Leee Black Childers: Drag Queens, Rent Boys, Pick Pockets, Junkies, Rock Stars and Punks

"Tits have played a big part in history" - Leee Black Childers

In 2012, Leee Black Childers came to London to launch his book Drag Queens, Rent Boys, Pick Pockets, Junkies, Rock Stars and Punks (ah - My People!) He came armed with anecdotes and proved to be a fountain of Old Southern Charm. Below was a piece I wrote at the time for the London Festival Fringe. It was an honour to meet him.

Leee Black Childers 1972

When Leee Black Childers first arrived in New York in the late 1960s, fresh from the simmering backwaters of Kentucky, a cocky request for a cigarette found him looking skywards: towering above him was a stack-heeled Amazonian disporting false eyelashes like tarantula legs, hair an aureole of static-charged frizz. She was primed with panstick and sleek with speed: his first NYC drag queen. 

Jackie Curtis 1971

Leee’s entry into the demimonde of the rotting core of the Big Apple led to his becoming the in-house snapper at Andy Warhol’s Factory, and later vice president of David Bowie’s Mainman company and manager of Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers (who he brought to the UK to join the Sex Pistols on the 1977 Anarchy Tour). 

But in the end, he was always spiritually solid with the anonymous outlaws scratching a living in the anomalous, urban dead zones of London and New York.

In that respect, the tile of the exhibition & book is somewhat misleading. While Childers has taken the titular misfits as his subjects for over 40 years, the photos on display here are largely comprised of the Warhol superstars, the key proto-punks (Iggy and the Stooges, Patti Smith, the New York Dolls) plus Bowie, Debbie Harry and the London scene of ’77.

Iggy 1973

Modest to the point of reticence about his many achievements, Leee’s photos betray a stunning use of murky light, composition and, of course, styling – none of which was born of anything as quotidian as by-rote training: these were collaborations born of sulpahte, sass and whatever satin and tat was to hand.  The photos of the Factory drag queens stand out – particularly a 1970 shot of Jackie Curtis, a plush hussy half lit by a seedy neon dancehall sign, cigarette in hand, hair the colour of dried blood, eyelids weighted with glitter, her gossamer-thin mini-dress dress clinging to her padded contours.

Jayne County 1974

The proud and pugnacious Jayne County snarls at the camera, mimicking the heads of two tiger rugs that flank her – she looks like their human equivalent, equally fierce but with more Max Factor than fur. Patti Smith looks equal parts frail and hard, her obsidian eyes ablaze in that solemn pale cameo of a face, and Cherry Vanilla is depicted simultaneously enjoying cock and crack in an eye-watering fashion.

Debbie Harry 1977

Bowie appears here on his 1974 Russian tour in all his haughty, androgyne glory. Childers had also been tour manager for Iggy and the Stooges in 1972 and the images of the 23-year-old Iggy perfectly stress his diamond-hard, glistening body aglow with sweat and sexual energy, while the Stooges look like the most terrifying gang on earth. 

They had competition in Bowery boys The Heartbreakers though, and the pictures of them in London display a menacing vision of sexuality – Johnny Thunders couldn’t have looked as though he gave a damn even if he’d tried. 

The other London pictures depict some curiously cosy scenes: NME journalist Caroline Coon had half the punks in town round for Christmas dinner in 1977, and it’s charmingly jarring to see Slits guitarist Viv Albertine and Sid Vicious (with an acoustic!) lounging amid the throws and spider plants of Coon’s living room like a pair of urchins who’ve broken into some bourgeois hippy's home and are taking a moment before going in search of the jewellery and silver. A platinumed Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren overlook the brood. 

Cherry Vanilla pipes up, 1976

There’s a grand portrait of chalk-faced Siouxsie, too hardened with hauteur and high dudgeon to care that someone’s waving a lens in her direction and her polar opposite, Debbie Harry, displaying the smiling, cocky, come-hither charm of the savviest starlet in town.

Jackie Curtis 1970

Bowie on the Trans-Siberian Express 1973

Diabolical Angel: Johnny Thunders in London 1977

Hard Day's Night: sleepy rent boys, late 1970s

These kind of outlaws are harder to find in London or NYC today as the cancerous bloom of gentrification slowly seeps into every street and neighbourhood. But they’ll always be with us, skirting the Quicksand of the Everyday, outsmarting the Life More Ordinary – and Leee Black Childers’ subjects built much of that rocky road on which they wilfully walk.

Leee Black Childers. Born: Louisville, Kentucky 1945. Died: Los Angeles, California 2014.

This piece was originally published by London Festival Fringe in December 2012