The My Comrade Anthology

The My Comrade Anthology gathers the campy, radical heart of Les (Linda) Simpson's legendary New York drag zine into a 256-page newsprint volume, published by Boo-Hooray in 2022 for the magazine's 35th anniversary.

Selected by Simpson from past issues, the anthology surveys a zine that set itself apart from the deluge of Xeroxed titles in late-1980s New York: through parody of both mainstream tabloids and the self-serious gay press, an ironic sensibility, and radical-left sloganeering, My Comrade captured the zeitgeist of the gay downtown scene. Eleven issues appeared between 1987 and 1994, several flipped with the lesbian companion magazine Sister!, with covers and features starring RuPaul, Lady Bunny, Tabboo!, and the Pyramid Club orbit. Printed offset on newsprint in illustrated wraps, the volume was published on the occasion of the exhibition My Comrade Magazine: Happy 35th Gay Anniversary at Howl! Happening, which also prompted a new issue.

Simpson, a pioneering drag performer, publisher, and photographer, has become a de facto historian of queer downtown New York: her slideshow and photo archive The Drag Explosion documents the scene from the late 1980s through the 1990s, the My Comrade archives were acquired by Harvard's Houghton Library in 2021, and the zine featured in the Brooklyn Museum's Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines.