GAYSBiE, 37 Fire Island Blvd (2026)

30/09/2026

Drag shows weren’t some random one-off during WWII - they were happening across military forces in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

A lot of units were almost entirely male, so when troops put on shows for each other, female roles were usually played by other servicemen. Some productions became surprisingly serious, with proper rehearsals, costumes, makeup and performers spending weeks or months preparing for their roles.

In the US, the Army even backed large-scale soldier productions like This Is the Army, while other military concert parties travelled between bases, ships and war zones specifically to entertain troops. For men living through years of war, these shows were mainly about comedy, escapism and keeping morale up.

The photos in this post were taken in southeast England in 1940, but they’re only one part of a much bigger wartime archive. It’s such a strange contrast looking back - drag could be openly performed for hundreds of servicemen, while gay men themselves could still face serious consequences for being discovered.

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27/09/2026

Before Leigh Bowery became a legend of q***r nightlife and performance art, he was a 19-year-old from Melbourne trying to make a life for himself in London.

At first, things were much less glamorous. He worked ordinary jobs, including a stint at Burger King, while slowly finding his way into the city’s club and fashion scene.

Then people started noticing him.

Bowery didn’t just turn up to parties - he completely changed the energy of a room. By 1985 he had launched Taboo, a tiny Leicester Square club night that became infamous for its anything-goes atmosphere and helped make him one of the most recognisable figures in London’s underground.

Bowery was obsessed with pushing ideas around beauty, gender, taste and what people were willing to accept as art. He understood that making people uncomfortable could be just as powerful as making them admire something. If people stared, laughed, recoiled or couldn’t work out what they were looking at, he had their attention.

That thinking took him far beyond nightlife. He performed internationally, appeared as a living exhibit in galleries and became known for treating his own body as something that could constantly be reinvented.

He was also fiercely private. Bowery lived with HIV for years without many people knowing and died on New Year’s Eve 1994, aged just 33.

His life was incredibly short, but the impact was huge. More than 30 years later, his work still feels bold, confrontational and completely original.

Leigh Bowery didn’t just want to be remembered. He made himself impossible to forget.

📸 All images remain with their respective photographers, artists, archives and rights holders. Shared here to celebrate and reignite interest in Leigh Bowery’s incredible contribution to q***r art, nightlife and performance.

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24/09/2026

Before drag had Instagram, reality TV or camera phones, Linda Simpson was already photographing it from inside the room.

From the late 1980s through the 90s, Linda carried a little point-and-shoot camera through New York’s clubs, dressing rooms, parties and after-hours spots. She’s said taking photos actually helped with her shyness - giving her an excuse to approach people and document whoever happened to be around.

Those nights eventually became an archive of around 5,000 photographs.

RuPaul, Lady Bunny, Willi Ninja, Candis Cayne, Leigh Bowery, Club Kids, go-go boys and countless queens appear alongside people who never became famous at all - photographed at places like the Pyramid Club, Limelight and Wigstock while the scene was still largely underground.

That’s what makes these photos so good. They weren’t staged as “important historical photographs.” They were friends, nights out, dressing rooms and ridiculous parties that only became history later.

The images also capture q***r nightlife during the AIDS crisis - an era of enormous loss happening alongside an explosion of creativity, drag and chosen family across New York.

📸 Every photograph in this carousel was taken by Linda Simpson and remains her copyrighted work. We’re sharing them to celebrate Linda’s incredible archive and introduce a new audience to the history she preserved.

Linda’s work continues through The Drag Explosion, and her photo books including The Drag Explosion: Greatest Hits are available directly through her project. Please support the photographer behind these amazing images 🖤

Photography: Linda Simpson / The Drag Explosion © Linda Simpson

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23/09/2026

Fire Island became one of America’s most important q***r escapes - and by the 1970s, it was completely wild.

Cherry Grove had a gay and le***an community by the 1950s, while neighbouring Fire Island Pines originally tried to keep q***r people out. That failed spectacularly. By the 60s and 70s, the Pines had become one of the country’s most famous gay destinations.

The parties became legendary: Tea Dances, beach raves, drag, themed house parties, tiny swimwear and all-night discos. At Sunrise in 1978, organisers built a dance floor on the beach and around 2,000 people turned up to party until morning.

Fire Island also drew major q***r icons, artists and celebrities. Cher visited the Pines and went to Tea Dance, Grace Jones performed at the Ice Palace, and Peter Allen performed with the Radio City Rockettes on a stage floating in the bay. Calvin Klein, Robert Mapplethorpe and Pat Cleveland were also part of the wider scene.

Stormé DeLarverie - legendary drag king, activist and a figure associated with the Stonewall uprising - was photographed relaxing in Cherry Grove in 1977. It’s one of those images that really shows just how many different generations of q***r history crossed paths on the island.

Fire Island mattered because it gave q***r people something difficult to find elsewhere at the time: somewhere to be loud, affectionate, sexual, ridiculous and completely themselves.

When AIDS devastated the community in the 1980s, that same party culture became a force for fundraising, with events like the GMHC Morning Party raising tens of thousands of dollars for people affected by the crisis.

These photos don’t just document wild parties. They capture a place where q***r people built their own world - refusing to make it smaller for anyone.

📸 All images remain the property of their respective photographers, rights holders and archives. Shared here to preserve, celebrate and reignite interest in this chapter of q***r history. GAYSBIE claims no ownership of the original photography.

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18/09/2026

David Bowie understood that makeup could do more than make someone look good - it could completely change who they became.

Across different eras, he used painted brows, exaggerated eyes, stark white skin, metallic colour and prosthetics to build characters that felt separate from the man underneath. Some lasted for years. Others existed for a single shoot, performance or film.

For Bowie, the face was part of the costume. Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Halloween Jack and the Thin White Duke all had their own visual language, with makeup helping audiences understand that a new version of Bowie had arrived before he even opened his mouth.

It’s one of the reasons his image still feels so modern. He treated beauty less like a set of rules and more like another tool for storytelling.

📸 All image rights remain with their respective owners and photographers. We’re simply bringing these incredible images back into view for a new generation to discover.

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15/09/2026

William Haines and Jimmie Shields weren’t completely hidden away behind closed doors. Within Hollywood, people knew they were together - they shared a home, travelled together and had some of the biggest stars of the era in their circle.

After Hollywood turned its back on William, he somehow managed to build an entirely new career. He and Jimmie ran their interior design business together, creating homes for Hollywood royalty and later even designing for Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

Joan Crawford was one of William’s closest friends and biggest supporters. She reportedly hired him to decorate several of her homes and remained close to both William and Jimmie for decades.

For two gay men who met in 1926, their life together was pretty extraordinary. They never got the marriage or legal recognition that couples have today, but they built a life together that lasted almost half a century.

And perhaps Joan Crawford summed them up best when she called them “the happiest married couple in Hollywood.”

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05/09/2026

Almost 100 years ago, women were queuing to get into one of Paris’ most famous le***an nightclubs.

Le Monocle was a place where women could drink, dance, meet and kiss other women. Many arrived in tuxedos, ties and trousers with slicked-back hair - and the monocle itself had become a subtle way for le***ans to recognise each other. The club even had an all-female orchestra.

It wasn’t exactly hidden either. Le Monocle became a fashionable meeting place for artists, intellectuals and influential women - all while le***an venues and the women working inside them were being watched by police.

In 1932, photographer Brassaï gained access through a regular named Claude. He photographed the actual women who spent their nights there - couples embracing, friends drinking and packed tables of people partying.

The freedom captured in these photos didn’t last. Le Monocle was forced to close during the German occupation of France in WWII.

The final slide shows the former Le Monocle site at 60 Boulevard Edgar-Quinet today - more than 90 years after these photos were taken.

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03/09/2026

For three years in the 1970s, photographer Roz Joseph stepped inside San Francisco’s drag balls with her camera.

She photographed queens at coronations, parties, parades and the people behind a thriving drag scene that was still largely invisible to the wider world.

Roz wanted to turn the photographs into a book called Golden G**s - but she couldn’t find a publisher.

Instead, the photographs and negatives remained stored in her San Francisco apartment. In 2010, she donated them to the GLBT Historical Society, bringing the collection back into public view almost four decades after the photographs were taken.

There’s also a sad reality to the faces in these pictures. Researchers later found that many of the people Joseph photographed died from HIV-related complications during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s.

📸 All image taken by Ros Joseph and rights remain with their rightful owners.

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02/09/2026

Casa Susanna gave people something many of them had spent their lives without - a place where they could finally meet and live openly alongside others like themselves.

Hidden in New York’s Catskill Mountains during the 1950s and 60s, it became part of what has been described as the first known transgender network in the United States.

Run by Susanna Valenti and her wife Marie, Casa Susanna welcomed crossdressers - primarily married professional men - who could spend weekends dressing openly, cooking, relaxing, performing and socialising together, often after years of isolation.

For many, this part of their lives remained a secret from their wives, children and families, making the friendships they formed at Casa Susanna even more significant.

Outside Casa Susanna, being discovered could risk their marriages, careers and reputations. Inside, they could spend an entire weekend living openly - which is why so many of the photographs are strikingly ordinary: people having coffee, playing cards, cooking dinner and simply existing together.

Photography became an important part of the community. Hundreds of photographs were taken, exchanged between friends and sent through the mail, helping connect crossdressers across America. Some also appeared in Transvestia, a magazine created for the community.

Then in 2004, antiques dealer Robert Swope discovered 340 of these photographs at a Manhattan flea market. Most had survived inside three photo albums, preserving an extraordinary record of a community that could so easily have disappeared from history.

We use the term “crossdressers” because this is how the Casa Susanna community is historically described, rather than applying modern identities retrospectively. Some members later identified as transgender, but not everyone did.

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📸 Casa Susanna photographs, various photographers, mostly unknown. All image rights remain with their rightful owners.

01/09/2026

Kansas City’s drag history was discovered in a salvage yard, where it had been left among scrap metal and rubble.

In 2006, artist Robert Chase Heishman was researching for a documentary class when he found a slide carousel labelled “Jack’s Slides: Chicago and Kansas City” buried among scrap metal and rubble in a salvage yard. It had already been discarded, mixed in with the debris, and was moments away from becoming nothing more than rubbish.

Inside were photographs of drag performers, parties and people arriving at clubs dressed for the night, hidden among ordinary family snapshots.

Then, in 2008, Michael Boles found dozens more slides loose inside a shoebox while helping a friend move. Among them were more than 100 photographs of drag queens and people attending drag shows, along with letters and writing belonging to someone named Jack.

The two friends didn’t connect the discoveries until 2012, when they realised the photographs had clearly been taken by the same person. Many were traced to Kansas City venues including The Colony and The Jewel Box Lounge, where underground events were advertised as “tea dances” or “private parties”.

Together, the photographs became the Private Birthday Party collection, now more than 200 images preserving a side of 1950s and 60s q***r nightlife that could have so easily disappeared forever.

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📸 Images from the Private Birthday Party collection. Photographer unknown. All image rights remain with their rightful owners.

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