Blacklips: Her Life and Her Many, Many Deaths

In the midst of the AIDS crisis in NYC, ANOHNI and a group of fellow artists, drag queens, punks, nightlife veterans, and students formed the Blacklips Performance Cult. They performed a new play every Monday night at 1:00 a.m. at the Pyramid Club on 101 Avenue A. The collective left a lasting impression on New York's late-night subculture by blending hysterical drag, surreal horror, and disconcerting tenderness. ANOHNI and coeditor Marti Wilkerson have released Blacklips: Her Life and Her Many, Many Deaths, an expansive collection that introduces the phenomenon to the twenty-first century.

Format: Hardback
Length: 492 pages
Publication date: 16 March 2023
Publisher: Anthology Editions

From June 1992 to March 1995, amidst the AIDS crisis in New York City, an extraordinary theatrical collective emerged from the queer underground. Blacklips Performance Cult, initiated by ANOHNI and joined by a cabal of fellow artists, drag queens, punks, nightlife veterans, and students, performed a new play every Monday night at 1:00 a.m. at the Pyramid Club on 101 Avenue A. Blacklips never courted mainstream attention. However, the group left a sustaining impression within New York's late-night subculture by melding hysterical drag, surreal horror, and disconcerting tenderness.

In Blacklips: Her Life and Her Many, Many Deaths, ANOHNI and coeditor Marti Wilkerson lay bare the collective's archives in photographs, scripts, and the assembled ephemera from more than one hundred and twenty original "plays." Featuring images from newly digitized film and video recordings, texts from participants and audience members, and an introduction by Lia Gangitano, this expansive collection introduces to the twenty-first century the short-lived and ruthlessly creative phenomenon that was Blacklips.

Weight: 2924g
Dimension: 309 x 303 x 41 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781944860530