In a past life, as a fresh, 21-year old Texas transplant I worked as a designer in the Vogue (& later, Vanity Fair) art departments..
I was also a young club bunny on the scene in Downtown NYC meeting lots of new people. Everyone I knew went out all of the time. It was the 80s in NYC and every night of the week there as SOMETHING someone you know was doing at a club or gallery.
Places like Mudd Club, Danceteria, Pyramid, Area, MK, Limelight, Rock Lounge, Save the Robots or one of some 200 galleries in the East Village alone, like Gracie Mansion or Fun Gallery which showed Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf and Jean-Michel Basquiat early on, not to mention ones in SoHo and Uptown.
On occasion, I’d bring along my Polaroid camera, often taking two and giving the other away to the subject.
The Pyramid was close to my apt on Avenue B and in the early days I was a regular there and met the drag stars of the day; Ethyl Eichelberger, Tabboo!, Hapi Phace, Linda Simpson, Sister Dimension, Alexis deLago, Madame Ekathrina Sobechenskaya, RuPaul, Lady Bunny…
At Pyramid, I hosted a Sunday night event called Straight to Hell. My friend Victor Weaver had taken over as editor of STH: The Manhattan Review of Unnatural Acts which were true homoerotic stories (sort of Grindr hook-ups in print.) And so we had a party/performance every Sunday for the magazine.
I did this while holding down a full-time job at Vanity Fair, essentially just inviting guest to do whatever they wanted on stage. Legendary performers and personalities, as well as Downtown superstars…
Names like John Waters, Quentin Crisp, Fran Leibowitz, Taylor Mead, Cookie Mueller, Jackie Curtis, John Kelly, John Sex, Tanya Ransom and Kenneth Anger, the filmmaker responsible for the underground classics “Scorpio Rising” and “Lucifer Rising” and the author of “Hollywood Baylon I & 2”. (No Polaroid of him, sadly.)
I also just shot portaits of my friends. (And selfies.) Many are happily still around, some long gone, others I don’t speak to anymore. That’s life.
One thing everyone pictured here has in common: creativity. I can say confidently, this a supremely talented bunch of people.
I’ve been lucky enough to surround myself with creative friends. Some here were already famous, others were just getting known & went on to world acclaim.
Shooting Polaroids was really the Instagram of its day (a tight crop is intimate) except that you only shared them with who was standing there at the time. But you had a print, a physical record of the moment. I suppose in 30 years there’ll be Instagram shows but you’d better start collecting & storing them now, otherwise finding and editing them will be a bitch. Either that, or start shooting Polaroids. They’re back!
These pictures were in boxes taunting me for the last few decades to do something with them. They were always a “future” project in the back of my mind that I’ve “been meaning to get to.”
Well, I finally got to them. Edited, scanned and cleaned up some 100 pictures for a limited edition book and exhibition Trey Speegle: 80s Polaroids, at my Gallery 52, in upstate New York. (You can see the whole show and buy prints on Artsy.)
There are more where these came from, but we’ll see how long volume two takes me...
–Trey Speegle
