Adra Maner
03/02/2015
Women’s Studies
Paris Is Burning
I was really excited to watch the movie Paris Is Burning in class, I really enjoy Ru Paul’s Drag Race and during one of the seasons there was a participant who had been involved in the New York Ball scene and had talked about some of the things that they mentioned in the movie like voguing and the fashion style involved with the Balls.
At the end of the movie I was curious as to what had happened to the other main figures such as Octavia and Ninja. And after very little searching I found that the rest of the ‘cast’ had also passed away some in 1993 the year I was born and some in the early 00’s mostly do to Aids related illnesses which I felt like might have been the case due to how hard hit the gay community was by the aids epidemic especially in the 80’s.
The death I found most interesting though was that of Dorian Corey the older queen who they
interviewed. She died of aids related illness in August of 93’ but in October two men that were her friends were allowed by her presumably her partner to search Corey’s, who had also been a costume designer, house in order to find a halloween costume. It was there inside a garment bag in a well hidden walk in closet they found a partially mummified body that had been shot in the head and then wrapped in plastic wrap then placed in the leather garment bag. When the police arrived and the medical examiners examined the body they determined that this person known as ‘robert wells’ had been dead for 15 years. Meaning that Corey possibly got away with murder though no one knows whether she was actually the killer or not. You can read more about this incident on jstor in an article titled ‘The Drag Queen and The Mummy’.
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