Affinities by Brian Dillon

Author:Brian Dillon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

There was Jack Dracula, who took considerable persuading before finally allowing himself to be photographed in a bar, shirtless and sullen. There was William Mack, the Sage of the Wilderness, a figure with a biblical aura, who had crammed his tiny apartment with countless incurious curiosities: nine umbrellas, a cowbell, twenty rings, five hammers, thirty-eight cigar butts in a bowl, eleven bracelets, four watches, three earrings, six necklaces, thirty-five empty bottles, a Hopalong Cassidy gun and holster, forty-six rolled-up pieces of string, and many, many more. And Miss Cora Pratt, the Counterfeit Lady, who was the buck-toothed, lacy, wigged invention of a woman called Polly Bushong, whose eccentricity consisted simply and unfathomably in the fact she liked sometimes to go about dressed as Cora.

There is one figure whom Arbus had intended to include in ‘The Full Circle’ but whose image the magazine’s editors refused to print. In Arbus’s best-known photograph of Stormé DeLarverie, Miss Stormé de Larverie, the Lady Who Appears to Be a Gentleman, she’s sitting on a park bench smoking, with a half-smile. She is wearing a slimly cut tweed suit, stud-collar shirt and tie, wristwatch and pinkie ring, and a pair of highly polished, Cuban-heeled Chelsea boots. Her hair is close-cropped—she’s an austere dandy, relaxed and refined. DeLarverie was at the time performing regularly as a singer and the only drag king in the Jewel Box Revue, a racially integrated drag troupe. It is said that on 28 June 1969, her scuffle with police during a raid on the Stonewall Inn, in Greenwich Village, was the start of what became known as the Stonewall riots.

The rejected photograph of Stormé DeLarverie, whose ambiguity was too much for a magazine that had apparently wanted Arbus’s freaks in all their glory, is instructive. One cannot imagine Joseph Mitchell adding her to his picturesque roster of bearded ladies and flea-circus impresarios. Stormé seems to come from a differently freakish future. There are plenty of sexual misfits in Arbus’s work, as well as sex workers and strippers—the dominatrix embracing her client; the topless dancer all got up, backstage, apart from her bare breasts; the couples on beds and couches; the occasional appearance of a naked Arbus herself, who later in the 1960s took to frequenting and photographing sex clubs and orgies. But her photographs of drag artists are different, seeming to offer some of the keenest tests of her competing ambitions: to find the most freakish of her contemporaries, in all their difference, and at the same time to give us the ordinary intimacy of her encounters with them. Some of the later work shows these figures much more starkly, it is true: the figure in Transvestite showing cleavage, N.Y.C. (1966) fills the frame, with just a bit of moulding and upholstery in the background—we have no idea of her milieu. But in the early work, and sometimes in the contact sheets for sessions that produced the famous later pictures, Arbus’s ‘female impersonators’ are people with unkempt beds and messy dressing rooms,

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