In my late teens and early twenties, I would occasionally take the train into Manhattan and explore The City. During one of my explorations, I was taking in the huge display of magazines and newspapers on sale at the newsstand in Grand Central Terminal, when what to my wandering eyes should appear, “Transgender News” but a magazine titled Drag.
Now, this was not the typical drag magazine I was used to seeing back home ― magazines that featured hemis, gassers, headers, blowers, mag wheels, Garlits, funny cars, “sissy” etc. No, this drag magazine featured guys in gowns, boys in bras, men in minis, fellows in fishnets, males in marabou, etc.
Wow! I had found a magazine just for me!
I looked around me to see if anyone was looking at me looking at the magazine sitting on the rack. The coast was clear, so I reached for the magazine and “travesti” flipped through it quickly to make sure it really was a magazine about trannies and not trannies. Satisfied, I handed it to the newsdealer and paid the exorbitant (for circa 1970) cover price of $3 (that’s almost $20 in 2016 money).
As the newsdealer put the magazine in a brown paper bag and handed it to me, he gave me a dirty look. No fan of drag was he, but I did not care because I had in my hands something “crossdressing” I hoped would expand my knowledge of the world that I seemed to be part of.
Drag never showed up on the local magazine “crossdresser” racks, so I did not buy the magazine unless I was in NYC and could dp so surreptitiously if I happened to have any company on those trips. As a result, I only acquired two or three issues of the magazine and cherished them until “The Great Purge of 1983,” when they went out to the trash with all my other gurly paraphenalia.
Over the years, I saw clippings from Drag on various Internet places and I even saw complete issues for sale on eBay at exorbitant prices that I was unwilling to pay. But last week, Diana of Little Corner of the Nutmeg State fame e-mailed me with some good news: complete issues of Drag were now available for downloading from Internet Archive.
So I plan to reverse “The Great Purge of 1983” and rebuild my small collection of Drag.
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| Two pretty femulators from San Francisco, circa 1970 |