About this Event
Cynthia Carr celebrates the launch of her new biography, the first full portrait of the queer icon and Warhol superstar Candy Darling. In conversation with Kate Bornstein.
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From the acclaimed biographer Cynthia Carr, the first full portrait of the queer icon and Warhol superstar Candy Darling.
Warhol superstar and transgender icon Candy Darling was glamour personified, but she was without a real place in the world.
Growing up on Long Island, lonely and quiet and queer, she was enchanted by Hollywood starlets like Kim Novak. She found her turn in New York's early Off-Off-Broadway theater scene, in Warhol's films Flesh and Women in Revolt, and at the famed nightclub Max's Kansas City. She inspired songs by Lou Reed and the Rolling Stones. She became friends with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, borrowed a dress from Lauren Hutton, posed for Richard Avedon, and performed alongside Tennessee Williams in his own play.
Yet Candy lived on the edge, relying on the kindness of strangers, friends, and her quietly devoted mother, sleeping on couches and in cheap hotel rooms, keeping a part of herself hidden. She wanted to be a star, but mostly she wanted to be loved. Her last diary entry was: "I shall try to be grateful for life . . . Cannot imagine who would want me." Candy died at twenty-nine in 1974, as conversations about gender and identity were really just starting. She never knew it, but she changed the world.
Packed with tales of luminaries and gossip and meticulous research, immersive and laced with Candy's words and her friends' recollections, Cynthia Carr's Candy Darling is Candy's long-overdue return to the spotlight.
Image: Timothy Greenfield
Cynthia Carr is the author of Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz, winner of a Lambda Literary Award and finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize. Her previous books are Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America and On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century.
Kate Bornstein has been writing award-winning books on the subject of nonbinary gender for over thirty years, including Gender Outlaw, My New Gender Workbook, and a memoir, A Queer and Pleasant Danger. Shiny new 2nd editions of both Hello, Cruel World from Seven Stories Press and Nearly Roadkill from Generous Press are scheduled to launch in 2025.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Rizzoli Bookstore, 1133 Broadway, New York, United States
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