Legendary #1: New York City, 1987
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Legendary #1New York City, 1987
You want me to say who I am and all of that?
—Pepper LaBeija
LaBeija, my house, is kept gold, swept clean— fronts fantasy from top to plump bottom. What I want to be, I be: crew-cut queen, middle sex owed to manicured pink thumbs. Catwalk as fierce as the fiercest real bitch, I am high like fashion. And fame. I am a man who likes men and a good cross-stitch, whom homesick kids crown “legendary.” Ma’am of the ball, been walking now two decades and got more grand prizes than all the rest. The long and short: I’m a one-man parade, elaborate drag, from manner to breasts. Within ballrooms I am most opulent. Inside this house I am most relevant. [End Page 1075]
Nicole Sealey, a Cave Canem fellow, is an essayist, poet, and editor, whose interviews with writers such as Sapphire, DJ Spooky, and Nikki Giovanni can be found in Artists and Influence: Volume XXV, Studio, and Mosaic literary magazine, respectively. Sealey has published poems in Feeding the Soul: Black Music, Black Thought, Torch, among other print and online journals. She holds a Master of Liberal Arts degree in Africana studies from the University of South Florida. A resident of Brooklyn, NY, she is the Readings/Workshops and Writers Exchange Program Manager at Poets & Writers, Inc.
