Underground Ambassadors: Queer Theater, Trans Life, and their European Audiences

As part of a book in progress on the social and geographic proximities of the queer performance and activist cultures of downtown New York City in the 1970s, I will be conducting research in the Downtown Collection of the Fales Library, New York University, on the Off-Off Broadway theater troupe the Hot Peaches, who centered the experiences of its transgender members such as Marsha P. Johnson and Wilhemina Ross. The Hot Peaches’ Divas of Sheridan Square was based on Johnson’s life and toured Europe in the mid 1970s, becoming a primary way that European audiences were introduced to New York’s artistic and cultural underground.