LLyn De Danaan is a cultural anthropologist, writer, photographer and textile artist with an unmistakably queer sensibility. She is most happy when she uses all of her disciplines and her angle of approach in a single work. Sometimes it happens. She is a happy 50-year resident of Oyster Bay, Kamilche, Washington and lives with her companion animal Apple.


My interest in drag and gender performance is informed by Gladys Bentley of the Harlem Renaissance, Claude Cahun the surrealist, Chavela Vargas, Gertrude Stein, Monique Wittig, Simone de Beauvoir, Lily Tomlin’s Lounge Lizard Tommy Velour, and by my flirtations with Bohemian lifestyle and the Go-Go dancers and their Butches in Pioneer Square, Seattle of the 1960s.

I began experimenting with dress and identity when I was young. I loved opportunities to dress in male/boy clothing beginning with 4-H camp fancy dress events. Since, I’ve enjoyed the spectrum, trying it on here and there when possible. Nineteen-fifties films like Calamity Jane led the way.

During Covid isolation, I invited many men and women to inhabit me. They allowed photographs. I documented their visits. Just me. With a handheld cell phone. Some 43 of these stopovers became a Facebook page called, “The Isolation Series,” orchestrated by Sally J. Cloninger. Six of the series are reproduced here. This was not my first photographic exploration in performing gender. Characters called Agnes Sorrell and “The Brett” made earlier appearances in galleries and film. Queer subjectivity allows one to run the gamut.

The three color photographs are from a series called, “Transformative Adventures With Friends and Loved Ones.” I lipsticked and otherwise “glamourized” friends, put wigs on their heads, dressed them…all as a tribute to my mother’s fascination with (and imitation of) Hollywood women of the 40s. I knew I wasn’t one of that species, but these women attracted me and seemed desirable. That series was a self-conscious purging of those fantasies. There were always Gertrude and Chavela and the others who let me in on another way to be and appeal in the world. Another world.