It was just these parasites who would come in. That’s what was enigmatic for me.” The pair spoke with Pitchfork about a selection of photographs from the book that show the alchemical collective at its peak: a nightlife community both of its time and outside of it, built as a haven for rebellious souls to try anything.ĪNOHNI: Marti, your camera was never banned. It became clear really quickly watching these videos that I didn’t know what Blacklips was. “It wasn’t just one person’s work, it was 15 people’s work. “It’s a testament to the level of productivity,” ANOHNI explains. Revisiting memories from the Blacklips years often evokes bouts of laughter from the pair, who quip that they spent more time making the book than they actually spent in the collective. Speaking over Zoom, ANOHNI and Wilkinson share a familial rapport from years of knowing each other, a fact that becomes quickly evident during our conversation. The book is a deep dive into a glorious, previously unseen chapter of New York nightlife, filled with essays, artwork, film stills, handwritten scripts, and a panoply of candid backstage photos. Together, they compiled enough primary source material to populate Blacklips: Her Life and Her Many, Many Deaths, a 400-plus-page tome released last week alongside a companion album of recordings from the era.

ANOHNI and fellow member Marti Wilkerson, a photographer and performance artist who joined Blacklips under the name Lost Forever, began to reassess their time in the group with an eye toward preservation beginning almost 10 years ago, but the project accelerated during the early days of the pandemic. Despite a strict no-cameras policy at the shows, the surviving members of Blacklips-which disbanded in March 1995-amassed a trove of archival materials of their own.

They also arrived in the wake of acts like the Cockettes, who paved the way for Blacklips’ confrontational performances, elaborate makeup and costuming, and heady blend of music and theater. Blacklips’ exaggerated, gory psychodramas reflected a specifically anti-establishment frame of mind in queer New York at the time, when anti-gay policies and the AIDS crisis were decimating the city’s community, and straitlaced homogenization was proliferating even among the drag queens.

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