Exhibition explores tradition, spectacle of S.F. drag
Gareth Gooch had already been living in San Francisco a couple years before he stumbled into the Monster Show, a weekly drag and performance night hosted at the Edge in the Castro. Gooch had seen drag shows before, of course. This, though, was something different.
“We were absolutely blown away by these amazing performances,” he recalls of the time he and a friend caught a show. “It was not the traditional drag. This was much more modern and more more interpretative and performance-art based. And it was a spectacle.”
Before moving to the Bay Area, Gooch had worked in London as a professional photographer. He didn’t think twice about pulling out his phone and taking a few quick shots of the performance. Or about returning the next week and taking some with his regular camera. Or about posting those photos to social media.
When he came back the third time, camera in hand, the late Cookie Dough, the event’s hostess at the time, came up to him. She wanted to know if he was the one who had been taking the photos. He was nervous at first, afraid he’d broken some rule. But he soon found out he wasn’t in trouble.
“Nobody has ever taken such wonderful photos of the show before,” she said.
Then Cookie Dough invited him to come back again. He’d even be allowed to sit on the bar for a better angle.
That was just the beginning of a years-long journey photographing San Francisco drag at the Monster Show and beyond.
Gooch is fast to point out that “drag” means a lot of things in San Francisco. There’s the dramatic and the grotesque, there’s the funny and the very weird. Women perform drag, gender nonconforming people perform drag. It’s a big tent. “Everybody was invited and included to be on the stage,” he says.
All of that is reflected in an exhibition of his photographs called “Smoke + Mirrors: Exploring Modern Drag,” which opens Friday, March 16, at Ravot Gallery. The photographs on display are rich and color saturated, and though Gooch works in the studio, too, all of the images in this show are candid or portraits done on the sidelines. He says he wanted to get at “the essence of their performance.”
“I adore documenting this scene, this community of performers,” he says. “They’re wonderful. They’re so creative. (Each photo) is a living moment in time of performance art.”