When Zephyr (they/them) stepped into the Eagle NYC for the first time in 2019, they couldn't have imagined that just a few years later, they would make history as the bar's first transgender Mr. Eagle. But on October 6, 2024, that's exactly what happened when they were crowned Mr. Eagle 2025, marking a watershed moment for trans visibility in New York's leather community.

At 29, Zephyr represents a new generation of leather title holders who are reimagining what leadership in the community can look like. Born in Queens and raised in California, their journey into leather began unexpectedly early. "I was like 3 or 4 years old when I got my first leather piece," they recalled. "It was just this leather baseball cap that I saw on vacation. I was crying and begging my parents to get it, and I wore the hell out of that hat."

That early affinity for leather would lay dormant until Zephyr returned to New York as an adult. In 2019, dating a pup led them to their first visit to the Eagle for a "Pup and Handler" event. While that first experience had its challenges ("Some of those pups were bitches," they noted with a laugh), Zephyr found their community through events like INTO, a monthly party that centers trans and gender-expansive people.

Now, as Mr. Eagle, Zephyr is focused on making the space more accessible to trans people while honoring its history. They've taken over hosting INTO on second Sundays and launched "Trans Invasion" nights on fourth Thursdays. "My main thing is I want to make it easier for trans people to check out the Eagle," they explained. "For those who are like, 'this is my space,' I want them to feel very easy. And for those who are like, 'I want to check it out, and I'm not sure if it's for me,' I want to help them figure that out."

Zephyr's approach to inclusion comes from personal experience. "I benefit a lot from passing pretty well," they acknowledged. "People often don't know [I'm trans]. But it does make it easier for me to access these spaces, so using that sort of positionality of like - you don't know who is [trans] - kind of opens it up with like 'we're here, we're cool too.'"

The significance of having a trans person advocate for trans inclusion isn't lost on Zephyr. "As a trans person, I can be a little more passionate about speaking on inclusion because this isn't just theory - this is my lived reality," they explained. "If people were shitty to me about being trans every time I went to the Eagle, I probably wouldn't go."

Beyond trans advocacy, Zephyr works at an HIV/AIDS nonprofit as a testing counselor and plans to organize AIDS Walk fundraisers. They're also preparing to compete at International Mr. Leather (IML) in Chicago, where they could potentially join the ranks of Tyler McCormick and Jack Thompson as trans IML title holders.

Zephyr's win reflects broader changes in the leather community. They note that title holders are getting younger, partly due to greater accessibility through online communities and porn helping people discover their interests earlier. But their philosophy remains grounded in showing up and being present: "You make up the space by being there," they emphasized. "I will belong in this space because I'm going to show up, and by nature of showing up, I belong."

Looking ahead, Zephyr sees their role as building on the work of recent Mr. Eagle winners like Pup Kenzo (2022) and Chris Kelly (2023), who have worked to expand perceptions of what the leather community can be. "I want everyone in because there are things that I wanted to do to make it inclusive," they said. "Winning makes it easier for me to do the things I would like to see at the Eagle."

One recent Friday, I walked into Caffeine Underground, a large and unpretentious Bushwick coffee joint where, on any given day, I am far from the only trans person. I opened my laptop to find more “thanks, but no thanks” emails regarding my pitch to review “The Breakdown Odyssey,” trans rap artist Ms. Boogie’s one-night-only show on Saturday, September 14. None of the city’s top periodicals seemed to grasp the importance of the event, though it was the season opener at prominent Manhattan venue The Shed.

Boogie, a Dominican-Colombian native of East New York, has been a cultural force in the queer underground for more than a decade. She has toured the U.S. and Europe, produced polished music videos, and released three albums, the latest of which—“The Breakdown,” a storytelling opus backed by Brooklyn drill beats—was co-created by a team of queer and trans artists she flew across the country on her own dime.

I was bummed that I failed to sell my pitch about the show. Nonetheless, on a Saturday night, I took two trains and walked thirty minutes in three-inch heels to Hudson Yards, where I found Journey Streams, the 25-year-old art scene maven whose Yale dissertation on queer Brooklyn nightlife landed her a Verso Books deal. “This feels like a cross between The Whitney and LaGuardia Airport,” Streams laughed, gesturing around The Shed’s lobby.

In walked Byrell The Great, the preeminent DJ of New York City ballroom, who greeted Streams with air kisses before joining a gaggle of once and future ballroom legends at the lobby bar. Among them was Gia Love, the model and singer who founded an annual cookout to celebrate Black trans women, where Boogie performed last summer. (Boogie, too, first came up voguing in the ballroom scene.)

Doors opened, and ticket-holders rode three escalators along tall glass windows to the sixth floor of The Shed, where artistic director Alex Poots has said that he aims to “break down the barriers between so-called high and low culture.” In the venue’s black box Griffen Theater, three ornate crystal chandeliers glowed atop piles of rubble.

Boogie emerged in a nude, stocking-like bodysuit that revealed her dramatic curves while evoking the surgical contexts that shaped them. Over a droning soundscape by musical director M. Jamison, a trans woman who produced much of the album, Boogie crawled gollum-like from chandelier to chandelier, reciting broken-down verses from her album.

“Gotta do my due dills before I get killed,” she moaned breathlessly, reciting from the song “Black Butterfly,” a paean to the resilience of trans women of color living under constant threat of violence. “Quite frankly,” she intoned, “girls like me don’t grow tall like trees.”

The show was stunning as much for its content—a powerful trans woman brazenly baring her innermost struggles through poetry and physicality—as its form, which layered dance, performance, and fashion into a theatrical rap set. Boogie played various unnamed characters, her costume changes providing opportunities for singer Demi Vee, another Black trans woman, to bring the house down with heart-wrenching operatic singing.

In a Nike bodysuit and kneepads, Boogie crisscrossed the theater, slinkily accentuating her hips and flourishing her hands before squatting low and dipping to the floor. Abstract yet clearly voguing-inspired, the movements were co-choreographed by Alex Mugler, another ballroom success story. When Boogie performed “Aight Boom,” some in the crowd shouted every word: “Bitches got botched now they ask for my D-R / Your B.M. bad, but I’m bad-D-E-R.”

Boogie appeared alternately strong and vulnerable, breathing heavily then snapping back onto beat. Her next character wore a deconstructed gladiator skirt and knee-high black leather boots. Wavy black hair grazed her waist. She performed “Clipped,” a song processing a break-up, while Lambkin, the show’s movement assistant, played the role of a sympathetic hairdresser.

Boogie then sat beside a male figure wearing a hoodie, dramatically oversized jeans, untied Timberlands, and a grotesque, lacquered bull mask whose expression was perpetually dumbfounded. He personified DL trade, the kind of down-low men with whom Boogie, like many trans women, has extensive experience. I reached back to hold a friend’s hand, shuddering with recognition.

“Let me explain to you why you love me,” Boogie sang to the shame-ridden trade—touching empathy for an archetype who, to a trans woman, is at best, a passionate yet inconstant lover and, at worst, a threat to her life. The Beast would never give her the love she deserved, she conceded, but she was consoled by God’s love from above, which is “bigger and deeper than anything you can give me from below.” (She gestured to the Beast’s crotch.)

“I, too, am a child of God, contrary to popular belief,” Boogie proclaimed in a cheeky yet heartfelt closing monologue, channeling Broadway in the leotard version of a businessman’s undone suit. She pointed at the spotlights overhead and cried, “Thank Jesus I’m alive!” Then, blackout.

Immediately, I converged with two other white trans women in the audience. We were all just shy of speechless, having seen our own experiences so thoroughly depicted in a way they rarely are, certainly not with a budget. Yet we admitted we could only relate so much. Ms. Boogie’s perils are undoubtedly those of a trans woman who is Black; not a Bushwick transplant, but native to East New York.

Still, Boogie’s relentlessly honest and innovative performance impassioned me. I felt called to tell my own story, which is unique yet partakes of the odyssey on which every trans woman embarks. What I had just witnessed was a masterpiece, and I felt livid that the cis establishment couldn’t see that, or at least wouldn’t give it space in their periodicals. But Boogie reminded me of the power in working with those in your own community, the ones who get it. So I took the story elsewhere.

“We are a group of people who love nightlife,” Julie J, a popular Brooklyn-based performer who notably stars as Jules in a long-running campaign for jewelry brand Alexis Bittar, tells Fag Rag.  “We are trying to change how things operate because we love this community so much that we want to see it be the absolute best that it can be.” Julie joins Carr as well as others like Marti Gould Cummings, Kiki Ball Change, and ShowPonii, who are a part of the collective’s organizing committee.

In her initial series of posts in August, Carr called out the $150 base rate for New York City drag performers, saying it was the same as when she arrived to New York back in 2010. Multiple performers have reported even lower numbers. 

Cummings, who has become known for their mixture of drag and politics in their career as a full-time entertainer over the past 16 years, remembers booking their first weekly at $125, which is still a common rate.

“$150 is a good day, especially for a drag king,” says ShowPonii, voted 2023 Best Drag King at the Glam Awards. “I’ve had to take $75 and, on a bad day, even $60. Most of the time, I get booked for $100, and I wish I didn't have to accept those rates, but unfortunately, I do. I’m constantly telling people to ‘stop taking the $75,’ but me, myself, I’m like fuck I have to take it.“ Ponii has previously recounted gigs where he was paid $100 while the drag queen was paid $300 and says he doesn’t know of any drag king in New York City that has a weekly night.

This lack of rate increase contrasts sharply with the prices of rent, groceries, and the overall cost of living in New York City, which has consistently risen. “Even when you ask people from before when I started, they always say that this was always the rate,” Cummings says.

“There needs to be an opportunity for growth,” they add. “Like if your show has been doing well for a year, we’re going to bump you up to $200. Or if the show has been doing well for five years, we’re going to bump you up to $500.”

During the meeting, New York City legend and RuPaul’s Drag Race competitor Peppermint related her own experience. 

“I got hired at a bar, and it’s a famous bar — that’s where you had to be,” she explained. “They courted me and said they really wanted me to have a show, and then when they brought me in before I even sat me down, they said don’t ever ask me for a raise. So he was normalizing a culture that I would never make more than the little hundred dollars they were giving me each week.” Others have reported bar management retaliation or being let go after requesting a raise.

Pay was a central issue of discussion at the meeting — though general workplace treatment from bar management and fellow performers also became a topic of conversation. Possible solutions focused on collective options but stopped short of unionizing or “the U word,” as Kizha called it. Some put forward the idea of establishing a fund to help out those in need after an attendee pointed out that, while people may want to adhere to a base rate that all performers demand, that may become difficult for those who fall on hard times and need whatever money they can get.  Establishing a “Drag Performer Bill of Rights” was another idea.

Performers also suggested sharing payout scales with one another to ensure a sort of uniformity. Others hope that New York’s so-called “Freelance Isn’t Free” law (passed in New York City in 2016 and New York state in August) will provide an initial wedge to open up the conversation. That statewide legislation says that any 1099 worker who earns more than $800 within a 120-day period has the right to a written contract, amongst other provisions. The hope is that the legally mandated contract will present the opportunity to add terms to that agreement, which may enumerate raises, bonuses, rights, and more.

“Because we’re 1099 employees, there’s no security,” Cummings says. “The issue is you’ll show up and do your show, and at the end, they’ll say, ‘By the way, that was your last show.’ The next day, they post the flyer for a new show they were already planning. Now, maybe we can put it in the contract that they will give you a two-week notice.”

This is all to develop something once seen as a hobby into a legitimate full-time career for more than the globetrotting queens flying across the world after appearing on Drag Race but for local drag artists as well. 

“I’m somebody that is very interested in drag futurity,” Julie says. “I am the Entertainer of the Year in New York City, and I am Miss Bushwig — I don’t say that from a place of like I deserve [it], but if I’ve obtained all these things and I’m still only being paid $100 for performing, hosting, marketing, communications, and all the things drag queens have to do — it becomes discouraging.”

My hat is off to the fine folks at The Eagle NYC for cultivating a renaissance in the historic space while staying true to its grit and aesthetic. In a time when a bastion of NYC queer nightlife could have fallen, the owners doubled down and expanded the space to introduce the large dancefloor our dear Eagle has always deserved. With this expansion came two large new restrooms, an even more necessary addition.

Any Eagle regular has known all too well the clusterfuck traffic jam that was the second-floor situation. Those confined bathroom spaces have personally caused me much dismay over the years, often sending me fleeing down to the less frequented powder room by the entrance.

With ample space to attend to one’s needs, these new bathrooms have been a relief for those needing to relieve themselves. However, they still share some of the same user errors of any queer bar lavatory. The following etiquette should be seen as helpful suggestions in navigating these shared spaces. They are by no means rules or intended to kink-shame. You can have a good time and still remember basic considerations.

1. Rules of consent do not end at the bathroom threshold. Yes means yes and no means no. Just because someone’s dick is out does not necessarily mean it is an invitation for anyone to grab it when passing by as if shaking their hand. 

2. If you are standing in the doorframe of the bathroom, you are in the way. A multitude of other people need to use this door as an entry and exit. 

3. If you are waiting for a stall and have no need for a urinal, let the folks behind you know and let them pass to use one.

4. The stall is not an office meant to be used for soirées of six of your closet casual acquaintances. Accomplish your stall goals and save the chit-chat for later.  

5. If you are getting fucked in the stall, please arrive pre-paired and pre-lubed, placing at least one hand on the top of the stall wall to let others know it will not be available for the time being. 

6. If someone in a stall can see your eye color through the gap, you are being a creeper.

7. Please do not leave your various paraphernalia on the ledge or on the floor.

8. Muscling aggressively past others is not a good look.

9. Please wash your hands and use trash receptacles. 

10. And as always, as much as you may love watersports, DO NOT LIE IN THE TROUGH!

All images of the exhibition White Meat were shot by Charles Benton

All images courtesy of the artist and JTT, New York

When you walk into a room that Cobra is working in, you can feel the magic in the air. It’s in the stillness, the silence, the audience members staring unblinking, especially the nervous white people scratching their chins. Something is happening here at her new exhibit, “White Meat.” It’s the soil from the grave of the truly evil “doctor” who murdered Black women for the sake of “scientific research,” sown delicately into the silicon formed to look like the flesh of the bastard, powerful totems. The dreadlocks, which remind you of every self-righteous hippie thinking they knew more about your culture than you, are now made to look scalped off the skulls of those appropriators, arranged delicately in a large oval creating a hairy portal on the wall. And where will it lead?  What will it transform us into? Transmutation is occurring in this room–history transforming as it moves into the present. When you experience this magic, you will be stopped. It makes you take a step forward and then a step back. You want to lean in and look closer, turn away, and lean in again.

Recently diagnosed as neurodivergent, Cobra experiences the world differently. “A lot of what’s gotten me here,” the artist said, “is overanalyzing people's behavior, body language, textures, materials, and the way these things make me feel. That’s driven me crazy for a long time, and it’s naturally worked its way into the way I’ve made sculptures.”

The detail is astounding. Using silicone, Cobra recreates white flesh. Then, using a tattoo gun, delicately colors and adds pigment to the skin to make it look even more realistic. The work looks so real, it is often jarring. Seen in the shape of a smallpox sore, the tint of a tumor, the subtle pigments of red, pink, and orange that tinge a sliver of flesh placed in a deli slicer, the carefully inlaid rubies making up the heart of a wound, the intricate contents of a shark’s belly, decorated with shells, pearls, and a Black person's foot.

 “It's to attract people to the work,” she says. “People really love shiny things. Even thinking about the gowns for the Met Gala, whatever bullshit thing is going on, all the beading and the sequins. I'm approaching my work with the same obsessiveness of making it look like it’s glittering. I usually end up incorporating that because diseases are disgusting. If you see raw images of syphilis, you're not really going to spend a lot of time there, but if some of those open sores are glass beads, it makes it a little bit easier for people to want to stick around it. You can't do too much because then you're overworking it. It’s the thought process of a painter applied to the physical process of making a sculpture.”

The detail never ceases to amaze. You can imagine Cobra’s hand carefully taking human hair, silicone, and fabric and weaving it together with a felting tool. Her art features disease, rotting flesh, cutting, pain, the suggestion of violence, and often the suggestion of revenge. Have I mentioned that the work is funny as hell too?  There’s a deep trickster spirit enmeshed in the sculptures, giggling as it pokes at your sensitivities, winking as it pushes your boundaries. All a reflection of the artist’s sense of humor.

“Yeah, I've been trying to switch it up!” Cobra declares, smiling at me as we walk around her exhibit–the picture of warmth and humility, even as we stand in front of her completely grand and dramatic sculptures, a gaping mouth with barbed wire teeth, a full-sized shark created from white flesh, harkening back to the slave ships which brought out ancestors across the Atlantic.

“A lot of my work in the past was just about trauma that Black people have experienced through the medical industry.  Now it's more so focused on the hands that created the trauma, and whiteness and the disease. There's a lot of hypocrisy in the assimilation tactics that people who are not white are supposed to aspire to–a lot of myths that clash against each other, whiteness is projected to the public as being a symbol of purity. But, you know, when you're thinking about colonization and the transatlantic slave trade, all the diseases that were brought over to Africa and to America were spread from Europeans. And a lot of those different scenarios that are, you know, pretty absurd. So I'm trying to present them in a way that still sticks to my material language, but is a little bit less about the history lesson of trauma. I think about different movies that I've seen, a lot of the silly serial killer movies.  Deranged murders.  But in a joker way!”  Clown faces hang above cream pies but there’s glass hidden in those pies, a reflection of the intensity in her jokes.  “There was one moment where I was really trying to harness some villain energy.  I'm letting that go right now. I'm in my soft boy era.”

Though it may seem like a contradiction to say, Cobra’s enemy is not of the flesh. Though flesh is her medium, there are non-physical entities she is fighting and others she is collaborating with. Her work speaks to ancestral magic, historical slave revolts, people rising up and finding the way to liberation–but also to the people who never had the chance to rise up in the first place. So many of our Black, brown, and queer ancestors were not able to break free from the oppression of their time. This is where Cobra comes in. Reaching back through history, she does a service for the dead and lets them speak through her, remembering those Black artists who were not able to be artists in their own time.

 “I think about all the artists that weren't able to produce work because they were enslaved,” she said. “I like the idea that when I'm doing my meditations, that it provides an opportunity for those people to be able to work through me, kind of brainstorm ideas through me, through meditation and science and prayer. The way that art is experienced now is totally different than it was before. So I like the idea that they have a larger audience for the sculptures that they want to collaborate with me on.”

Giving the dead avenues to create connects deeply to Cobra’s larger mission. In her burgeoning work with Black healing communities, and her widely recognized tattoo artistry, Cobra is a creature of care. Part of that growth and healing is reckoning with the past and asking the question of how American traditions of oppression affect us today. Talking about this pain and trauma, past and present, can be a revolutionary act for a Black artist. At a moment when so many of her contemporaries are interested in and encouraged to make work about Black joy, Cobra’s work strikes a different chord.

“I do feel like it is difficult because a lot of us are so used to keeping our trauma secret, in fear of exposing the vulnerability of ourselves or the people that have harmed us, still wanting to protect them subconsciously. We can also be fearful of what people that don't look like you do with your experiences of trauma. So in that regard, there's definitely a lot of suspicion that is valid.  But at the same time, if you never address it or if you continue to try to bury it, it doesn't really help to change anything.”

There is something about the word “change” that resonates strongly in Cobra’s work. She enters her cave to commune and create, then re-emerges with gifts for the communities she exists in, changing all who come into contact with them. A week after seeing her exhibit I give my friend Hue (one of her tribe and close collaborators) a hug and look at his large chest piece, tattooed by Cobra over the last year. A few days later my friend Charles pulls his shorts up his thigh in a club and shows me a piece that covers his leg from hip to kneecap, another of the artist’s works connected to me through friendship. Cobra is a connector of community, and though she may have exited her sculpting seclusion, she continues to care for the flesh of her people. Flesh transformed by her–and more than flesh as well.