NYC nightlife royalty Linda Simpson offers rare inside look at East Village drag culture in the ‘80s and ‘90s

Linda Simpson has been around for more decades than her youthful looks might lead you to believe — and she has the pictures to prove it.

On Friday, the self-proclaimed “High-Profile NYC Drag Queen!” is bringing her campy sensibility and a trove of historic photos to the South Street Seaport Museum in Manhattan to offer viewers an insider’s look at a fascinating chapter of New York nightlife.

The free event, “Queer History: Drag and the Waterfront,” will highlight queer nightlife and activism in New York in the ‘80s and ‘90s with images of some of the most colorful characters of the era — including then-underground celebrities RuPaul, Lady Bunny, Lypsinka and Leigh Bowery — nearly 30 years before “RuPaul’s Drag Race” turned the art of drag into a worldwide phenomenon.

Simpson — an author, artist and gameshow hostess — moved to New York from Minnesota in the early 1980s. By the end of the decade, she’d become part of a new brigade of performers who were taking Manhattan’s East Village by storm.

“I started [performing] at the Pyramid Club,” Simpson told the Daily News, referring to the legendary nightclub on Avenue A that helped define the queer underground scene in New York.

“That was the real hotbed of the kind of kooky and imaginative drag scene of that era” — added Simpson, who photographed key moments of that effervescent moment in queer counterculture, and who is now able to share them with the world.

Her photography, which at the time was only meant as a pre-Instagram-era photo album, paints a clearer picture of such a groundbreaking chapter of New York nightlife.

“I’m not a professional camera photographer by any means, but I would carry around cheap little cameras, and so I took a lot of photos when I was out but very randomly,” she said.

About eight years ago, Simpson realized she had made “a time capsule” that told the story of the city’s drag scene at the time. That idea turned into a slideshow and later into a book, “The Drag Explosion,” which was released in 2020 and is already in its second print.

On Friday, Simpson is bringing that slideshow to the Seaport Museum, whose mission is to preserve “the origins and growth of New York City as a world port, a place where goods, labor, and cultures are exchanged through work, commerce, and the interaction of diverse communities.”

Her presentation will highlight the drag history connected to the area — including a drag-themed boat cruise that embarked from the South Street Seaport; and Wigstock, the legendary outdoor drag festival that started in Tompkins Square Park in the summer of 1984 and had iterations at Pier 54 and Pier 17.

The moments captured for prosperity in Simpson’s photos tell the story of a different world of drag performance, which she hopes can educate viewers by offering them a first-hand account of its backstory, as well as an overview of the evolution of the art form — and the colorful activism that came along with it.

Apart from their over-the-top costumes, impossible eyelashes and sickening death drops, drag queens have historically also played a vital role in queer rights activism.

In 1987, Simpson began publishing My Comrade, a “tongue-in-cheek revolutionary magazine” created in reaction to the “tough times that everyone was going through with the AIDS crisis,” but combined with the East Village drag scene of the time.

The result was a publication that had a “campy feel but it was also invigorating,” and that “promoted gay power, gay love and gay unity” — a fitting message today, as a renewed anti-drag sentiment seems to be gaining momentum across the U.S.

Speaking about the increasing number of protests against all-age drag performances taking place in venues across the country, Simpson said the animosity toward Drag Queen Story Hour, a fun story-telling event for kids, is “just kind of homophobia/transphobia.”

“These people who are protesting aren’t really [doing it for] the children’s benefit. They’re just out to make a stink about something that they feel is wrong,” she said.

“Queer History: Drag and the Waterfront” is scheduled for Friday at 7 p.m. at The Green Room at Pier 17. The event is free, but advanced registration is required.