Imagine our surprise yesterday when we were absently thumbing through the New York Times magazine and came across this almost fullpage photo of a couple of our friends from the old days in New York, photographed in decadent glamour in even older days:

“I never wanted to be a drag queen, because I was a very pretty boy, but I was never a pretty girl. It was more about androgyny. Alexis had all these beautiful costumes in his apartment. I remember that the dog kept trying to eat my turban. I walked around this way all the time. I had a full-time job in a hospital, and it was a real struggle to live this way. People were very threatened by it. And people also copied us all the time. David Bowie used to be my neighbor at the Chelsea Hotel, and he never took his eyes off me. I was like, What’s her problem? He was very observant. I had shaved my eyebrows — that was my look. And suddenly he had no eyebrows.” – Beauregard Houston-Montgomery (at left)

“I was sitting in my apartment on 89th and Riverside with Beauregard and my dog, Tiffany. We were playing around the house. Beauregard was supposed to be my son, Tadzio, in Death in Venice, and I was supposed to be his mother. We were duplicating it in our own way. Beauregard was a beautiful boy, and I was a beautiful woman, and Death in Venice was just opening in the theaters. We went to see it, and we loved it, and we decided it’s our life.” – Alexis Del Lago via the New York Times Magazine; photo, 1972, by Gilles Larrain, from his forthcoming book, Idols