheating and just getting plants. But look, we just make it work. That's what we do.

    [01:13] Jessica: That's what we do. I'll never tell.

    [01:29] Meg: So before we get started, I just want to do a shout out to my mother, who, at your father's wonderful Passover dinner, said to me, don't any women kill men ever? And I was like, well, less often. And she was like, I think they do. Like, all right, so this story this story mommy, this story is for you.

    [01:54] Jessica: Can I ask a question before we begin?

    [01:56] Meg: Sure.

    [01:57] Jessica: Is your mother not counting women who kill the men who abuse them in her?

    [02:03] Meg: I don't know. That's a good question.

    [02:05] Jessica: I mean, because that's a demographic.

    [02:08] Meg: And this story is interestingly murky, as far as that's concerned. No spoilers.

    [02:15] Jessica: You know who else killed a man?

    [02:16] Meg: Who?

    [02:17] Jessica: Lizzie Borden.

    [02:18] Meg: That's true.

    [02:19] Jessica: With an axe. Gave her father 40 wacks. But she killed a lot of other people, too. In the house. Oh, Lizzie.

    [02:28] Meg: So my engagement question or suggestion. Would you be interested in talking to our listeners about Mrs. McMenamin?

    [02:39] Jessica: Did she kill someone?

    [02:41] Meg: No. But she's a type, is she not?

    [02:45] Jessica: Yes. Would you like me to describe her?

    [02:48] Meg: Please.

    [02:48] Jessica: All right. I think that part of our living in the '80s that was really fortunate was that people really still were in their social echelons, and there was a uniform for their social echelons and all these things that we've talked about already, like, if you were a preppy, you looked like a preppy. If you were a punk, you looked like a punk. And it's really funny that you would ask me this, because I was having a zoom call with someone who I work with who is very funny and understands these things. And I was looking at myself in the zoom, and I was like, my hair is crazy right now. She's like, what do you mean? And I was like, first off, don't say, what do you mean? We both know it looks crazy. I was like, but I look like the women who were the administration of Nightingale in the '80s and she was like, what does that mean? And I was like, okay, so there is this woman, she was head of upper school, Mrs. Gordon. She always had her pappagallo flats. She wore nylons. She had a tweed perfect little suit, and she had an Hermes scarf, and she had glasses. And it was always the brown football helmet of hair, which is basically what I was sporting. So Mrs. McMenamin was of that type, but then it was ratcheted up a notch.

    [04:09] Meg: We need to tell them. She was the headmistress of our all girls school

    [04:12] Jessica: Right, of the true old school variety. Like she would walk down the halls and the girls would scatter.

    [04:23] Meg: She was terrifying. Formidable.

    [04:25] Jessica: She was formidable. I didn't find her terrifying. I found her formidable. But she was her her name was Mrs. McMenamin. She was called Big Mac, behind her back, with silver buttons all down her back. No one would ever no, I'm laughing because it sounded like the rhyme.

    [04:43] Meg: I mean, did you ever see her giggle?

    [04:46] Jessica: Not once.

    [04:47] Meg: That just seems totally incongruous.

    [04:49] Jessica: She would smile with tolerance kind. There's a story about her that my mother really enjoyed telling a lot because I'm not sure if it was because it was a dig at me or I don't know, but so Mrs. McMenamin looked just like what I described Mrs. Gordon looking like. But she was tall and she was a big woman. She wasn't fat in that sort, like, soft way. She was just a Sherman tank. And she had close cropped short brown hair that had a lot of steel gray in it. She always wore like, hot pink lipstick, like very Palm Beach, but with these preppy woman Ferragamo heels. She was just so, just so but remember how she had peach fuzz? She had a very peach fuzz face. And it was like one of the softest things about her. It was like, oh, you're fuzzy.

    [05:56] Jessica: But, she was kind of a little sarcastic. And when I entered Nightingale in 8th grade, I was the only new girl. We've talked about that, and I was definitely lost. And I went from such a bohemian place to the army as I saw it that I didn't know what was going on ever. And my mother once asked Mrs. McMenamin when she came to pick me up at school, she's like, oh, have you seen Jessica? Oh no, no she said, oh, hello, Mrs. McMenamin, where is Jessica? And she said, well, we've been asking ourselves that for years. And I was like - b----. You know.

    [06:40] Meg: Oh my, That's intimidating. Is that a good word too?

    [06:44] Jessica: Yeah, I mean, for many, many people. For me, I just felt like I was about to be in trouble.

    [06:51] Meg: Right.

    [06:51] Jessica: Yeah. No matter what I did, I was about to get some kind of disciplinary action.

    [06:58] Meg: You know Harry Potter?

    [06:60] Jessica: Yes.

    [07:00] Meg: Dolores Umbridge.

    [07:02] Jessica: Yes.

    [07:02] Meg: That's the same type. If people have a.

    [07:09] Jessica: But Dolores Umbridge was evil 

    [07:11] Meg: Right, Mrs. McMenamin wasn't evil, but the visual. Absolutely, yes. And women who ran all girl schools. I feel like there was a mold, a steely mold. It seemed like all girl schools were looking for a Mrs. McMenamin. Yeah, and there were a lot of them out there. The women who run and men who run all girl schools now, it's a whole different vibe.

    [07:37] Jessica: They're politicians. Mrs. McMenamin was a benevolent dictator.

    [07:41] Meg: So that leads right into my story. For today. My sources are The New York Times, New York Magazine-1980, Medium and Crime Magazine. And again, this is for you, Mommy. In the middle of the night on March 10, 1980, Leslie and Marge Jacobson were awakened in their Manhattan apartment. Their phone was ringing off the hook. When Leslie answered it, he heard, yes, Leslie is a man, "Leslie, I think I've killed Hy". It was their good friend Jean Harris, calling from the Purchase, New York police station. "Do not utter another word", Leslie ordered her and drove 45 minutes outside the city, where he found Jean wearing a white blouse streaked with blood and her face badly bruised on her mouth and eye. Once Herbert (Herman) Tarnower, nicknamed Hy, was pronounced dead, she was booked for second degree murder. But let's back up to 1966. That's the year when Jean Harris and Hy started dating. She was 42 years old, recently divorced, and the mother of two boys. She'd grown up in well to do Shaker Heights. 

    [09:04] Jessica: Ohh.

    [09:05] Meg: I know. Went to an all girls high school

    [09:07] Jessica: Shaker Heights, Ohio. For those who don't know.

    [09:09] Meg: She went to an all girls high school and then to Smith College. She was director of the middle school at Springside School in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia when she met Hy. Herman Tarnower was 56 and a cardiologist at White Plains Hospital near Harrison, New York, where he lived. They were both well educated and well healed and ran in the same social circles. They both were each other's perfect plus one. For 14 years, they dated. Now, early on in their relationship, Hy had asked Jean to marry him, giving her a $90,000 ring in today's money.

    [09:48] Jessica: I was going to say whoa. Hey now Hy.

    [09:51] Meg: But she hesitated. She wasn't sure if their marriage was in the best interests of her boys or her career. They lived two and a half hours away from each other, after all. But by the time she came around, he reneged. He had cold feet about the whole marriage thing. In fact, he'd decided he didn't want to be exclusively dating either. Jean was blindsided, but after some soul searching, she said she was okay with an open relationship.

    [10:19] Jessica: No one's ever okay with an open relationship. Give me a break.

    [10:25] Meg: Also, it was a one sided open relationship.

    [10:28] Jessica: Aren't most? I mean, yeah, let's have a moment, shall we?

    [10:32] Meg: So Hy was totally cool with that. And for the next 14 years, he slept with a lot of women, and Jean pretended not to notice.

    [10:42] Jessica: So it was 14 years and then another 14 years.

    [10:46] Meg: No, their whole relationship was 14 years. And it was really in the first year that they were dating that he proposed and that they came up with this arrangement.

    [10:55] Jessica: Okay, got it.

    [10:56] Meg: And in the meantime, they both prospered in their respective careers. Jean became headmistress at The Madeira School, an elite school for girls outside DC, whose alumni include Brooke Astor, Stockard Channing, Catherine Graham and Mika Brzezinski, just to name a few.

    [11:16] Jessica: Amazing.

    [11:17] Meg: And Hy decided to publish a diet book. The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet.

    [11:24] Jessica: A lot of grapefruits in that.

    [11:27] Meg: It's true, grapefruit and toast. For years, he had been giving his patients a mimeographed page of his low carb, high protein diet plan. The New York Times referenced his diet. They were interviewing somebody who said, oh, my doctor gave me this great diet. And so he just got name dropped, basically, in an article. And this diet that he gave to his patients was very popular. And because The New York Times wrote about it, suddenly there was, like, a little splash of OOH interest, and he was encouraged to expand it into a book. It became a bestseller, and Herman Tarnower became a celebrity. It was about this time that he hired Lynne Tryforos as his medical assistant. She was 37, recently divorced, and raising two daughters. And before long, Herman began dating Lynne. But he didn't break up with Jean. In fact, he would take one of the women on a weekend vacation and have dinner with the other woman the night he returned regularly.

    [12:35] Jessica: So queasy making.

    [12:37] Meg: I know, right? Both women kept clothes in his home. He seemed to actually enjoy playing them off each other?

    [12:45] Jessica: And they had no wwareness that the other existed.

    [12:46] Meg: They completely knew of the other one.

    [12:48] Jessica: Oh, okay.

    [12:49] Meg: They had to because of the clothes, for example. And he didn't hide anything.

    [12:54] Jessica: Okay.

    [12:54] Meg: He didn't hide anything.

    [12:55] Jessica: All right.

    [12:56] Meg: It was actually kind of thrown in each other's faces. And then Jean started getting anonymous phone calls from a man taunting her. The caller would say things like, your boyfriend is cheating on you, and you need sex lessons. Jean thought it was Lynne or that Lynne was behind it somehow, and called her to tell her to back off. Lynne got upset by Jean's accusations and changed her phone number and made it unlisted. But then Jean got an anonymous call leaving Lynne's new unlisted number. What the actual fuck is going on?

    [13:38] Jessica: Oh, lordy.

    [13:40] Meg: And that cycle continued a few times, with both women complaining to Hy about the other constantly, and Jean was having issues at work. The motto of The Madeira School was function in disaster, finish in style.

    [13:58] Jessica: That is the school motto? Function in disaster finish in style.

    [14:06] Meg: I hope they've changed it by now, but that is not uplifting.

    [14:10] Jessica: Does bring a lot of clarity to the whole concept of finishing schools, doesn't it? That it's like, here's how to be a woman in society.

    [14:21] Meg: Right. Yeah. Just make sure it looks good.

    [14:23] Jessica: Yeah. Keep paddling under the surface and look calm as can be above.

    [14:28] Meg: And Jean, poor Jean, was really trying to do that as best she could function in disaster. But the wheels were falling off the wagon. As a perfectionist, she insisted the girls of the school adhere to the most stringent rules overseeing their behavior and dress. She had a rule about no oranges because the girls would leave orange peels around the campus.

    [14:50] Jessica: Not knowing that they would decompose. Biodegrade?

    [14:57] Meg: Biodegrade. That's what I was thinking.

    [14:58] Jessica: I don't know.

    [14:59] Meg: Biodegradable.

    [14:59] Jessica: Both of us are clearly like, major outdoors people.

    [15:05] Meg: The fact that oranges banned it's like, oranges are banned?

    [15:09] Jessica: Diana Vreeland kind of command, right? Like, no more oranges. Yes. Anyway, I'm with you.

    [15:24] Meg: In the meantime, she was driving 5 hours each way to continue a fragile relationship with a man who never once thought to visit her.

    [15:32] Jessica: 5 hours? Wow.

    [15:36] Meg: She and Hy had always maintained a long distance relationship, which can be a struggle. And to help out, Hy gave Jean a prescription for digoxin after they'd been dating for about five years. Digoxin is essentially meth, so.

    [15:53] Jessica: What do you mean it's essentially meth?

    [15:55] Meg: It is essentially meth.

    [16:01] Jessica: How does it make you feel? And why would he want her to be on meth?

    [16:05] Meg: To help her keep going. Because she was having a hard time keeping up with everything. Because she was driving so far and she had stress at work. And meth would help her not need sleep as much as she needed sleep.

    [16:16] Jessica: Is it possible that meth was the Scarsdale diet?

    [16:20] Meg: It certainly occurred to me. He was a doctor.

    [16:24] Jessica: He was probably prescribing some nice little bits of speed to his ladies, along with here, have a grapefruit.

    [16:33] Meg: So for almost a decade, Jean relied on digoxin to keep her going, but found herself slipping into a depression regardless. Or maybe because of it, she started having thoughts of suicide and bought a gun just in case. The first week of March 1980, Jean ran out of digoxin and she couldn't get Hy on the phone. He basically ghosted her. There had been a dust up over an upcoming formal dinner to honor Tarnower. He had decided to invite both Jean and Lynne and have them sit at tables on the opposite sides of the room. His table, the table of honor, was in the center of the room. Of course.

    [17:17] Jessica: This guy is a sadistic fuck. Can you picture this? Yeah, his is a sadistic, nasty little twerp.

    [17:23] Meg: Also, Jean had recently this is all such crazy stuff. Jean had recently received in the mail, again, anonymously, a copy of Hy's Will. In it, he left $220,000 to Jean and $200,000 to Lynne. But on this copy, Jean's inheritance had been crossed out manually and in Hy's handwriting, Lynne's inheritance had been increased. Jean is having a shitty week.

    [17:52] Jessica: This is really so abusive. It's crazy.

    [17:58] Meg: Jean wrote a scathing, heart wrenching, eleven page letter to Hy.

    [18:03] Jessica: I mean, he's clearly doing this. It has to be.

    [18:06] Meg: Do you want to know?

    [18:08] Jessica: Is this a spoiler? Should we wait?

    [18:10] Meg: Let's talk about it later. Okay. So she writes in the letter to Hy, quote, "you keep me in control by threatening me with banishment, an easy threat which you know I couldn't live with. And so I stay home alone while you make love to someone who has almost totally destroyed me". End quote. In the letter, she called Lynne a whore and ignorant slut.

    [18:35] Jessica: A poor ignorant slut. Did she get that from the sign off on SNL?

    [18:43] Meg: I don't know who started it.

    [18:44] Jessica: Jean you ignorant slut. Oh, my God.

    [18:48] Meg: I guess she did get it, because that would be '70s right?

    [18:51] Jessica: Yeah.

    [18:53] Meg: And a vicious adulterous psychotic. And then she sent it certified mail, by the way.

    [19:01] Jessica: By the way, of course those are all the things that he was, not Lynne.

    [19:06] Meg: Yeah, it's true.

    [19:08] Jessica: Yeah. I mean, it's so transparent that it's painful, but please continue this tale of joy.

    [19:16] Meg: The next day, on March 7, she expelled four teenagers after finding marijuana stems and seeds in their dorm rooms. In response, most of the students staged a sit in to protest the expulsions. Jean was devastated. She was trying to please everyone and failing miserably. On the 10th, Jean called Hy and begged him not to read the letter. She said she had to see him in person. She also desperately needed him to refill her prescription. He said it wasn't a good time. He was having friends over for dinner. So Jean decided to drive to his home and kill herself at the pond in his yard after seeing him one last time. When she arrived at his place.

    [20:06] Jessica: Wait, wait, wait, wait. So Jean decides to drive the 5 hours, have a discussion with him, so confront him in some way.

    [20:15] Meg: Have a goodbye of some kind, and then go sit by his pond and kill herself. That's her plan.

    [20:21] Jessica: This is very cinematic.

    [20:24] Meg: When she arrived at his place after a 5 hour drive, she entered through the back door and came into his dark bedroom where he was sleeping. The rest of this is a quote from Jean. "I said, I thought you'd leave the lamp on in the window. It's black as pitch. He was not enthralled to see me. He said, Jesus, it's the middle of the night. I said, It's not the middle of the night. He was lying on one pillow with another one held to his stomach. And he closed his eyes and didn't seem to want to wake up. I finally said, I've brought you some flowers. I waited. Then I said, have you done any more work on your book? He said, Jesus, Jean, shut up and go to bed. I said, I can't go to bed, and I'm just going to be a little while. I said, won't you talk to me for just a little while? He didn't, but I didn't want to leave. I was just kind of hoping he would wake up and say, Jesus, that was a nutty thing to drive 5 hours to talk. But now you're here. Okay, what is it?" End quote. But he didn't wake up. So Jean went into his bathroom where she saw Lynne's neglige and she lost her shit. The rest is hazy and all from Jean's account, but clearly Hy woke up and they fought somehow in the ensuing melee, Hy hit her in the face and she shot him in the hand with the gun. Then this is another quote from Jean "I started to follow him into the bathroom, but then I thought I could get it over with before he came into the room, (meaning kill herself), I couldn't find the gun. I got on my hands and knees and looked for it under the bed. He came back and grabbed the gun and I said, Hy, please give me the gun or shoot me yourself. He said, Jesus, you're crazy. Get away from me. And pushed me aside and picked up the phone. I pulled myself up on his knees. The gun was on his lap. I remember reaching for it. He dropped the phone and grabbed my wrist like he was trying to tackle me. I felt the muzzle of the gun in my stomach, or what I thought was the muzzle. I had the gun in my hand and it exploded again. And it was such a loud shot. And my first thought was, My God, that didn't hurt at all. I should have done it a long time ago." When the smoke settled, it turned out Jean had shot him three times in the shoulder, chest and upper arm in addition to his hand wound. The trial was..

    [23:04] Jessica: Wait, can I ask a question?

    [23:04] Meg: Yes.

    [23:05] Jessica: Okay, wait. So we know that she knows that there was one shot, theoretically in the hand, and then she knows there's another shot. She insanely thinks that she was shot. But it was him.

    [23:21] Meg: Right.

    [23:21] Jessica: So there are two more shots.

    [23:23] Meg: She doesn't remember those at all. She has no memory of those.

    [23:26] Jessica: Okay.

    [23:27] Meg: The trial was a circus and deserves its own episode. But suffice it to say, some people defended Jean as an emotionally battered woman. The drug prescription stuff never came into trial, though. Interesting.

    [23:43] Jessica: Was it introduced as evidence and then it was not allowed in by the judge? Or was it just they never did..

    [23:50] Meg: Defense didn't just chose not to bring it up.

    [23:53] Jessica: Which seems insane.

    [23:55] Meg: Very strange.

    [23:56] Jessica: I'm so sorry. But I wonder if this is like one of those well, it could only happen in the '80s kind of things?

    [24:03] Meg: Definitely.

    [24:03] Jessica: That it would have been exclusively bad for her if it was revealed that she was on meth, that he was prescribing.

    [24:11] Meg: I think that was the problem. They also didn't talk about her mental health in any way because I think they thought then people would be like, yeah, she's crazy and she shot him. As opposed to she's crazy and she should get manslaughter or something instead of murder. You know what I mean? Others thought she was a vindictive, jealous witch. She insisted till the day she died that it was an accident. But she was convicted of murder and sentenced to 15 years to life. Her sentence was commuted by Mario Cuomo for health reasons in 1992, and she died in a retirement home in 2012. Lynne never discussed the case publicly.

    [24:50] Jessica: Smart Lynne.

    [24:52] Meg: She remarried and died in 2020 in Cold Spring, New York. I read her obituary. It did not mention Tarnower or any of this incident at all.

    [25:04] Meg: At the time of his death in 1980, Hy Tarnower was working on a new book called How To Live Longer and Enjoy Life More. Can't make it up.

    [25:19] Jessica: Oh, my God. Wait. What was Cindy Adams'sign off like? Only in New York, kids, only in New York.

    [25:27] Meg: Okay, I want to talk about a couple things, okay? One is that Jean kept setting the bar lower and lower and lower. One quote that she has, "what I wanted was to be good company and not a whiner." And the problem is, she just wanted to seem like, oh, I'm fine with everything. It is fine. I am fine. But as you pointed out, Jessica, it was not fine. She was not fine. All of that repression, not healthy, not good. But also so sad. Like, the more she said, hey, you can do whatever you want, and I'll be a good plus one for you for the rest of your life. I don't need anything. I'll keep giving, like, just lowering and lowering the bar. And he was just like, oh, I can make that bar lower. Watch me make it lower. Let's get it real low.

    [26:18] Jessica: You know who I blame?

    [26:19] Meg: Him?

    [26:20] Jessica: No. The band 38 Special. Why? Well, didn't they have that song? Hold on Loosely.

    [26:27] Meg: Oh, I don't know it.

    [26:28] Jessica: If you cling too tightly, you're going to lose control. That whole concept of I'm going to just let you be you. I'll be chill, and I'm going to be chill, and that will make you stay. He'll stay. And you will slowly but surely be eating the wallpaper.

    [26:47] Meg: Exactly. Who was calling? Who was calling Jessica?

    [26:52] Jessica: Tarnower

    [26:53] Meg: I think so, too.

    [26:54] Jessica: There's no question in my mind.

    [26:56] Meg: Listen, though, this is the crazy thing. I had a lot of sources for this story. No one suggested it was Tarnower. And I'm sitting there going, it's obviously Tarnower.

    [27:07] Jessica: You know why it's him? I will tell you why it's him. Yes. Couple of things. Number one, the information that was being shared, like, no one else would have it, except maybe his attorney. So that's crazy. It's all in the way that he did the seating arrangement. He was in the middle. I thought so, too. Watching them and having them play against each other and making them miserable, staring at the reality of the other. That's, that was his kink. There's nothing else about Tarnower that's really worth noting. Like, all we know is that he was a shit doctor who put people on speed and made them eat too much grapefruit and that he was a sadistic, narcissistic manipulator. That's all we need to know about that guy. And so, of course, he was planting seeds of dementia for these two women. And the best thing that Lynne did Lynne did everything that Jean Harris did not. Lynne didn't talk about it, didn't go to the press, didn't have her day, and died without ever giving him satisfaction.

    [28:24] Meg: Well, he was dead.

    [28:25] Jessica: It doesn't matter. Psychically.

    [28:30] Meg: He was successful. The women did go after each other. But the anonymous phone call part of it this is the other thing that absolutely made it obvious to me is at some point, Hy claims, oh, yeah, I've been getting anonymous phone calls for many years. Many years. Like, before he met Lynne. So lots of people are like, oh, well, it was Lynne, Lynne must have started it, or Jean was delusional. If he was receiving, supposedly receiving anonymous phone calls for years before Lynne came on the scene, that means it's him. That means it's him. He's making that up, clearly. And it certainly couldn't be Lynne. So unless Jean is completely delusional, which she wasn't because Lynne was getting them too.

    [29:13] Jessica: Correct. There's a problem here.

    [29:16] Meg: She couldn't be delusional enough to make up Lynne's new unlisted numbers.

    [29:21] Jessica: No, no. The thing, though, that makes everything difficult is that we know that Jean is an unreliable narrator and so

    [29:31] Meg: I'm just looking at the facts, though. How could you get somebody's unlisted number? She didn't.

    [29:35] Jessica: No, I'm not talking about the phone calls themselves. I'm just saying, generally, once we know that she's gone into cuckoo cachu because she's drugged out of her mind and then she's in withdrawal I don't know if you've ever seen anyone in withdrawal. They're not really together.

    [29:55] Meg: Right.

    [29:56] Jessica: My takeaway is it's a mess. It's his mess, and he paid the price, and not even because someone wanted to kill him. No, but that's what happens. You create terrible situations. There will be a terrible outcome, and it just might be you in the crossfire. I have an engagement question for you. Great. We talked about radio stations in the past. Yes. So. WLIR. What was the radio station that you listened to the most?

    [30:37] Meg: I listened to an AM station. I know, it's so nerdy.

    [30:44] Jessica: No, it's not nerdy.

    [30:45] Meg: Oh, I also listened to PLJ.

    [30:47] Jessica: Okay, it doesn't matter. PLJ or the AM station.

    [30:50] Meg: Okay. The AM station. I can't remember what the number was, I think, but I would, it was

    [30:52] Jessica: Was it a music station?

    [30:55] Meg: It was music, and it was, like, oldies. It was oldies I liked. You and I both, we listened to remember? Diana Ross and stuff.

    [31:02] Jessica: Well, in glee club, like, we did Lollipop. That's true. Yeah. So, no, we nerded out holding hands and skipping through nerd town, so no, that's fine. Do you remember the DJs?

    [31:16] Meg: Casey Kasem.

    [31:18] Jessica: Oh, my God. Could you believe it? Yes. We used to listen to American Top 40 on PLJ. And it mattered.

    [31:25] Meg: It really mattered. What's going to be the number one song of the week?

    [31:30] Jessica: Oh god, I hope it's Duran Duran.

    [31:32] Meg: As though that affects things exactly way. And you would call into stations. I did try to do that on occasion.

    [31:40] Jessica: Yeah.

    [31:40] Meg: Never made it. I wanted to win things. I can't remember.

    [31:44] Jessica: Oh, you. I'm so surprised that you were oh, competitive.

    [31:51] Meg: I like swag.

    [31:52] Jessica: Calling Dr. Freud. So Casey Kasem. But how about the regular DJs you would listen to?

    [32:03] Meg: Oh, Don Imus. Imus in the Morning.

    [32:06] Jessica: He wound up being a bad egg. Oopsies, not so good, Don. But yes. So actually, Don Imus is the perfect, perfect person.

    [32:16] Meg: Okay.

    [32:17] Jessica: In the '80s, as you and I both know, radio stations were thriving despite what The Buggles had to say about Video Killed the Radio Star. It was very much alive and well when we were in high school and a little after that, it was important because, yeah, what you listen to, the music that you listen to really defined you. But soon, and I know you're going to know what I'm talking about, and Don Imus was one of them. Not only did the music define you, but the DJ defined you. Who you wanted to listen to was part of the package. Right. And Don Imus was like outrageous, that was his whole shtick. He was outrageous. But as we all know. But I think that maybe the kids don't know because this person is now like the professor emeritus of broadcast. But back in the day, there was someone who Don Imus hated. He hated him so very much. And that was the up and coming upstart, real jerk named..

    [33:39] Meg: Do you want me to fill it in?

    [33:40] Jessica: Yes.

    [33:40] Meg: Howard Stern. Yes, I hated Howard Stern. Do you have quotes? I mean, the things that would come out of his mouth. The fact that he has somehow managed to decided that he's now this like you said, stately gentleman, or a good guy or oh, yeah, no, I never said any of that misogynist, horrible stuff or put it in context. I was playing a character.

    [34:05] Jessica: Well, that's the thing. So here's the basics on Howard Stern as told by me, from having lived it and there's going to be a postscript to all of this that's the ultimate in I was there. Howard Stern, if you read his book Private Parts or saw the movie which he starred in himself.

    [34:26] Meg: That was the beginning of like, oh, maybe he is this wonderful man. Well, he's got such an incredible marriage.

    [34:32] Jessica: No, that's not well, yes, but that's what the movie yes, that's true. But in the movie, it was very clear that he knew he was an outrageous nerd. And when he started to have success as a DJ and he had this forum, he became the frat boy that he never got to be or was probably pummeled by on a daily basis. And his shtick was to be rude, crude, socially unacceptable. And that went from being wildly misogynistic to putting porn stars on the radio. And he had a trick that was actually in the movie, but I remember when it happened because people went completely berserk. He had a woman sit on a speaker in the studio and made the speaker vibrate with his own voice. And she, I'm quite sure, pretended to have an orgasm from that. And he would do things with, like, handicapped people, and he was just. Handicapable. At the time. I'm kidding. Okay. Thank you. My God. I was like, is that who we are now?

    [35:52] Meg: Okay, maybe we should be, but I'm not sure we are.

    [35:55] Jessica: I can't roll back the tides of time. Don't worry about it, I was teasing. The idea that you would listen to Howard Stern when we were in high school because he came to New York in 1982.

    [36:09] Meg: Teenage boys loved it.

    [36:12] Jessica: Yeah. And it was just like, who would listen to Howard Stern? And I don't know if this is correct. You tell me. Do you remember that it was kind of also like we've talked in the past about the great divide between Manhattan and bridge and tunnel. Yes. Wasn't Howard Stern the hero of the bridge and tunnel crowd?

    [36:31] Meg: That's what it seemed like.

    [36:32] Jessica: Yeah, that's what I remember. And it was like if you were listening to and the irony of all ironies, of course, is that WLIR was coming out of Queens, Long Island, and yet here..

    [36:45] Meg: There are lots of cool people in Queens. And then there's Howard Stern.

    [36:50] Jessica: And then there's Howard Stern. Or Long Island. Wait, was it coming out of was it coming at no, not Long Island City. It was coming out of Long Island. Anywho, he was the hero of what I think today would be like, the incel and semi incel crowd. Absolutely. Yeah. And it was for every nerd who could never get laid before, this was how to get women naked. And of course, the great joke of this was that none of it was video, but he would just bring people into the studio and have everyone describe it and have these women just fawning and

    [37:32] Meg: And embarrass themselves. Yeah. It was horrible.

    [37:33] Jessica: It was specifically to have them embarrassed. He would do a setup so that they would feel and look ridiculous.

    [37:42] Meg: And he gave interviews. He interviewed Trump, whoever he interviewed, he asked them really lewd questions. Like Playboy.

    [37:53] Jessica: Yeah, it was always you know, do you fuck this? You know when you do this, do you like that.

    [37:58] Meg: He's the one who got Trump to admit that he was sexually attracted to his daughter.

    [38:02] Jessica: That's right. I just need to have a moment of vomiting very quietly.

    [38:07] Meg: And that's what we grew up with. yeah. I mean, that's awful.

    [38:10] Jessica: Yeah.

    [38:11] Meg: And it's out there now, too. Thank you. Howard Stern.

    [38:15] Jessica: Correct. So it was declasse, to say the least. And just in our growing up time never cool. And it's so interesting to me that now people who I really love and who I know are really smart, who are in my crowd, listen to him, you know, in his Sirius XM channel. And he is actually now a great interviewer.

    [38:36] Meg: And he does he's very smart.

    [38:38] Jessica: He is ridiculously smart. And of course, the whole thing that he did in the '80s was a fantastic act. But you still get it doesn't matter that's the thing. Like, act or not, it's still what you're doing. And it pandering to the lowest of the low.

    [38:58] Meg: It made me feel disgusting, and it made yeah, this kind of incel culture that wasn't called that at the time, but certainly existed. It buttressed them and gave them vocabulary and encouragement to treat girls horribly.

    [39:17] Jessica: Well and it's also a culture of bullying. So I'll tell you something interesting. I couldn't help myself. I was checking out our rating on Apple podcasts, and I was extremely proud of us and our listeners because we have five stars and we have so many very nice reviews. And underneath, you know how it says, like, if you like this, you might also like listening to that. So one of them is Smartless. The one with Jason Bateman and Will Arnett and Sean Hayes. And I started reading through their stuff, and they only have like a 4.6 or something. Like I was like, how could that possibly be? Most of the comments are, you guys used to be funny, but now Jason Bateman and Will Arnett just pick on Sean Hayes all the time, who's really affable and goes with it, but it's unappealing. Do you know who else did that? Howard Stern. So he had Robin Quivers as his sidekick, but he had the other guys, the producers, and god, I can't remember his real name, but the one he called Baba Booey, who he just tortured constantly on the air. And he would bring people on just to be mean and obnoxious. Anyway, so this was someone who we grew up with who now has this incredible reputation. And I do wonder, do people know? Do they know? They know. It anecdotally or. It's like, oh, he was once so crazy. What a wild and crazy dude. But there was a genuine impact. Now, that's the '80s, in 1992. We're going to jump ahead a little bit. I was working at Simon& Schuster. It was my second year there. And there was an editor who was known for doing really outrageous stuff. There was nothing she wouldn't stoop to. And in fact, she was the person. Her name was Judith Regan. She's the person who bought O.J. Simpson's book, If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer

    [41:22] Meg: I knew I recognized that name.

    [41:26] Jessica: Yes. And got herself ousted. And she had her own imprint. She had Judith Regan Books. But Judith Regan put herself on the map by signing Howard Stern for his first book, Private Parts. And I was in the publicity department.

    [41:41] Meg: Oh, my gosh, Jessica.

    [41:42] Jessica: And we had a big event, the announcement of him doing his book. And it was when he started to announce that he was the king of all media because he had a book, which, by the way, was genius and hilarious. Like, well done, sir, if you weren't such a reprehensible creature at the time. We also have to acknowledge that the people grow and change.

    [42:05] Meg: Sure. But he hasn't apologized, has he?

    [42:08] Jessica: I don't know. You know what? That's a good question. Let's see if he's ever said anything about his prior behavior anyway. And I remember being grossed out and I was like, this fucking pig dog is going to come into the office. And there was I think it was at The Plaza, but if not The Plaza, some other sort of schmancy venue where they did the announcement that he had signed with Simon & Schuster to do this book. But first he came into the publicity department and I swear to you, it was like an alien walking in. So he's 7ft tall, wearing a trench coaty type black coat, like, to the floor. And he had my father actually once said it, he was like, what a creature. He described Howard Stern's hairdo as a Louis XIV curls, that it was cascading in this unbelievable mound of hair that, in a way, he was sort of hiding behind Joey Ramone style with his glasses. And he was so quiet and he was so meek. And he went around and he thanked everybody and he was very polite. And then we all went over to the venue and I had to give him a bottle of water or something. And he's like, oh, thank you very much. It was really nice. And then the actual press event began. And right there it was, I'm the king of all media. You're all pig dogs. And all of us were just sitting there like, we're already exhausted.

    [43:52] Meg: Right?

    [43:52] Jessica: It took three minutes of him talking in that character for us to just be like, we're going back to we'd rather be at the office. We're going now bye, see ya. I can imagine. Yes. So quite a phenomenon. This is not one of those stories of here's a big reveal anything that you didn't know, but if you were there. But he has become something that at this point, generations of people only know him as the great interviewer. He basically made himself into Dick Cavett. I don't know how he did it.

    [44:28] Meg: It's the movie. I swear to God. The movie rebranded him. That's my memory.

    [44:35] Jessica: Yeah, well, and then he promptly divorced his wife.

    [44:38] Meg: Right?

    [44:38] Jessica: Exactly.

    [44:39] Meg: So much for the happy marriage.

    [44:40] Jessica: And then, interestingly, he started revealing his OCD. And I was like, poor you poor boohoo. Whatever. Again, he's one of these people we all come from someplace. We all come from a particular time period and perspective. And I know that there's some slang that I use that would make your young friends fall on the ground foaming at the mouth. So I was looking at him and thinking about him and remembering that press conference and remembering my own reaction that we were going to deal with him. And it was one of the first times that I really understood the business that is show and what good it does and what bad it does. But he is a great interviewer and enjoy him. But if you can try to find some of his original early '80s. I will. Definitely mid '80s broadcasting because it is hair raising.

    [45:56] Meg: What's our tie in? Jean Harris.

    [45:59] Jessica: Okay wait, so meth. Meth is the best. I mean I need to look up what this drug is.

    [46:08] Meg: Gaslighting, torturing women.

    [46:13] Jessica: Well there you go. Well yeah. Misogyny.

    [46:17] Meg: Sure.

    [46:18] Jessica: Yeah.

    [46:19] Meg: You know what? I think that's our tie-in this week.

    [46:21] Jessica: I guess that's our tie in, misogyny.

    [46:24] Meg: How fun. Well it was a particular brand of misogyny in the '80s for sure. And I'm glad to say that we've got some perspective on it now because at the time I remember feeling like I was fighting the good fight and being looked at by some as like, oh get over yourself.

    [46:40] Jessica: Well, like constantly

    [46:41] Meg: Like no this is damaging.

    [46:44] Jessica: Yes. There's no question. You know even working at Simon & Schuster in those, we've talked about our work experiences where it was you know hey chicky not exactly show us your ass. But it was fine to tease and make sexual innuendos and that kind of thing. It was perfectly normal.

    [47:10] Meg: I've told you right. When I was a waitress the cooks used to put flower hand prints on my ass which I would walk around all day serving people and have no idea that I had a big handprint on my ass.

    [47:26] Jessica: That's so nice.

    [47:27] Meg: I know. These were my friends supposedly.

    [47:30] Jessica: And you were a teenager.

    [47:32] Meg: And I was a teenager, lovely.

    [47:33] Jessica: Well. Yeah. Misogyny. Always fun. Always a good time. A good time had by all.

    [47:39] Meg: So next week we're going to take a break because I've got a crazy work thing that I am, is exciting but is going to take up a lot of time.

    [47:47] Jessica: Is it a work thing in your capacity as an actress?

    [47:51] Meg: It is.

    [47:52] Jessica: Would you like to talk about that?

    [47:54] Meg: I'm building a show with little Lord.

    [47:58] Jessica: That is Little Lord the production company.

    [48:01] Meg: Theater company. Yeah.

    [48:02] Jessica: That's incredible.

    [48:03] Meg: Very exciting.

    [48:04] Jessica: Yay you.

    [48:04] Meg: I know.

    [48:05] Jessica: So you're going to take a little moment off from your creative life. For your creative life.

    [48:10] Meg: Exactly. And I was thinking we could call it our spring break. Good. Right?

    [48:15] Jessica: Do we get spring break?

    [48:17] Meg: Well we're going to be working a lot during the break.

    [48:20] Jessica: Yes. Well I like the fantasy. I like the concept.

    [48:25] Meg: And I think on Instagram we can highlight some callbacks because we've been doing so many callbacks lately.

    [48:33] Jessica: Sure. That sounds like fun.

    [48:35] Meg: Cool.

    [48:35] Jessica: All right, see ya.

    [48:37] Meg: See ya. I'll miss you.

    [48:39] Jessica: I'll miss you too.Four years later, Broadway Brevities reported from another ball that men rivaled birds of paradise and peacocks, their plumed headdresses nodding and undulating from their shapely heads. Soon after, novelists Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler evoked the drag ball floor as, quote, "a scene whose celestial flavor and cerulean coloring no angelic painter or nectarish poet has ever conceived."

    [30:30] Meg: Now, who are these undercover people who were? These parties were just for the participants or for the community? Straight people didn't come?

    [30:38] Jessica: Straight people came to watch.

    [30:40] Meg: So who's undercover?

    [30:42] Jessica: Well, good question. Because as all of the balls gained popularity and the open expression of homosexuality gained popularity, the New York State legislature had criminalized homosexual solicitation in 1923 as part of a wider backlash around male male sexual relations. But dragball organizers found that they could continue to stage events if a neighborhood organization applied for official police sponsorship on their behalf. The hiatus lasted until the autumn of 1931, when officers, reacting to the cultural experimentation of the Prohibition years and the onset of the Depression, began to clamp down on the city's queer community and targeted the balls.

    [31:30] Meg: So, interesting.

    [31:31] Jessica: Indeed.

    [31:33] Meg: I wonder if the resurgence of these balls happened because people knew of the history of them or just spontaneously was born again.

    [31:45] Jessica: They never went away.

    [31:46] Meg: Okay.

    [31:47] Jessica: They just went underground.

    [31:49] Meg: Okay. And then were passed down from generation to generation somehow.

    [31:53] Jessica: Well, it revives full force in the very late '60s, early '70s, and I found out a piece of information that blew my mind. Because one wonders, why did New York become a haven for gay men? And the same might be said for San Francisco. Why? It's because during World War II, soldiers were being processed in and out of New York and San Francisco, and they saw already existing gay cultures from whatever their little tiny hometowns were. They were like, there's no way I'm going back.

    [32:30] Meg: Oh, so you're saying because soldiers were being processed, they were coming from all over the country to one place?

    [32:37] Jessica: Yes. And they saw something that they would never, ever be able to experience anyplace else. Which, by the way, is a callback to our field trip with Russell, because he said exactly the same thing. I had never seen anything like it before, and I knew that these were my people. Anyway, so it never really went away and interestingly, it fragmented further because in the '60s, it really started to break down on racial lines and one of the major bones of contention within the members of the drag community was that it became more like a pageant and there was more judging going on.

    [33:22] Meg: Interesting.

    [33:22] Jessica: And the judges were white, and if you were not white, you could only win if you looked white.

    [33:34] Meg: Oh no! No, no, no. That's not that's not in the spirit.

    [33:39] Jessica: Oh no. So in Jennie Livingston's film Paris Is Burning, we're introduced to all of the houses, the drag ball houses. That's when this started to pop up. So, founded in 1972, the first house came into existence when Lottie, a Harlem drag queen who worked in the welfare office at 125th Street, asked Crystal LaBeija to co-promote a ball. One of the few black queens to be awarded a Queen of the Ball title at a white organized ball, LaBeija had also become tired of the anti-black bias of the balls, as she made clear during a documentary that you can actually see on Netflix called The Queen by Frank Simon. Cool. And it tracks the Miss All-America Camp Beauty Contest. LaBeija and others competed in front of a panel that included Larry Rivers and Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol would have gone to the opening of an envelope. Honestly, it's crazy. He popped up everywhere. Convinced the result was a caucasian fix, LaBeija flew into a rage when host Flawless Sabrina declared the winner to be Harlow, described by The New York Times as a, quote, "frail." I mean, The New York Times was reporting on this. Crazy. Hello. "A frail, blonde, pouting young man formerly Miss Philadelphia." The experience prepared the way for LaBeija's collaboration with Lottie. Crystal agreed to do it so long as she was a highlight of the ball, notes Terrence Legend International. Lottie made the deal sweeter by convincing Crystal that they should start a group and name it the House of LaBeija with Crystal's title as mother. Crystal agreed. The event was titled Crystal & Lottie LaBeija presents the first annual House of LaBeija Ball at Up the Downstairs Case on West 115th Street and 5th Avenue in Harlem.

    [35:37] Meg: What year are we?

    [35:39] Jessica: 1972.

    [35:40] Meg: Wow. So it's not that long ago.

    [35:43] Jessica: Oh, no. Now, just because this is one of my favorite drag stories of all time and we've talked about it on this podcast before. The infamous Dorian Corey, the drag queen who had the mummified body in the naugahyde.

    [35:57] Meg: Okay, but that's in the '70s, isn't it?

    [36:00] Jessica: Yes. Referencing the glamorous fashion houses were glamour and style, whose glamour and style they admired. Other black drag queens started to form drag houses or families that headed by a mother and sometimes a father would socialize, look after one another and prepare for balls. Mother Dorian and Father Chipper founded the House of Corey in 1972. And two years later, Father Jay set up the House of Dior, after which La Duchess Wong and Nicole Wong established the House of Wong and Paris Dupree and Burger Dupree inaugurated the House of Dupree in 1975. And this kept going on in Manhattan until in Brooklyn, they started popping up as well. The House of Chanel sprung up in Brooklyn during 1979 and 1980. So now we are in the decade that Jennie Livingston got into in Paris Is Burning. From this point on, contestants battled to win trophies. There were multiple entrants walking along an imaginary runway. A group of scrupulous judges would cast their verdicts, sometimes rewarding optimum realness or the ability to pass as straight to the outside world. Quote "it was our goal then to look like white women," LaBeija told Cunningham reporter as she reflected on the days before the black queens organized their own balls and initiated a very particular housing boom. "They used to tell me, you have Negroid features. And I'd say, that's all right, I have white eyes. And that's how it was back then." But it was in the 1980s that diversity really came to rule. Willi Ninja founded the House of Ninja in 1981 and '82 and set out his intention to bring Asian aesthetics and philosophy into the ball world. Possibly founded by Father Hector in 1982, the House of Xtravaganza, the first Latin house, formally entered the drag ball scene when they attended the House of Omni ball in 1983. In 1987, the boutique owner and fashion designer Pat Field established the House of Field as the first white downtown house to walk the uptown balls. We call ourselves House of Field now because that is what we've evolved into. Myra Christopher, a sales clerk in the boutique who encouraged Field to create the house commented in '88, we were always around, though, as Pat Field kids and we'll evolve into something else eventually. Becoming a house was just socializing.

    [38:32] Meg: So are we talking about the stylist, Patricia Field?

    [38:35] Jessica: Yes.

    [38:36] Meg: So she had her own house.

    [38:37] Jessica: So get this. So this is another back to our past. Did you ever buy things at House of Field?

    [38:44] Meg: Of course.

    [38:45] Jessica: All the time. Because Patricia Field was, in my mind, the alternate if Betsy Johnson didn't have what you wanted.

    [38:55] Meg: Right. No, it was super funky, like, I mean if you could afford it.

    [38:59] Jessica: Yeah. And I never understood why were the shoes so big?

    [39:04] Meg: Oh, that's so funny.

    [39:07] Jessica: Yes. Pat Field was always outfitting drag queens.

    [39:11] Meg: Well, I guess I knew that. I just didn't know that. I mean to have your own house feels like a whole other level of involvement in the community.

    [39:25] Jessica: Absolutely and as many people know, Pat Field also was the stylist for Sex and the City.

    [39:30] Meg: Yeah.

    [39:30] Jessica: So it's a great example of how there's a trickle down of street look to fashion, to high fashion. Right. And it's sort of the opposite of what the Anna Wintour character that Meryl Streep plays in The Devil Wears Prada says to Andy. You know like, you're wearing that blue sweater because we told you to. And it's like, actually, no, the queens up in Harlem told you. And then that's how that goes.

    [40:04] Meg: That's nice. I like that.

    [40:04] Jessica: So, yes. I just think that's worth a moment. Now, there's another thing that I found really fascinating about where the 1980s drag culture came from. Growing out of the drag queen ritual of throwing shade or subtly insulting another queen voguing emerged as a distinctive dance of first the houses and then inevitably, the balls where specific voguing categories were eventually introduced. Quote "it all started at an after hours club called Footsteps on Second Avenue and 14th Street" which, by the way, I have been to, says David DePino, an influential DJ for the voguing community. Paris Dupree was there, and a bunch of these black queens were throwing shade at each other. Paris had a Vogue magazine in her bag and while she was dancing, she took it out, opened it up to a page where a model was posing and then stopped in the new pose again on the beat. The provocation was returned in kind and then Paris went in front of her and did another pose adds DePino. This was all shade. They were trying to make a prettier pose than each other. And it soon caught on at the balls. At first they called it posing and then because it started from Vogue magazine, they called it voguing. An alternative account has it that voguing was first practiced by the black gay inmates of Rikers Island, a New York City jail who pursued the movement as a way of attracting the attention of boys and throwing shade. Maybe they didn't have a name for it, but that's what they were doing, or so it said, notes Kevin UltraOomni, "I know Paris was an early pioneer of voguing, but I believe that vogue existed in some other form through other people as well. I also think that a lot of voguing poses come from African art and Egyptian hieroglyphics." So just to come full circle, Langston Hughes in the 1920s, the Negro is in Vogue, and then they have chosen to pose from Vogue. So nice wrap, Jessica. That is a quick.

    [42:18] Meg: And tell us again the name of the book and the author.

    [42:21] Jessica: Well, the author is Tim Lawrence. His books are Love Saves the Day, Hold on to Your Dreams, and Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980 to 1983.

    [42:33] Meg: Nice.

    [42:34] Jessica: Oh, and Love Saves the Day, the subtitle is, a history of American Dance Music Culture, 1970 to 1979. Deep in vogue we are no longer, but we can go back there. Okay.

    [42:56] Meg: So I think the tie in is clear.

    [42:59] Jessica: I think the tie in is very clear.

    [43:01] Meg: Drag queens. Drag queens and the representation of drag queens and the history of it. And Nan Goldin certainly want to tell the drag queen story respectfully and beautifully.

    [43:14] Jessica: As does Tim Lawrence, who now we have to stalk and make him our friend. But yes, drag queens. And there was another thing that occurred to me. Did you watch the TV show The Deuce?

    [43:28] Meg: No, I haven't. You've talked about it on the program.

    [43:30] Jessica: We've talked about it before.

    [43:33] Meg: On the program. This is our program.

    [43:35] Jessica: You're listening to NPR.

    [43:39] Meg: No, I haven't. You know, I should obviously it comes up in so many articles I read.

    [43:45] Jessica: Well, it's something that you would just love, but I think one of the characters is based on Nan Goldin.

    [43:51] Meg: Oh, I absolutely know that's true because it came up in the stuff I was reading this week.

    [43:56] Jessica: Yeah, yeah.

    [43:56] Meg: And Tin Pan Alley, that bar which made me go yeah, she was the bartender there. And the woman who owned Tin Pan Alley primarily hired sex workers because she wanted to give them a way to provide for themselves that wasn't what they didn't necessarily want to have to do.

    [44:15] Jessica: So the main character, the female character, is the one who employs sex workers on the show. And I can't remember if she is also a photographer or if they broke that out into an actual other

    [44:27] Meg: Maybe 2 people.

    [44:30] Jessica: But anyway, it's another reason to watch the show. Whether or not it's the best thing ever or glamorizes, whatever, it's still a hell of a trip. Watch it.[00:16] Meg: Welcome to Desperately Seeking the'80s. I am Meg.

    [00:19] Jessica: And I'm Jessica. And Meg and I have been friends since 1982. We got through middle school and high school together here in New York City where we still live.

    [00:30] Meg: And where we podcast about New York City in the '80s. I do ripped from the headlines

    [00:35] Jessica: And I do pop culture.

    [00:37] Meg: So, Jessica, last week we did our first live recording at the amazing Malt & Mold. What an adventure.

    [00:44] Jessica: That was so much fun. I had no idea what to expect. We can even start with my epic insanity, which is that I showed up without any of our recording equipment and you didn't kill me.

    [00:58] Meg: I didn't.

    [01:00] Jessica: I locked eyes with you when I showed up, and I had this profound lack of understanding. I just looked at you with you had, like, death rays coming out of your face, and I was scared. What? Oh no.

    [01:15] Meg: I was like, does the roadie, who we don't have, have all the equipment?

    [01:20] Jessica: In my brain, yes that's right.

    [01:23] Meg: So we jumped in an Uber and went all the way uptown again to Jessica's place and got all the equipment and then came back. And do you remember the name of our amazing Uber driver?

    [01:34] Jessica: Jordy.

    [01:35] Meg: Jordy. He was so supportive. He was so sweet.

    [01:40] Jessica: Jordy was like the Uber angel.

    [01:43] Meg: And then we were just, like, 20 minutes late getting started, and everyone was fine because they were getting their beers and their cheese, and it was fine.

    [01:51] Jessica: The takeaway, as far as I'm concerned, is it's good to be on time, but people are very forgiving, and it was our first time doing it ever.

    [02:00] Meg: First time doing it. And the sound quality was great. The only thing that I am sad about is that we didn't hear more of our audience. So next time I can bring our remote recorder and we can get some room tone.

    [02:14] Jessica: We had a very lively audience.

    [02:15] Meg: We had a really lively audience. And you can't really tell from the recording because our mics are so sensitive to us and not to other people. It's very interesting.

    [02:24] Jessica: It's like they were made just for us and our little egos.

    [02:29] Meg: Do you want to get started?

    [02:31] Jessica: Oh, please. Okay. Yes, I do. Meg, before we begin, we have a note from a BFF of the podcast. Our friend Nick. Who, like some of the other wonderful men who listen to our podcast, cannot contain himself from correcting us. And I'm open to corrections because I know that I am frequently, I won't say poorly researched. It's just a bit sketchy.

    [03:12] Meg: I like the discourse. I approve of the back and forth, for sure.

    [03:16] Jessica: Well, I like that he begins like this. Hello. Fabulous episode. Wonderful way to start. What more can we ask for? He says, I am so sorry that I could not be there. He was not at Malt & Mold. He says, Mr. Pedantic strikes again. That's great self knowledge. The first building granted landmark status in New York City in 1965 was the 300 year old The Wyckoff House in Brooklyn. In fact, the first group of buildings landmarked that day, which became the very first landmarks in Manhattan, were the Merchant's House Museum, the Stuyvesant Fish House, and the remaining houses of Colonnade Row/LaGrange Terrace at 428, 430, 432 and 434 Lafayette Street, which isn't that The Public Theater.

    [04:10] Meg: Everything is in the same neighborhood. The Merchant's House Museum, The Public Theater.

    [04:15] Jessica: I thought that the Colonnade. Lafayette street. I thought that Colonnade Row. Anyway, then he says the former Astor Library/Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, now, The Public Theater was designated a landmark later in 1965, while the Salmagundi Club was not landmarked until 1969 and he even includes a press clipping from thevillagepreservation.org or sorry, villagepreservation.org. He goes on to say, the Merchant's House Museum was the first Manhattan building designated.

    [04:51] Meg: Now we know.

    [04:52] Jessica: Now we know. And as a quick plug for the Merchant's House Museum, you can visit the Merchant's House. And it is quite something. And because of Nick's involvement with the Merchant's House Museum, I had the great and good fortune of attending a seance there.

    [05:09] Meg: Okay. My very good friend Dan is actually a ghost hunter, and he has done a tour of ghosts in the Merchant's House Museum.

    [05:21] Jessica: Has he turned anything up?

    [05:23] Meg: You know, I haven't gone on the tour so I don't. I assume so. Otherwise, why would he continue to do?

    [05:29] Jessica: Is he a ghost hunter or a ghost of New York tour guide?

    [05:34] Meg: I think he hunts them. I don't think he means them harm, but I think he definitely wants to find some.

    [05:38] Jessica: And does he want to put them in, like, a contraption, like, ghostbusters?

    [05:44] Meg: I should probably follow up before I talk too much more about it.

    [05:46] Jessica: Think we need him on the show.

    [05:49] Meg: Oh completely! The second I heard Merchant's House Museum, I was like, we got to get Dan.

    [05:52] Jessica: Oh, my gosh. Love it.

    [05:53] Meg: All right, are you ready for my engagement question?

    [05:56] Jessica: Yes.

    [05:57] Meg: All right. When we were little, wonderful to go on field trips from school.

    [06:02] Jessica: Field trip.

    [06:03] Meg: Do you have some of your favorite field trips? Do you remember? I mean, there were ones that we did regularly. We would go to The Metropolitan Museum of Art regularly. We went to the Museum of the City of New York. I remember that was kind of a regular one.

    [06:17] Jessica: Yes, I actually I remember going to the Museum of the City of New York, and I remember there was some Indigenous People of the Americas display that was not called that at the time and we even had a little discussion about it way back in the '80s.

    [06:35] Meg: Interesting. The American Museum of Natural History has to do a lot of, they have new plaques.

    [06:40] Jessica: Oh, do they?

    [06:41] Meg: Yes, they do. For the Dioramas.

    [06:45] Jessica: That seems quite right. Yeah, the Dioramas were scandalous.

    [06:50] Meg: By today's standards absolutely.

    [06:50] Jessica: Yeah. Well, just putting someone from a different culture in a glass case, like they were a puma or an elephant, not good. Favorite field trip. I really liked going to London for our glee club field trip.

    [07:11] Meg: Which I was not at.

    [07:14] Jessica: For the glee clib field trip that you did not attend. We also went to DC. That was fun. That was really fun.

    [07:20] Meg: And we met with Geraldine Ferraro.

    [07:22] Jessica: We did. Oh, my gosh. You've got a good memory.

    [07:24] Meg: I know. '80s reference much.

    [07:26] Jessica: Nice. And as a child we would just go around New York, like to the aquarium or some kind of day trip. But yeah, there was fun.

    [07:39] Meg: Cool. I think you will, it's going to come up at the very end of this story, but you will know why I asked that question. My sources are The Guardian, The New York Times, The New Yorker and the documentary that has recently come out called All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.

    [07:57] Jessica: You must have dropped dead with joy when you heard that title.

    [08:03] Meg: In the winter of 1986, Nan Goldin's slideshow, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, was published as a book by Mark Holborn, an editor at the Aperture Foundation, filled with photos of friends in their most private moments. The raw and intensely personal project had evolved over the last seven years. Its publication was not exactly a seal of approval from the exclusive, male dominated art world, but it certainly showed that some gatekeepers were ready to allow access to a new vision. Nan had a loft on the Bowery and tended bar at Tin Pan Alley on 49th Street in Times Square. She took photographs of the people she hung out with, drag queens and drug addicts and sex workers, people on the fringe, people who had come to New York because it had space for weirdos. The slideshow started as a way to entertain her friends. She played it to music in bars and clubs and performance spaces in Tribeca in the East Village. And people would shout back to the screen, either because they loved or hated a picture or were just excited to see their lives projected. The soundtrack at first was The Velvet Underground or James Brown or Nina Simone and then people started sending her music. She would change the slideshow based on her mood. It was never the same. It evolved. And of course, she kept taking more pictures. There was nothing off limits. The photos showed people doing drugs and having sex and fighting and sleeping and being sad in dark bars and hotel rooms and apartments. At one point, she had a series of photos of her friend having sex. Her friend got pretty upset, so Nan replaced them with photos of herself having sex. The goal wasn't to expose people against their wishes or to catch them in an unseemly moment. She looked for honesty. She wanted to show the drag queens as they wanted to be seen, as beautiful. Quote, "I'm not crashing. This is my party. This is my family, my history." As the slideshow became more popular, Nan got a lot of shit. The art world did not consider her work art. She was dismissed by male artists and gallerists. Someone actually told her, quote, "There is no such thing as a good woman artist." And that sounds so crazy. Who would ever say something? But I remember hearing things like that. That used to happen.

    [10:39] Jessica: Well that's like women can't be funny.

    [10:43] Meg: Right. Exactly. And even for those who didn't articulate their beliefs so bluntly as that, there was a presumption that women could not be voyeurs. My father once said to me that women couldn't play guitar because a guitar is an extension of a penis.

    [11:02] Jessica: Well, that's not unlike Joan Jett's experience with her first and only guitar lesson. Did you ever hear that story?

    [11:08] Meg: No.

    [11:08] Jessica: She went to some school, I don't know what it was, but she went to have a guitar lesson. She already had a guitar and was sort of trying to pick it up. And she had a male guitar teacher who said that she had real potential. But don't bother trying to be a rock player, not a rock star, a player of rock and roll music because women just don't do that. And she was like, may I introduce you to The Runaways later on? But the idea yeah, a woman cannot touch something that is associated with maleness unless she is required to or invited to.

    [11:59] Meg: Okay, so this is all from the perspective of being a visual artist. And so the idea that a woman can't be a voyeur because women are supposed to be looked at, they're not supposed to be the ones who are doing the looking.

    [12:13] Jessica: Is it also because if a woman is a voyeur, that means that she is in spaces where she's not supposed to be?

    [12:19] Meg: I think it's actually like I don't want to see what she sees. I don't give a fuck. Fortunately, Nan had a thick skin. Quote "I didn't care about good photography. I cared about complete honesty." And I'll tell you a little bit about her background. She'd grown up in a painfully conventional home in Maryland. Her parents didn't like each other very much, favored their sons, and were terrified of their smart, rebellious daughters. Her older sister Barbara fought with her parents and was sent to a mental institution. Ultimately, she committed suicide at 18 by lying down on the railroad tracks outside Union Station.

    [12:59] Jessica: Oh my God.

    [13:00] Meg: Nan was twelve.

    [13:02] Jessica: Oh my God.

    [13:03] Meg: Her parents response to the suicide? Move to a new town and never mention it again. This scarred Nan for life and made her hell bent on breaking free from that repression. And incidentally, there are many photos of couples in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, including her parents. Interesting. So in 1984, in small clubs around the city, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency was picking up steam. The art world didn't embrace her work, but they were pissed off by it, which helped its popularity with the counterculture. Nan had an opportunity to show it in a loft in Berlin. Now for the last three years, she'd been living with a man named Brian, who she'd met while bartending at Tin Pan Alley. He was an office worker and an ex-Marine. On their first date, Nan asked him to get her some heroin, which she was snorting at the time and he did, and they fell into each other through drugs and sex, and he became a subject of many of her photos. Their relationship was tumultuous and unhealthy, and they often tried to break up, but always came back to each other. Nan had been in Berlin showing her slideshow for a bit before Brian came to meet her there. When he found out she had cheated on him with a woman, he lost his shit and beat Nan to a pulp. He focused all of his rage specifically on her eyes. Her friend Sylvie managed to drag her out of the hotel room and get her to a hospital, saving her life. Brian left back in the room, trashed the place. He wrote bitch and cunt and lipstick on the walls and burned her diaries. Fortunately, she had left the slideshow at the loft where she was showing it, otherwise he would have destroyed that, too. All the bones in her orbital floor were broken, and she almost lost one of her eyes. It took months to recover, and she took photos of it. She says the photos of her battered face kept her from returning to him, and those photos became part of the slideshow. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency was part of the 1985 Whitney Biennial, and for those who don't know, the Whitney Biennial is a biennial exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art for up and coming artists, and it's known for setting trends and making careers. So it was a pretty big deal. A year later, when the Aperture Foundation wanted to publish The Ballad of Sexual Dependency as a book Nan wanted to include her family story in the text of the book. I mean, it's really her origin story. And her father tried to stop the publication of the book, accusing her of blaming him and her mother for her sister's suicide. And Brian tried to stop the publication, too for obvious reasons. Nan was indefatigable and the book was published, and the rest is art history. Photography curator Susan Bright says, quote "one only has to teach a class of undergraduate photography students to realize her influence. She gave legitimacy to snapshot style or diaristic. I would go so far as to say her work has come to represent an entire style" and now she has a huge influence in the art world. Case in point Nan had an operation in 2014 and was prescribed OxyContin as a painkiller. She took it as prescribed and became addicted when, by the grace of God, she managed to pull herself out of the addiction three years later, she realized that the Sackler family this is a quote "the Sackler family, whose name I knew from museums and galleries were responsible for the epidemic." A little background. The Sackler family owns Purdue Pharma, which manufactures and heavily markets Oxy. They also donate untold millions to cultural institutions like The Met, The Guggenheim, the Tate, the Louvre. Arthur Sackler funded the wing of The Met that houses The Temple of Dendur. We should do a poll of people who grew up in New York.

    [17:20] Jessica: I mean, well, The Temple of Dender is like the I don't know, like the most glamorous and iconic piece of a museum in the city.

    [17:27] Meg: Seriously. Me too. And the fact that the playground right outside the glass windows, I mean, that was my favorite playground. It was actually a safe playground because it was so close to the street.

    [17:39] Jessica: And people who did not grow up in New York know The Temple of Dender because When Harry Met Sally is filmed there, they have their conversation about, oh, I don't know, gender politics. One of their conversations about that.

    [17:54] Meg: Anyway, Nan was so incensed by this revelation that she took all the lessons she learned from her friends and ACT UP in the '80s, that's a callback to Episode Eight, The Queen of Mean + Silence = Death. And she staged a die-in's in The Temple of Dendor and The Guggenheim and other cultural institutions accepting Sackler money. And she won, thanks to P.A.I.N., which stands for Prescription Addiction Intervention Now, which she helped start, and her influence in the art world, major museums and galleries are now rejecting Sackler money and have removed their name from plaques and wings, including The Temple of Dendur.

    [18:38] Jessica: Wow.

    [18:39] Meg: Her art and her activism reek of integrity, honesty over secrecy. Quote, "When people talk about the immediacy in my work, that's what it's about. This need to remember and record every single thing."

    [18:55] Jessica: Didn't she get some flak for taking photos of her children?

    [19:00] Meg: No, I think that's a different photographer. Mann. No, no, she doesn't have children.

    [19:05] Jessica: Well, then it's definitely not her. That was another woman photographer who had.

    [19:11] Meg: Whose last name is Mann. Sally Mann.

    [19:14] Jessica: Yeah. I thought you meant a man. No, no, Sally Mann. You're absolutely right. Sorry. Nan. Man. Sally Mann. Anyway, that's amazing. I had no idea that Nan Goldin had so much to do with bringing down in fact, almost everything to do with bringing down the Sacklers.

    [19:32] Meg: Yeah, you got to see this documentary. It is so cool.

    [19:36] Jessica: That's incredible.

    [19:37] Meg: And it's very moving. And there was only so much that I could talk about because her story is there's so much more to her life. But, yeah, I tried to focus in on this particular piece of artwork.

    [19:48] Jessica: Pretty amazing. Thank you.

    [20:02] Meg: We're back.

    [20:03] Jessica: We're back. I found a writer who I'm now kind of obsessed with.

    [20:09] Meg: Oh.

    [20:10] Jessica: His name is Tim Lawrence.

    [20:12] Meg: Okay.

    [20:12] Jessica: He's a Brit, but he has some very interesting things to say about the American music scene.

    [20:19] Meg: Okay. How old is he?

    [20:21] Jessica: Our age.

    [20:22] Meg: Okay. And he's writing about music right now?

    [20:25] Jessica: But he wrote a book that I'm reading from and about. "Listen and You Will Hear all the Houses that Walked There Before': A History of Drag Balls, Houses and the Culture of Voguing". So we had Seder at my dad's house last night, and it was such a joy to see the teenagers there, the kids. And I was thinking about how it's amazing that your son and Ale's son and daughter were all getting along and they're the age that we were during a lot of what we talk about on this podcast.

    [21:07] Meg: That's true. Good point.

    [21:08] Jessica: And I thought, like, what did they care about? What did they know? What did they not know? You and I speak so frequently about music and going out and how we socialized and all that kind of stuff. And I was wondering, what did they really know about what our nightlife was or the nightlife that we cared about? Because when I hear about what they do, I'm like, is that as boring as I think it is? It seems extraordinarily boring. Sorry, kids. And then I thought so much of what we were into has been sort of repackaged for television right now, or streaming. The most obvious example is Stranger Things. That has repackaged '80s culture into this not actually '80s, it's like '80s cosplay. What? You have a look on your face.

    [22:06] Meg: Well, I feel like I'm not doing Billy justice, or Alice Justice, for that matter. It's what they tell us they're doing. They seem to be enjoying it and honestly, like, we don't know exactly what they're doing. We just know what they've said.

    [22:19] Jessica: No, I'm not saying that we know. I'm saying what we see and hear is boring. But I'm sure that they are keeping us very ignorant on many, many different levels. So maybe you should see this as like I'm throwing down the gauntlet. All right, kids, tell us how cool you really are.

    [22:41] Meg: I don't know if I want to know.

    [22:43] Jessica: That's actually a very good point as well. I was thinking about what I wanted to talk about today, and in thinking about it, ran across this piece that I'm going to read from. And I was thinking about how we were, going dancing was such a very big thing and how dance trends still existed. Dance trends. If you see something in the movies or whatever, it's always like the '60s, like the Mashed Potato or the Stomp or whatever. But there were dance trends. I think that on the last podcast, I was talking about how Ale and I would drool over Mel Gibson sadly, and practice dance moves in her room. And there were, like, moves that you had to know how to do. And that by the time we were in college, I guess it was the beginning of our senior year, the incredibly famous and we've talked about it on this podcast several times, Paris Is Burning came out and it coincided with Madonna's song Vogue, and there was a real focus on that dance style at that time, but not I mean, aside from Jennie Livingston's Paris Is Burning, there wasn't a lot of information about where it came from. And the number of people, I think, who have actually seen Paris Is Burning is not as large as we would think.

    [24:20] Meg: Right. I saw it when it first came out and what I remember about Vogue, Madonna's video of Vogue was that she got some backlash because it was like she was co-opting somebody else's or another community's culture and making it her own. You know, all of that kind of thought was very new to me. I was like, isn't it a celebration? I don't understand.

    [24:44] Jessica: Well, particularly because the dancers in that video were from one of the houses and they wound up being her backup dancers on her Blonde Ambition tour.

    [24:54] Meg: Right. But I do remember that there was just everything she did, she got a little bit of backlash.

    [24:59] Jessica: Yes. And so she was doing something right.

    [25:02] Meg: I mean, look, who am I to say? But it didn't seem like the worst thing in the world to me.

    [25:06] Jessica: Not to me neither. So with that in mind, I'm gonna just I'm going to read a little bit from this person who I'm now kind of obsessed with, and I want to read a lot more of his work. Just as a quick aside, Tim Lawrence is the author of three books that trace the history of DJ music, dance and art culture in New York City during the '70s and early '80s. Love Saves the Day, a History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970 to 1979. Hold On to Your Dreams, Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992, and Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980 to 1983. Together they amount to an unprecedented in depth account of the importance of New York City's DJ music, dance and art culture during the '70s and early'80s. And they are all published by Duke University Press.

    [26:02] Meg: Cool. And that's from the jacket of the book?

    [26:06] Jessica: That is the bio that I found online. Got it. For Tim Lawrence. Not only did Vogue and drag balls and all that not start with Madonna, it didn't even start in this century. So in my usual way, I'm going to take us back in time. So this is thanks to Tim Lawrence. Here we go. Bursting into public consciousness between 1989 and 1991, the culture of drag balls and voguing can be traced back to the second half of the 19th century. Harlem's Hamilton Lodge staged its first queer masquerade ball in 1869. Wow. And some 20 years later, a medical student stumbled into another ball that was taking place in Valhalla Hall on the Lower East Side. He witnessed 500 same sex male and female couples, quote, "Waltzing sedately to the music of a good band". A rickety old building situated at 119 East 11th Street, Webster Hall, where we used to go and it still exists. I totally danced at Webster Hall. Played host to further events during the 1920s. And by the end of the decade, masquerade parties were being staged in conspicuous venues such as Madison Square Garden and the Astor Hotel (Hotel Astor) where they attracted crowds of up to 6000 people. Invited to attend another ball at Hamilton Lodge by the entrepreneur and party host A'Lelia Walker, Harlem renaissance social activist and writer Langston Hughes proclaimed the drag balls to be the, quote, "strangest and gaudiest of all Harlem spectacles in the 1920s" and described them as "spectacles in color". Noting the presence of, quote, "distinguished white celebrities" during this period, Hughes concluded that Harlem was in vogue and the negro was in vogue.

    [28:04] Meg: And who said that again?

    [28:05] Jessica: Langston Hughes.

    [28:06] Meg: Oh, and wait, and you were saying earlier that both same sex men and same sex women were partying together.

    [28:16] Jessica: Yes, which also went wildly out of fashion. Held once a year, the balls came to feature a procession known as Parade of the Fairies which included drag queen contestants sacheting through the auditorium in preparation for a costume competition. For the rest of the evening, dancers took to the floor in couples and formed partnerships that were superficially straight with men including lesbians dressed as men and gay men who favored butch style accompanying women or men dressed as women, as well as straight femmes while any number of straights watched on from the sidelines.

    [28:54] Meg: It's so interesting given all this talk about outlawing drag, which is oh so interesting. I mean, as if you could?

    [29:03] Jessica: Who is outlawing drag?

    [29:07] Meg: That's in the news. Not New York, but some states trying to...

    [29:14] Jessica: Oh, oh, oh like Florida. Ew. Okay.

    [29:15] Meg: Right.

    [29:16] Jessica: Well, that actually is going to come up in our little chat because it was outlawed in New York City. So here's a little quote about the Parade of Fairies from the time "About 12:30 a.m. We visited this place and found approximately 5000 people, colored and white, men attired in women's clothes and vice versa" reported a team of undercover investigators following an inspection of the Hamilton Lodge Ball held in the Manhattan Casino in February 1928. The affair, we were informed, was a, quote, "Fag masquerade ball." All these words. I know. Four years later, Broadway Brevities reported from another ball that men rivaled birds of paradise and peacocks, their plumed headdresses nodding and undulating from their shapely heads. Soon after, novelists Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler evoked the drag ball floor as, quote, "a scene whose celestial flavor and cerulean coloring no angelic painter or nectarish poet has ever conceived."

    [30:30] Meg: Now, who are these undercover people who were? These parties were just for the participants or for the community? Straight people didn't come?

    [30:38] Jessica: Straight people came to watch.

    [30:40] Meg: So who's undercover?

    [30:42] Jessica: Well, good question. Because as all of the balls gained popularity and the open expression of homosexuality gained popularity, the New York State legislature had criminalized homosexual solicitation in 1923 as part of a wider backlash around male male sexual relations. But dragball organizers found that they could continue to stage events if a neighborhood organization applied for official police sponsorship on their behalf. The hiatus lasted until the autumn of 1931, when officers, reacting to the cultural experimentation of the Prohibition years and the onset of the Depression, began to clamp down on the city's queer community and targeted the balls.

    [31:30] Meg: So, interesting.

    [31:31] Jessica: Indeed.

    [31:33] Meg: I wonder if the resurgence of these balls happened because people knew of the history of them or just spontaneously was born again.

    [31:45] Jessica: They never went away.

    [31:46] Meg: Okay.

    [31:47] Jessica: They just went underground.

    [31:49] Meg: Okay. And then were passed down from generation to generation somehow.

    [31:53] Jessica: Well, it revives full force in the very late '60s, early '70s, and I found out a piece of information that blew my mind. Because one wonders, why did New York become a haven for gay men? And the same might be said for San Francisco. Why? It's because during World War II, soldiers were being processed in and out of New York and San Francisco, and they saw already existing gay cultures from whatever their little tiny hometowns were. They were like, there's no way I'm going back.

    [32:30] Meg: Oh, so you're saying because soldiers were being processed, they were coming from all over the country to one place?

    [32:37] Jessica: Yes. And they saw something that they would never, ever be able to experience anyplace else. Which, by the way, is a callback to our field trip with Russell, because he said exactly the same thing. I had never seen anything like it before, and I knew that these were my people. Anyway, so it never really went away and interestingly, it fragmented further because in the '60s, it really started to break down on racial lines and one of the major bones of contention within the members of the drag community was that it became more like a pageant and there was more judging going on.

    [33:22] Meg: Interesting.

    [33:22] Jessica: And the judges were white, and if you were not white, you could only win if you looked white.

    [33:34] Meg: Oh no! No, no, no. That's not that's not in the spirit.

    [33:39] Jessica: Oh no. So in Jennie Livingston's film Paris Is Burning, we're introduced to all of the houses, the drag ball houses. That's when this started to pop up. So, founded in 1972, the first house came into existence when Lottie, a Harlem drag queen who worked in the welfare office at 125th Street, asked Crystal LaBeija to co-promote a ball. One of the few black queens to be awarded a Queen of the Ball title at a white organized ball, LaBeija had also become tired of the anti-black bias of the balls, as she made clear during a documentary that you can actually see on Netflix called The Queen by Frank Simon. Cool. And it tracks the Miss All-America Camp Beauty Contest. LaBeija and others competed in front of a panel that included Larry Rivers and Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol would have gone to the opening of an envelope. Honestly, it's crazy. He popped up everywhere. Convinced the result was a caucasian fix, LaBeija flew into a rage when host Flawless Sabrina declared the winner to be Harlow, described by The New York Times as a, quote, "frail." I mean, The New York Times was reporting on this. Crazy. Hello. "A frail, blonde, pouting young man formerly Miss Philadelphia." The experience prepared the way for LaBeija's collaboration with Lottie. Crystal agreed to do it so long as she was a highlight of the ball, notes Terrence Legend International. Lottie made the deal sweeter by convincing Crystal that they should start a group and name it the House of LaBeija with Crystal's title as mother. Crystal agreed. The event was titled Crystal & Lottie LaBeija presents the first annual House of LaBeija Ball at Up the Downstairs Case on West 115th Street and 5th Avenue in Harlem.

    [35:37] Meg: What year are we?

    [35:39] Jessica: 1972.

    [35:40] Meg: Wow. So it's not that long ago.

    [35:43] Jessica: Oh, no. Now, just because this is one of my favorite drag stories of all time and we've talked about it on this podcast before. The infamous Dorian Corey, the drag queen who had the mummified body in the naugahyde.

    [35:57] Meg: Okay, but that's in the '70s, isn't it?

    [36:00] Jessica: Yes. Referencing the glamorous fashion houses were glamour and style, whose glamour and style they admired. Other black drag queens started to form drag houses or families that headed by a mother and sometimes a father would socialize, look after one another and prepare for balls. Mother Dorian and Father Chipper founded the House of Corey in 1972. And two years later, Father Jay set up the House of Dior, after which La Duchess Wong and Nicole Wong established the House of Wong and Paris Dupree and Burger Dupree inaugurated the House of Dupree in 1975. And this kept going on in Manhattan until in Brooklyn, they started popping up as well. The House of Chanel sprung up in Brooklyn during 1979 and 1980. So now we are in the decade that Jennie Livingston got into in Paris Is Burning. From this point on, contestants battled to win trophies. There were multiple entrants walking along an imaginary runway. A group of scrupulous judges would cast their verdicts, sometimes rewarding optimum realness or the ability to pass as straight to the outside world. Quote "it was our goal then to look like white women," LaBeija told Cunningham reporter as she reflected on the days before the black queens organized their own balls and initiated a very particular housing boom. "They used to tell me, you have Negroid features. And I'd say, that's all right, I have white eyes. And that's how it was back then." But it was in the 1980s that diversity really came to rule. Willi Ninja founded the House of Ninja in 1981 and '82 and set out his intention to bring Asian aesthetics and philosophy into the ball world. Possibly founded by Father Hector in 1982, the House of Xtravaganza, the first Latin house, formally entered the drag ball scene when they attended the House of Omni ball in 1983. In 1987, the boutique owner and fashion designer Pat Field established the House of Field as the first white downtown house to walk the uptown balls. We call ourselves House of Field now because that is what we've evolved into. Myra Christopher, a sales clerk in the boutique who encouraged Field to create the house commented in '88, we were always around, though, as Pat Field kids and we'll evolve into something else eventually. Becoming a house was just socializing.

    [38:32] Meg: So are we talking about the stylist, Patricia Field?

    [38:35] Jessica: Yes.

    [38:36] Meg: So she had her own house.

    [38:37] Jessica: So get this. So this is another back to our past. Did you ever buy things at House of Field?

    [38:44] Meg: Of course.

    [38:45] Jessica: All the time. Because Patricia Field was, in my mind, the alternate if Betsy Johnson didn't have what you wanted.

    [38:55] Meg: Right. No, it was super funky, like, I mean if you could afford it.

    [38:59] Jessica: Yeah. And I never understood why were the shoes so big?

    [39:04] Meg: Oh, that's so funny.

    [39:07] Jessica: Yes. Pat Field was always outfitting drag queens.

    [39:11] Meg: Well, I guess I knew that. I just didn't know that. I mean to have your own house feels like a whole other level of involvement in the community.

    [39:25] Jessica: Absolutely and as many people know, Pat Field also was the stylist for Sex and the City.

    [39:30] Meg: Yeah.

    [39:30] Jessica: So it's a great example of how there's a trickle down of street look to fashion, to high fashion. Right. And it's sort of the opposite of what the Anna Wintour character that Meryl Streep plays in The Devil Wears Prada says to Andy. You know like, you're wearing that blue sweater because we told you to. And it's like, actually, no, the queens up in Harlem told you. And then that's how that goes.

    [40:04] Meg: That's nice. I like that.

    [40:04] Jessica: So, yes. I just think that's worth a moment. Now, there's another thing that I found really fascinating about where the 1980s drag culture came from. Growing out of the drag queen ritual of throwing shade or subtly insulting another queen voguing emerged as a distinctive dance of first the houses and then inevitably, the balls where specific voguing categories were eventually introduced. Quote "it all started at an after hours club called Footsteps on Second Avenue and 14th Street" which, by the way, I have been to, says David DePino, an influential DJ for the voguing community. Paris Dupree was there, and a bunch of these black queens were throwing shade at each other. Paris had a Vogue magazine in her bag and while she was dancing, she took it out, opened it up to a page where a model was posing and then stopped in the new pose again on the beat. The provocation was returned in kind and then Paris went in front of her and did another pose adds DePino. This was all shade. They were trying to make a prettier pose than each other. And it soon caught on at the balls. At first they called it posing and then because it started from Vogue magazine, they called it voguing. An alternative account has it that voguing was first practiced by the black gay inmates of Rikers Island, a New York City jail who pursued the movement as a way of attracting the attention of boys and throwing shade. Maybe they didn't have a name for it, but that's what they were doing, or so it said, notes Kevin UltraOomni, "I know Paris was an early pioneer of voguing, but I believe that vogue existed in some other form through other people as well. I also think that a lot of voguing poses come from African art and Egyptian hieroglyphics." So just to come full circle, Langston Hughes in the 1920s, the Negro is in Vogue, and then they have chosen to pose from Vogue. So nice wrap, Jessica. That is a quick.

    [42:18] Meg: And tell us again the name of the book and the author.

    [42:21] Jessica: Well, the author is Tim Lawrence. His books are Love Saves the Day, Hold on to Your Dreams, and Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980 to 1983.

    [42:33] Meg: Nice.

    [42:34] Jessica: Oh, and Love Saves the Day, the subtitle is, a history of American Dance Music Culture, 1970 to 1979. Deep in vogue we are no longer, but we can go back there. Okay.

    [42:56] Meg: So I think the tie in is clear.

    [42:59] Jessica: I think the tie in is very clear.

    [43:01] Meg: Drag queens. Drag queens and the representation of drag queens and the history of it. And Nan Goldin certainly want to tell the drag queen story respectfully and beautifully.

    [43:14] Jessica: As does Tim Lawrence, who now we have to stalk and make him our friend. But yes, drag queens. And there was another thing that occurred to me. Did you watch the TV show The Deuce?

    [43:28] Meg: No, I haven't. You've talked about it on the program.

    [43:30] Jessica: We've talked about it before.

    [43:33] Meg: On the program. This is our program.

    [43:35] Jessica: You're listening to NPR.

    [43:39] Meg: No, I haven't. You know, I should obviously it comes up in so many articles I read.

    [43:45] Jessica: Well, it's something that you would just love, but I think one of the characters is based on Nan Goldin.

    [43:51] Meg: Oh, I absolutely know that's true because it came up in the stuff I was reading this week.

    [43:56] Jessica: Yeah, yeah.

    [43:56] Meg: And Tin Pan Alley, that bar which made me go yeah, she was the bartender there. And the woman who owned Tin Pan Alley primarily hired sex workers because she wanted to give them a way to provide for themselves that wasn't what they didn't necessarily want to have to do.

    [44:15] Jessica: So the main character, the female character, is the one who employs sex workers on the show. And I can't remember if she is also a photographer or if they broke that out into an actual other

    [44:27] Meg: Maybe 2 people.

    [44:30] Jessica: But anyway, it's another reason to watch the show. Whether or not it's the best thing ever or glamorizes, whatever, it's still a hell of a trip. Watch it.