[A] dozen years ago, Vermonter Evie Lovett considered herself a “conventional, uncool mother of two.” But there she stood at a gay bar 10 miles south of her home near Putney, aiming a camera at a small squadron of men donning lipstick, padded bras and pantyhose for that night’s drag show.
“I was a fairly young and novice photographer, and I was completely intimidated,” she recalls. “They lip sync songs and, in between, do stand-up comedy. It can be razor-sharp, if not brutal. I thought if they directed that kind of attention toward me, they’d rip me apart.”
And so Lovett stayed silent, focusing on each brushstroke of eyeliner, each crimp and curl of false lash. Little did she know it was only the start of a larger transformation.
The bar closed in 2005. But Lovett’s vision lives on in a Vermont Folklife Center touring show, “Backstage at the Rainbow Cattle Co.: The Drag Queens of Dummerston,” which will cap a four-year, 14-county tour with a reunion performance this weekend at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center.
“Did I have any idea? Of course not,” Lovett says about how that first snap of the shutter — heard long before majority acceptance of same-sex marriage or transgender superstar Caitlyn Jenner — would echo statewide. “But the photographs and their subjects resonated with me and a lot of people. Of all the work I’ve done, this has captured the public imagination in a way nothing else has.”
Lovett rewinds to 2002 when, taking pictures of costumes and masquerade balls, she received an invitation to attend the Rainbow Cattle Co.’s monthly drag show.
“At that time I was the parent of very young kids,” she says, “and wasn’t doing a lot of bar-hopping.”
Lovett nonetheless introduced herself to a half-dozen men who, after working all day long at the local hospital, wholesale grocery warehouse and Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, would morph on one Saturday night each month into “Ladies of the Rainbow” with such names as Candi Shtick and Mama Mayhem.
“You don’t want to photograph us performing,” she recalls one saying. “You want to photograph us backstage.”
Amassing a portfolio over the next two years, Lovett sought to exhibit her work at urban universities. Instead she came across a blasé “been there, done that” response. She then sent a sampling to the nonprofit Vermont Folklife Center in Middlebury, where her black-and-white images of local color spurred co-director Gregory Sharrow to add to the exhibit audio interviews of the performers. The result toured statewide.
“The message outside Vermont was, ‘This isn’t new for us,’” Lovett recalls. “That caused Greg and me to reflect and ask, ‘Where is this going to be relevant?’”
They soon thought of all the rural, remote Green Mountain towns far from such progressive zip codes as Brattleboro and Burlington. The resulting exhibit, sponsored by the Samara Fund of the Vermont Community Foundation, has appeared in each of the state’s 14 counties since it debuted at the Middlebury-based center in 2011.
Public reaction has spanned the spectrum. Lovett recalls how one local gas station that displayed a “Take Back Vermont” sign during the state’s 2000 civil unions debate let her put up a poster for the show. Vermont Law School went several steps further, supplementing her work with a “Sex, Gender, Expression & the First Amendment Project” that drew such speakers as Gov. Peter Shumlin (who happens to be Lovett’s brother-in-law) and state Supreme Court Justice Beth Robinson.
“Those were the high points — when the community made their own contributions,” the photographer says.
Then again, one Northeast Kingdom church stuffed a comment box with complaints at Newport’s Memphremagog Art Collective, which itself dismissed a member who tried to prevent the public from seeing the show.
Southwest in Rutland, a resident wrote his local newspaper, “Ask your son or daughter how they feel about men dressing up as women-prostitutes. Ask yourself how you feel about the prostitution of art itself, next door to the Rutland County Boys and Girls Club.”
Lovett responded with her own letter to the editor: “How would I want my own son and daughter to respond? I hope they would respond with a sense of curiosity and an open mind, a respect for differences and the bravery to ask questions about something they may not understand.”
“There were some low points,” the photographer says. “There’s no nudity, but a number of places wanted to put up the sign, ‘This subject matter may not be suitable for all.’ I could have said, ‘I can’t have a note like that,’ but I wanted people to see this. I consented, but I wished I hadn’t had to.”
Which leads to the last transformation captured by the exhibit: The one experienced by the photographer herself.
“I didn’t think I had much in common with someone who dressed as a drag queen, but I emerged wishing I had more in common — more guts to explore a different facet of myself, to be courageous and outrageous, to write my own life story rather than follow a prescribed path that I feel I ‘should’ walk,” she writes in an artist’s statement on the website for the Vermont Folklife Center.
For Lovett, the show isn’t about “male” or “female” but instead about living every moment fully human. A dozen years and 14 counties later, she’s still a woman, wife, mother and introvert more comfortable behind the camera than in front of it. But she’s also more aware and less afraid.
“My time with the Ladies has prompted me to ask myself: How can I achieve that degree of freedom of expression in my own life?” she caps her artist’s statement. “So, here’s my promise to you, Ladies: I commit to following your example. I commit to forging ahead and doing what I love, being who I truly am, even if it isn’t what I think society expects of me.”
The exhibit, now on display at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center through June 21, will feature a live performance by the Ladies of the Rainbow this Saturday, June 13, at 8 p.m., with ticket information available on the museum’s website.
“The Ladies will continue performing,” Lovett says, “and I made friends that I will have for the rest of my life, but this particular journey is going to end. At least I think …”
The “conventional, uncool mother of two” marvels at society’s increasingly liberated attitudes, be it Ireland’s recent vote for same-sex marriage or Jenner’s own photographic splash on the cover of Vanity Fair. (Lovett’s show, for its part, was invited to a LGBT Pride event in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.) Yet while 88 percent of her Vermont tour’s written comments were positive, the remaining 12 percent were negative.
“It’s a real gift to have been immersed in this over the last decade because it’s such a pivotal time of change, and yet we’re not all there,” the photographer concludes. “There is still work to do. We need to continue to evolve — but it’s going in the right direction.”
Kevin O’Connor, a former staffer of the Rutland Herald and Barre-Montpelier Times Argus, is a Brattleboro-based writer. Email him at kevinoconnorvt@gmail.com.