E-LIST #19
[LGBTQ] Immense Drag Queen Photo Archive of Portland's Darcelle XV Showplace 1989-2010
A truly immense, very thorough 20-year archive of drag queens and queer culture at iconic Portland nightclub Darcelle XV Showplace containing approximately 14,500 photos.
Archive is subject to prior sale. It can be ordered via email at info@burnsiderarebooks.com.
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[LGBTQ] Immense Drag Queen Photo Archive of Portland's Darcelle XV Showplace 1989-2010
[Cochran, Dale & Edie]
Portland: 1989-2010. An exhaustively detailed chronicle spanning two decades of performances and performers at Portland's premier drag queen club, Darcelle XV Showplace, and other related events. Lovingly and obsessively compiled by a devoted fan and club patron Dale Cochran, and his wife, Edie. A vast collection comprised of approximately 14,500 vernacular photographs with hundreds of pieces of corresponding ephemera included for context, generally annotated by the photographer and organized by date. The archive consists of:
⦁ 28 ring-bound self adhesive photo albums measuring 11" x 11.5" and containing approximately 10,000 individual color photos, organized by date with ephemera corresponding to events interspersed throughout. These albums span the years 1990-2002. Most are labeled by date and/or volume number, starting with volume 2, and ending at #32. Photo album guards have occasionally come loose, some adhesive has dried, and some photos are laid in loosely.
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⦁  191 packets of developed photographs, often including negatives, organized by date and often listing an event or events covered (totaling an additional 4,400 loose photos). They span from 2004-2010.
⦁ Three smaller photo albums with a mixture of the Cochrans' personal travel photos and approximately 200 photos of drag-related material.
⦁ One Cochran family photo travel journal to Germany with "The Darcelle Group" from 1989, preceding the main body of photo documentation. Includes printed itinerary and ephemera, as well as photos of Darcelle XV herself and other club regulars witnessing the beginning of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. One of these photos was reprinted in the Willamette Weekly, the clipping is laid in. On that date the head of the East German Communist Party announced that citizens could legally cross the border with West Germany, leading to celebrations and a midnight surge at the checkpoints. Includes 53 photos of drag shows in Germany, and documents a pre-trip group dinner.
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⦁ Additional ephemera such as 24 framed portraits, many of which are signed by drag queens including Snickers LaBarr, Ginger Lee, Lady Elaine Peacock, Celeste Towers, Karla Krawford, Starla Knight, and Bobby Callicoatte; two envelopes with ephemera related to DXV from 2005 and 2007; four personal paper fans, one of which is inscribed by legendary drag performer Jimmy James, another inscribed Lady Elaine Peacock.
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About Darcelle XV 
Darcelle XV is the stage name for Walter Cole, who was born in Portland, Oregon in 1930. As a child, Cole described his personality as a shy, “four-eyed sissy boy.” He married his high school girlfriend at the age of 19, served in the Army, and came home to start a family. He worked full time at the local grocery store chain Fred Meyer, living a “conventional” life, sporting a crew cut and horn-rimmed glasses.
In 1967, Cole purchased a bar in Old Town Portland called Demas, which would morph into the Darcelle XV Showplace of today. He hired a popular lesbian bartender, who brought in many of her lesbian friends as patrons. At the time, homosexuality was considered a form of mental illness, and gay acts were arrest-worthy illegal acts that in turn often brought about humiliation in the press. Gay bars were the bedrock of the gay community, serving as refuges and community centers. Still, they were often raided by police, though less so in Portland compared to other cities nationwide.
It was at age 37, when Cole, still married to a woman and the father of two children, first put on a dress. He had just met Roxy Neuhardt, a male dancer who was infatuated with Fred Astaire, and who would soon become Cole’s lifelong lover and artistic collaborator. The first time Cole dressed in drag, it took the pair two hours to get fully dressed and apply make-up. Neuhardt did not foresee how enthusiastically Cole would take to dressing in drag. Before long, Cole left his wife and kids to be with Roxy, leaping out of the closet and fully embracing drag culture.
He adopted the alter-ego and stage name Darcelle, named after the French actress Denise Darcelle. In 1971 Darcelle and Neuhardt began staging regular drag shows, with Neuhardt working on choreography and Darcelle creating the costumes.
Darcelle went on to be crowned Empress of the Imperial Sovereign Rose Court drag pageant. She was the 15th Empress to be crowned, and so she renamed herself and her club Darcelle XV in honor of that title. That pageant still continues to this day, and has grown into an international event. The ISRC is Oregon’s oldest LGBTQ organization. It currently holds its monthly board and court meetings at none other than the Darcelle XV Showplace.
With the appearance of AIDS in the ‘80s, Cole was horrified with the lack of basic dignity showed toward gay men dying of the disease. He turned his focus toward fundraising, offering his club to nearly anyone who asked and appearing at many public events, realizing that legislation was an important facet in the fight toward equality.
 “There’s a lot of freedom today that come from people who broke through the barriers. And Darcelle was one of those people. We take for granted that there’s acceptance and celebration of our gay and lesbian and transgender community. Boy, that wasn’t true 25 years ago,” said former Portland mayor Charlie Hales.
Darcelle served as a community ambassador, offering a space for straight people to get better acquainted with drag culture, as well as broader gay culture, and has long offered a space and support for the Portland LGBTQ community.
According to a 2007 article in The Oregonian, Darcelle’s club “remains the epicenter of Portland's drag scene, a safe haven for tourists and suburbanites who want to cross the pink line for a Vegas-style revue featuring men dressed like dancing showgirls. And Darcelle is still the gay community's most visible ambassador to mainstream Portland, hosting charity events, riding in Rose Festival parades and hobnobbing with mayors.”
Today, Darcelle XV Showplace is officially the longest running drag show in the United States. Darcelle XV is a legendary figure in the Pacific Northwest LGBTQ scene, and at age 89 is the oldest American drag queen. Both Darcelle and her Showplace are institutions honored by the city of Portland.
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ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHERS
Husband and wife Dale and Edie Cochran—friends, devoted fans and regular patrons of the Darcelle XV Showplace—took it upon themselves to photographically document performances at the Showplace for their own private record, resulting in this massive trove spanning a twenty-year period.
According to Edie’s 2017 obituary, “In 1989 she and Dale travelled with their good friends, Darcelle XV and company, to Europe, zigzagging through several countries and arriving in Berlin just as the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. A piece of the Wall now graces their walls.”
And this is where this archive begins.
How long either had known Cole or been attending his club is unknown to us, but the first extant ring-bound binder of photos dedicated solely to Darcelle XV (following the 1989 Germany trip album), is dated March 1990 to July 1990.
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Drag shows are documented with occasional notes on the verso or small stickers identifying performers, dates, and routines. Flyers for events or score cards from competitions such as the La Femme Magnifique International Competition or Dorky Dora and the House of Assholes Awards are carefully bound in and interspersed, corresponding with photographs of the events. Either Dale, Edie, or both were often photographing multiple shows a week, getting to know the performers, and meticulously assembling a thorough record chronicling events and people at the club as only the truly obsessed could do.
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Along with the staggering amount of dynamic photos of drag  queens on stage—a performance genre that lends itself to visual representation, to put it mildly—the Cochrans documented some of the revealing minutiae of the pageantry at the club such as the elaborate birthday cakes given to performers and regulars. They documented the various masks worn, the gowns, costumes, set design, the group dance numbers, and themes that reappear throughout the photos like characters in and of themselves—as well as the funerals and obituaries of the performers who died, weddings and bachelorette parties, drag kings, Darcelle's appearances at the annual Rose Parade or at events in Lincoln City, Oregon or a "junk art" show or "Peacock in the Park" show or the local Gay Pride parade... They captured it all.
And they assembled it in a clearly-labeled, sequential way that make this collection read like a readymade archive. If an event happened at Darcelle XV Showplace from roughly 1990 to 2008, odds are it can be found documented in this collection. The same thing goes for the performers and their fashions.
This archive captures Portland gay life during a pivotal period when drag emerged from gay subculture to become widely accepted as part of American life. It's an educational resource as well as a corpus of photographic art that only could have come about through dedicated fandom. Simply put: there is nothing else quite like it.
$25,000
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