Close Encounters

Left to right: Mo B. DIck, El Daña, and Buck Wylde at the King of Drag premier, 2025.  I attended my first drag king show in 2018. Two friends invited me to join them at Spectrum, a queer nightclub in Eugene, Oregon. I’d seen quite a few drag queen shows by then—audiences packed with bachelorette parties and tourists seeking exotic experiences—but the atmosphere at Spectrum was intimate and insurgent. The room pulsed with a collective

A still from Le bonheur (1965). In the summer in New York City, every bodega you pass sells flowers, and every bodega selling flowers sells sunflowers, which do look a lot like the sun as a child might draw the sun: with distinct triangular rays and a smiling brown face in the center. Sixty years ago, Agnès Varda opened her film Le bonheur with an image of a sunflower, a florist’s symbol of loyalty. Did