Thru the Mirror | Jay Blumenfeld

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A LIFE THROUGH THE LENS

Jay Blumenfeld, 1976 • Photo: Robert Isabell
Photographer's
Noté
Thru the Mirror:
The Unfinished Project,
When I moved from South St. Paul, Minnesota, to Chicago in 1976, I saw my first Gay Pride parade, with drag queens on floats in wild, outrageous costumes. What an awakening! These men dressed fabulously as women, but many were closeted and lived double lives. To me, drag symbolized freedom, the freedom to express oneself boldly. I didn't have a plan.
I went with the flow, and that's how I started documenting drag queens.
At the age of twenty-two, I was a Deaf gay man trying to find my place in the world. I picked up my 35mm Nikon F2 camera and began photographing drag queens in bars and other places where gays meet. Some were Deaf, like me, and some were hearing.
We communicated easily.

WAS THERE A STORY
BEHIND EACH PERSON?
While taking their pictures, I wondered:
I didn't ask questions.
I let them show me who they were on their own terms.
Some showed up loud, cheeky, defiant.
Others were quiet, soft, vulnerable.
You can see it in their eyes, their stance, the way they held themselves.
Their truth is in the portrait.
During the four years I worked on the project on and off, I was barely getting by on $3.50 an hour working in a photo lab.
Despite my limited income, I kept capturing drag queens whenever I could and when money allowed. These models trusted me, the man behind the lens.
All of them posed in raw,
spur-of-the-moment, unrehearsed portraits. They were image-obsessed, constantly checking their reflection, refining their makeup, adjusting wigs and gowns. In other words, they were always in pursuit of beauty and perfection.
THRU THE MIRROR STRUCK ME AS THE IDEAL TITLE.
192
SAE
ETY FILM 5035
KODAK SAFETY FILM 5035
KODAK SAFETY FILM 5035
KODAK SAF

THE STORY BEHIND
Thru the Mirror
I dreamed of publishing a book celebrating what I captured. But in a time when drag culture was still considered taboo, publishers and art directors steered me toward a different path:
"Why don't you do
greeting cards instead?"
These two portraits marked a beginning, the first drag queens I ever photographed in 1976.
Inspired, I founded a greeting card company, InnoVisions, later rebranded as Smart Alex.
It became my creative outlet for the next 38 years. My book was quietly put aside.
Then, in the summer of 2023, my longtime friend Philip Rubin showed Chad Unger, a Deaf photographer, eight photographs of drag queens I'd taken. I had given those extra prints to Philip years earlier, and he had kept them all this time. After their meeting, Chad reached out to me via FaceTime. He urged me to finish the book.
At the same time, my spouse, Mark Taylor, who has been by my side for decades, reminded me how important this work was, not just for me, but for the community it represents.
His unwavering support and belief in the project gave me the courage to return to it. I found all the remaining photographs and negatives in storage, and
Thru the Mirror was revived.

REDISCOVERING THESE PORTRAITS
43 YEARS LATER
I realize they capture joyous moments frozen in time, when the LGBT+ community faced discrimination, injustice, and efforts to erase them out of existence.
The Stonewall riots that sparked the gay rights movement had taken place in 1969, only seven years before I watched my first Pride march.
I believe that the gay men in these pages deserve to be recognized as part of queer history. They are all gone now, lost to time and the AIDS epidemic. Here, they come alive, calling out to us at a time when we are once again threatened by intolerance and oppression.
Today, drag queens remain beacons of hope, justice, and freedom for our community.
THEY WILL NEVER BE ERASED.
Jay Blumenfeld
July, 2025

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© 2026 by Jay Blumenfeld. Website designed by Jason Wittig.

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