Reading is Still Fundamental

Mama Ru, Candy Darling and Mean Boys. The library is now open.

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ILLUSTRATIONS BY HENRY HUNG CHANG

TEXT BY PATRICK SWEENEY

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This story was featured in GAYLETTER Issue 20. Visit our shop to purchase a copy.

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In Issue 3 of Gayletter, I wrote the first literary criticism to appear in the magazine, titled “Reading is Fundamental.” In our 20th issue, I return to discuss three new books, including, appropriately enough, a memoir by RuPaul, who popularized the phrase in contemporary queer parlance. If reading is fundamental, writing an individual life story is its own core human activity.

The three books I selected to review, a biography (Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar by Cynthia Carr), a memoir (The House of Hidden Meanings by RuPaul), and a collection of personal essays (Mean Boys by Geoffrey Mak), each explore a life, its unfolding, and its transformation over time. And New York, a city defined by immigrants and transplants, which holds its own special gravity as a crucible of queer culture and history, plays a role in each of these life narratives, as it has the many who have lived here.

While each book touches on queer New York City nightlife in its own way, together the stories trace its contours from the 1960s to the present.

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Carr’s touching biography of Candy Darling (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024) is set amongst the landscape of New York City’s downtown, richly recounting the creative ferment of nightclubs like Max’s Kansas City and parties with members of Warhol’s Factory, as well as gay bars like the Stonewall and Julius’, which Candy was once thrown out of for wearing a dress. In his memoir (Dey Street, 2024), RuPaul invokes formative (and occasionally narcotized) moments at the Pyramid Club, Danceteria, and Tunnel, where he would work with friends like Susanne Bartsch, Lady Bunny, and Larry Tee while transforming his previous “genderfuck anarchist drag” aesthetic into polished supermodel glam.

Mak intersperses memories of nights at the Spectrum, Shock Value, and Brooklyn warehouse raves (as well as venues like Berghain in Berlin) amongst perceptive observations on art, culture, and politics in his wide-ranging collection of personal essays (Bloomsbury, 2024). As each of these books demonstrates, queer nightlife is often a space of experimentation and transgression where individuals perform new ways of being, social classes mix, and pleasure is an imperative instead of a sin. Music and lights transform the mundanity of the everyday into moments of ecstasy and transcendence that create glimpses in the darkness of new worlds and possibilities.

In her journey toward that utopia, Candy Darling’s life begins in the suburbs of Long Island, about as far away from the nightclub, culturally and psychologically, as you can get. Her biographer Carr, describes Candy’s childhood in Long Island as punctuated by an abusive father, schoolyard bullies, and a pervasive sense of feeling misunderstood. Carr writes that Candy was a “phantasm” in her hometown, and that “her approach to life in the ‘burbs was to try slipping through it in a plain brown wrapper.

Only a few would see traces in young Candy of the person who later became so vivid.” As a young person, Candy escaped into the movies, especially those featuring her idol, Kim Novak, and nurtured a dream of becoming an actor. Not because she wanted to act, but because she wanted to be a star.

When she was 17, Candy began to transition, growing her hair long, starting to wear makeup, and after seeing a doctor about her gender dysphoria, writing in her diary: “I want an operation.” That year, she visits her first gay bar, and starts trying on new names, like Kim, Hope, and Star, before settling on Candy. In 1966, Candy begins hanging out with street queens in the West Village and first meets Holly Woodlawn and Jackie Curtis. The three later become the infamous trio of Warhol Superstars featured in his film Women in Revolt (1971).

Candy’s natural beauty quickly attracts attention. Actor Agosto Machado describes her as “the most glamorous queen on the street,” shy and demure but holding court on the stoops of Christopher Street, doling out beauty tips such as “drink six to eight glasses of water per day.”

Candy eventually gets her first role in a play, the part of an aspiring actress which Curtis wrote especially for her. First staged in 1967, the play Glamour, Glory, and Gold offers “a disparaging take on the Hollywood dream,” which according to Carr, preoccupies both Jackie and Candy. Candy goes on to do more plays and independent films, Lou Reed writes the song “Candy Says” for the Velvet Underground after hanging out with Candy at Max’s, and she is included in Richard Avedon’s iconic group portrait of Andy Warhol and members of the Factory.

Candy appears alongside Jackie and Holly in another Avedon photo published full-page in Vogue, but hates it and thinks she looks terrible. In the photo (reproduced in glossy pages amongst other photos of Candy in the book), there are nearly imperceptible bumps, perhaps from shaving, on one side of her upper lip.

Throughout the meticulously researched book, Carr gives us glimpses behind the curtain of Candy’s self-made myth and glamorous persona. Through her diary entries and interviews with confidants, we see backstage moments of loneliness, doubt, and frustration with the difficulty of accomplishing her dreams. Candy wonders whether electrolysis, a nose job, or “the operation” might help, finally allowing her to live her dreams of womanhood and stardom.

Candy died from lymphoma in 1974, never quite achieving the mainstream success she so desperately desired. While she never became a Hollywood star, she was one of the last Warhol Superstars, and as Carr writes, Candy “succeeded in becoming the toast of a certain kind of town — more precisely, the toast of a certain part of a certain kind of town.” Despite the difficulties she faced, such as economic precarity, health issues, and abuse, she managed through determination to pull some of her shimmering visions of celluloid fantasies down to earth and make them real.

The House of Hidden Meanings begins in 1960 San Diego when a boy was born who also wanted to be a star.