WHO DOES THAT BITCH THINK SHE IS?

An exciting new history of drag told through the life of the remarkable, flawed, and singular Doris Fish.

Born and raised in Sydney - which he described as "the drag capital of the world" - Doris started performing there in 1972 as a member of Sylvia and the Synthetics. He was San Francisco's leading drag queen through the 80s after moving there in 1976, and was a central figure in the debate over the representation of the gay community at the time. This is where Craig Seligman, a young reporter immersed in the LGBTQ community, eventually crossed paths with him.

Drag has become a cultural and commercial phenomenon and entered the mainstream for many audiences, and this book offers one of the first histories of how drag evolved to its current iteration--where RuPaul's Drag Race is a popular mainstream television show--while also highlighting key figures and personalities that allowed it to do so.

In the 1970s, queer people were openly despised, drag queens scared the public, and that was the era when Doris Fish (born Philip Mills in 1952) painted and padded his way to stardom. He was a leader of the generation that prepared the world not just for drag queens on TV but for a society that is more tolerant and accepting of LGBTQ+ people. How did we get from there to here? In Who Does That Bitch Think She Is? Craig Seligman looks at Doris's life as a way to provide some answers.

There were effectively three Dorises - the quiet visual artist, the glorious drag queen, and the hunky male prostitute who supported the other two. He started performing in Sydney in 1972 as a member of Sylvia and the Synthetics, the psycho troupe that represented the first anarchic flowering of queer creative energy in the post-Stonewall era. After moving to San Francisco in the mid-'70s, he became the driving force behind years of sidesplitting drag shows that were loved as much as you can love throwaway trash - which is what everybody thought they were. No one, Doris included, perceived them as political theater, when in fact they were accomplishing satire's deepest dream: not just to rail against society, but to change it.

Seligman recounts this vivid era in LGBTQ+ history, giving needed insight to how drag has become the performance phenomenon we know today. Filled with interviews, letters and more, Seligman revisits the places and people Doris knew best allowing us to understand the historical markers and shifts his life encompassed and represented for the wider queer community, past and present.

Craig Seligman has written for and edited at a host of magazines, journals, newspapers, and websites. He is the author of Sontag and Kael: Opposites Attract Me (2004), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award in criticism. He lives in Brooklyn.