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Craig Seligman with Silvana Nova
Husbands Craig and Silvana Nova visit the store on the occasion of the former’s new book Who Does That Bitch Think She Is? Silvana, a former drag queen himself, will chat with Craig about the trailblazing drag queen Doris Fish and the history of drag.
In Who Does That Bitch Think She Is? Doris Fish and the Rise of Drag, Craig Seligman looks at the short but overstuffed life of Doris Fish (born Philip Mills in 1952). There were effectively three Dorises—the quiet visual artist, the glorious drag queen, and the hunky male prostitute who supported the other two. He started performing in Sydney in 1972 as a member of Sylvia and the Synthetics, a psycho troupe that represented the first anarchic flowering of queer creative energy in the post-Stonewall era. After moving to San Francisco in the mid-’70s, he became the driving force behind years of sidesplitting drag shows that were loved as much as you can love throwaway trash—which is what everybody thought they were. No one, Doris included, perceived them as political theater, when in fact they were accomplishing satire’s deepest dream: not just to rail against society, but to change it.
Seligman recounts a dynamic period in queer history — from Stonewall to AIDS — giving insight into how our ideas about gender have broadened to make drag the phenomenon we know it as today.
Craig Seligman has written for and edited at a host of magazines, journals, newspapers, and websites. He is the author of Sontag and Kael: Opposites Attract Me (2004). He lives in Brooklyn.
Silvana Nova, Craig Seligman’s husband, was a well-known San Francisco activist, performance artist, and drag queen in the ’70s and ’80s. With a cohort of friends he even waged a Dadaist political campaign against Harvey Milk. In 2019 and 2020, a giant image of him, from a 1977 political poster, adorned the new Harvey Milk Terminal of the San Francisco International Airport. After 1991 he worked in graphics in New York and is now retired (but not tired) and living in Brooklyn.
Event Links
Website: https://go.evvnt.com/1583719-0
