“We were queer way before gay liberation was invented.” Mogamat Kafunta Benjamin said this on the occasion of a small exhibition in Cape Town in 2019, which has since been widely received. Like so many others involved in Dirty Dragging, Mogamat didn’t live to see this publication. Today, our encounter feels like from another world. We first met during his …

  If we take to heart the fact that we make places, things, and selves, but not under conditions of our own choosing, then it is easier to take the risk of conceiving change as something both short of and longer than a single cataclysmic event. Indeed, the chronicles of revolutions all show how persistent small changes, and altogether unexpected consolidations, …

  Figure 1: Kewpie, District Six, near Invery Place, Cape Town, late 1960s. Kewpie Collection, GALA Queer Archive, Johannesburg, South Africa (AM2886/127). The undated black-and-white photograph captures a drag queen dancing amid the ruins of a destroyed house. Presumably taken in the late 1960s, this queer street scene in rubble can be read as a visual message in a bottle48—an …

  Figure 5: District Six before the forced removals, undated paper clip. National Library of South Africa, Cape Town (PHA 3709 Coons). “YOU ARE NOW IN FAIRY LAND” was a famous piece of graffiti on one of the houses in District Six, later demolished, whose remains are made visible in Kewpie’s dragging rubble series—as if a kind of queer crossing …

  Figure 14: Eva Braun, presumably at Studio Heinrich Hoffmann, ca. 1928/29. Photograph from Braun’s private album, Heinrich Hoffmann Collection, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich (hoff-333). “ich als Al Jolson”—“me as Al Jolson”—is the handwritten caption above a black-and-white album photo. The image shows a smiling white woman in drag, staging herself as someone else—in a man’s suit, with a blackened face …

  Exotic spectacles such as Ki sua heli were preceded by experiments in propagandistic mass culture labeled as genuinely National Socialist. These were buttressed, not least, by academic claims of Germanic lineages. Alongside a visual regime of antisemitic invective—prefigured, for instance, by Braun’s photo in drag—the Nazis relied on fictitious, ethnonationalist “self-indigenization:” an assertion of their own autochthonous rootedness in …

  Figure 33 Lynching Memorial, National Memorial for Peace and Justice, Montgomery, 2018. Photo: Alan Karchmer. In the spring of 2020, medical masks took over public life as the coronavirus pandemic set in. Suddenly, people began showing up in different masquerades in various locations to protest local mask mandates—and to share their photos on social media for maximum attention.387 Throwing …

  In the back streets of New Orleans, the contemporary displays of power and authority “in drag”—which variously referenced Perchten, court spectacles, and minstrel blackface—were, by the early twentieth century at the latest, undermined by appearances in public marked by shifting conflicts. Hardly photographed in the decades that followed, but visually ubiquitous today, this Mardi Gras, again shaped by roving …

  »We ask you … to ensure that there is no visual similarity to the iconic logo of the brand … belonging to our client.” The original design for the cover by Oliver Brentzel, reflecting on practices of quoting without quotation marks and on what we schlepp along involuntarily, was scrapped just before printing—another casualty of today’s crackdown on queering, …