A new book about Brooklyn drag traces the rise of queens like ThorgyThor and ajaoxum — and the wild nightlife circles they ran in.
Order it now hereOne Tuesday night in January 2012, a drag queen named Thorgy Thor was on a break between sets at Saliva!, her weekly show at the Ritz on Forty-Sixth Street in Manhattan, when the bar’s security guard approached looking worried.Thorgy sighed. “Aja?”
Teenagers with no money and no experience, Aja and Esai were not particularly glamorous, and they certainly had flaws. Many of the established queens they met in Hell’s Kitchen bars expected deference from Aja and got attitude instead. Esai was younger and less likely to lash out at strangers when he felt disrespected, but Aja was a fighter by nature — she just wouldn’t show the older queens the respect they thought they deserved. The teenage crew quickly earned a reputation for chaos and drama.
Thorgy nodded. The young queens rushed inside and marched toward the DJ booth at the back of the club. Thorgy stopped the teenagers in their tracks. “Dobe a mess,” she said, before instructing Aja and her friends to give the DJ their songs. A workhorse with a lot to say, it had taken Thorgy six years of constant striving to finally claw her way to a top spot at the Ritz. She’d developed her drag persona as a student at the State University of New York in Purchase, just outside New York City, which had a lively drag scene.
At the Ritz, Aja and Esai had watched — baffled and delighted — as Saliva! upended everything they thought they knew about the rules of drag. They friended Thorgy and the other artistic queens on Facebook and followed them to their gigs. Though several other bars had shut their doors to Aja and Esai, Thorgy had a ringmaster’s instinct for spotting talent, and she believed that freewheeling fun was worth the risk of chaos.
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