THE MARLOW LA FANTASTIQUE SHOW
The casual, personal photographs that Marlow and her friends captured are enchanting for their joy and intimacy.
Had you been in Europe during the 1970s, you might have been entranced by an exotic girl, in a darkly lit bar, drenched in blood-red ostrich feathers. Marlow La Fantastique gave shows from Hamburg to Berlin, then throughout towns in Italy and France. She was American, and everyone said she looked like Josephine Baker. Most assumed that she’d come to Europe from Jamaica, or another island in the Caribbean. “Wherever they said I was from, I said, ‘Yes,’” Marlow, now seventy-five years old, recalled recently, sitting in her Chicago apartment. “I knew not to argue.”
When she contacted me in 2014, I was elated to learn that Marlow, whose image I had come to know through vintage photographs and film, was still alive. As a showgirl in the 1970s and ’80s, she embraced a popular occupation for drag queens of the time, but she was distinct in her devotion to the craft; photographs from the era portray a startlingly professional transsexual entrepreneur. Photographers who documented the obscure community that Marlow and others like her built for themselves often made sensationalized images, and the performers were only to be a girl.
