San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
QUEEN OF THE NIGHT
How Linda Lee found a family and purpose out on the town.
It’s Friday night, and Linda Lee is ready to shoot. The 75yearold retired U.S. Postal Service letter carrier sits stageside at the San Francisco cabaretnightclub Oasis’ production of “Sex and the City Live!” She sips her Diet Coke, then points her camera, bracing it with her left hand while she takes the picture with her right.
“My photos are steady because I use both hands,” she says, her short white hair reflecting the low light, the rhinestones on her Hawaiianprint shirt occasionally glinting. “It’s not like taking a picture with your phone. D’Arcy (Drollinger) and all the other queens like my pictures because they know mine will be steady and in focus.”
As drag performer Sue Casa executes a series of pratfalls, Lee shoots away, documenting the tumble at each stage. Audience member Tristan Lombard’s hand signal to a server keeps getting in the way, so Lee darts across the aisle to him, leaving her orthopedic cane next to her chair. Lee signals the waitstaff for Lombard so his hand will no longer be in her shot.
After the show Lombard approaches Lee and introduces himself. Are you
“the Linda Lee” he asks? The Linda Lee who posts queer nightlife photos on Facebook?
“Oh, no, I’m getting a reputation,” jokes Lee, adjusting the rainbow lei around her neck.
“You have a really special energy. I’m a big fan and I’m not even on social media,” Lombard says. Lee snaps a picture of him and then poses for a photo of them together.
On a good week, Lee estimates, she goes out in San Francisco’s queer scene four to six times, camera always in tow, earning her a reputation as an LGBTQ community fixture. Even with arthritis, a right knee that needs replacing and a twoplushours roundtrip BART commute from Hayward, Lee feels more at home in the city’s queer spaces than anywhere else.
“Linda goes out more than anyone I know,” says performer Nancy French, a friend of Lee’s who works at Oasis. “She goes to Commonwealth Club in the afternoon and hears people speak, then goes to a drag show. She gets everywhere.”
“I don’t know where I haven’t seen Linda,” says drag performer and producer Peaches Christ.
Former state Sen. Mark Leno calls Lee “ubiquitous at community events,” and says that upon meeting her, “her passionate engagement with people was obvious.”
“If it’s a gettogether or a hoedown I’ll probably go,” Lee says about her social life. “If it’s a soiree or a gala, probably not. I like my shows, I like Oasis and knowing everybody when I’m at the window table at the Cove (restaurant) in the Castro. I’m not fancy.”
San Francisco has more than enough fancy at present. Lee is exactly the kind of character that is a tradition both in San Francisco and the nightlife world: She’s original, she’s upfor-anything and she’s an enthusiastic fan. Now the septuagenarian “it girl” has fans of her own.
Linda Lee didn’t start going out in San Francisco’s queer nightlife until she was almost 70, but she’s made up for lost time. In a few years she has become a presence at everything from film screenings, cabarets and street fairs to her beloved drag shows at Oasis and the Castro Theatre. Armed with her camera, and the sunny disposition she employed during her almost five decades delivering mail on route 10 in Burlingame, she’s become a kind of community documentarian and professional audience member known for her prolific Facebook postings from events. Her photographs, tagged and captioned with precision, are accompanied by cheerful summaries of her adventures and glowing recaps of performances in which her friends are participating.
“I call her Linda Lee, plus 43,” jokes Oasis coowner and performer D’Arcy Drollinger, about Lee’s penchant for posting extensive photo collections. “That camera has been a great way for her to get to know people. Her Facebook has become a kind of community archive over the years.”
Peaches Christ calls Lee “one of those truly rare people who go to almost everything and is a great audience member.”
“I think she’s on a fixed income, so she makes sacrifices to come to things and to get over here on BART.” Peaches Christ is one of several people who say that although they are happy to offer Lee comps, more often than not she buys her own ticket. Lee says she doesn’t want people to think she expects special treatment.
“People are so nice to me. Lots of times they’ll put me on the list since I’m taking pictures,” says Lee.
The past few years, more people have recognized Lee’s particular niche in S.F.’s LGBTQ scene. In 2019 alone she filmed cameo appearances in Oasis’ production of “Friends Live” and in Drollinger’s “S— & Champagne” film project as well as appearing in the Frameline film festival trailer alongside other community celebs, including Armistead Maupin. In 2016, the Bay Area Reporter voted her Best Fan in a story chronicling the best of San Francisco’s queer nightlife and performance scene.
“We didn't have this on the ballots, but our favorite fan is Linda Lee, the retired postal worker who attends more nightlife and cultural events than anyone we know,” the acknowledgment by Jim Provenzano reads. “Despite dealing with arthritis, and living in Hayward, she gets out and about in San Francisco with an infectious enthusiasm. Always cheerful and supportive, she's also quite the prolific photographer of local personalities. Thanks for being a super fan, Linda!”
Lee grew up in Patterson (Stanislaus County), the third child of a single mother. The family didn’t have a lot of money but Lee says she found joy in school and developed a lifelong love of learning, music and photography. At 11, she purchased her first camera, a Brownie Hawkeye, with money she made that summer slicing apricots from the nearby fields.
“I wanted to be a photojournalist but there wasn’t the money for me to go to college,” says Lee. She moved to the Bay Area in January 1964 and eventually settled on the Peninsula. After three years working as a telephone operator, Lee took a job with the Burlingame post office, becoming the second woman to deliver mail in the city.
“My mother was a seamstress and she altered the pants for my uniform,” says Lee. “There just weren’t any women doing this, they didn’t even know what to call us! I never liked ‘mail lady.’ Depending on how you spell it, mail lady could sound confusing.”
Over 47 years, Lee not only got to know the families who lived on her delivery route, she also honed her memory for names and faces, something that’s been invaluable in the nightlife scene. At age 42, while working at the post office, Lee made a personal discovery and realized her attraction to women.
“I can tell you the exact date, it was April in 1986 when I figured that out,” says Lee. “But even still, I didn’t go out to drag clubs and in the gay world until a lot later.”
In the early 2000s, Lee was priced out of the Peninsula and moved to a rented duplex in Hayward, and as she neared her 2014 retirement from the post office, she began to look for other ways to fill her time. In 2013, Lee began to attend drag events thrown by Drollinger and Heklina at the Rebel bar. She immediately endeared herself to the performers.
“Just seeing her at first at some of the things we were doing, it was like: Can we be this dirty?” says Drollinger. “She’s this grandmother type, but then I talked to her and realized she loved it and was excited just to be there.”
Lee followed Drollinger and company to Oasis, and her steps into further drag events begat invitations to other performances and parties. Her everpresent camera, says friend and performer Leanne Borghesi, became a way she built relationships, frequently
sending performers or new friends from the audience copies of pictures the oldfashioned way, tucked into a card in the mail.
“She loves her notes and her cards,” says Borghesi. “She worked for the post office all those years after all.”
“She’s not going out to booze it up or pick up women,” jokes Oasis performer French. “The pictures are how she built this community around her. We love that she’s cataloging it all.”
But while coming into San Francisco has been essential for Lee’s quality of life, she admits it’s not always easy to make the trip. Lee’s right knee has made long periods of standing uncomfortable, and there’s always the worry about missing the last BART train home. Given her volunteer work photographing events in the LGBTQ community in San Francisco, her friends have encouraged her to pursue some of the housing available in the city for LGBTQ seniors. Lee plans to reapply for a onebedroom apartment via Project Openhouse and says she’s ready to live closer to the friends and events she feels so connected to in the Castro and SoMa.
Leno, a longtime advocate for LGBTQ elder housing, says that across communities, “there’s nothing uncommon about social isolation as we age. The LGBTQ community in particular didn’t always have the benefit of supportive biological family and the financial, emotional support that can provide,” That said, Leno sees “creative ingenuity, compassion and empathy” in the way many communities have rallied around people like Linda Lee when they express a need for help. “That’s what we (LGBTQ people) do after a lifetime of experiences of being outsiders. We make our own families.” Leno is planning to meet with Lee to discuss her housing options.
“It would be wonderful to be closer to things,” Lee acknowledges. “I’m a night owl and always have been. People get messages from me all the time at 4 a.m.”
Following the show at Oasis, Linda Lee is taking a few final photos of Drollinger and his “Sex and the City” cast mates onstage. She then hands her camera to bartender Meesha Lucas, who takes photos of Lee sandwiched between the performers and French.
“I think Linda is having a renaissance at this time in her life,” Drollinger reflects. “She’s sort of … infamous now, in a good way. She’s not the Brown twins but she’s one of these great, kooky people who make the community.
“She’s tenacious,” says Drollinger. “She found us and actively made us her family. Someone else could have slipped away through the cracks, but not Linda.”
“I’m lucky to have a very supportive mother but a lot of us in the community don’t have that,” says Peaches Christ. “It’s very nurturing for us weirdos to have an older queer woman, an auntlike figure like Linda, come be a part of events and be nurturing to people who don't get that kind of nurturing.”
For Lee, this time in her life is proof that dreams don’t have expiration dates. Decades after putting her desire to be a photojournalist on hold, she agrees she is, in a way, living a life she was told was out of reach to her when she was younger. “I have a second career,” Lee says. And even though she still doesn’t like asking for favors, she does admit to reveling a bit in her new notoriety.
“When they were filming the Frameline trailer, I was so excited to be asked,” she says. “So, I figured if I wanted to be in it as much as possible, I better get next to the most famous people I can. I’m there next to Donna Personna and Armistead Maupin and Heklina. I just had the most fun.”
All her time hanging out with drag queens has taught Linda Lee a thing or two about finding the spotlight.
“I like my shows, I like Oasis and knowing everybody when I’m at the window table at the Cove (restaurant) in the Castro. I’m not fancy.” Linda Lee, photographer