Club kids

When Club Kid Michael Alig joined his friends on Joan Rivers' talk show in 1990, he wasn't the most conspicuous of the group. That would have been Leigh Bowery, the London-based drag performance artist after whom the New York club kids were modeling themselves. Bowery, a gargantuan and imposing figure, was wearing an orange Afro-style wig that totally covered his face, giving him the look of a giant with a bushy circle for a head. As he made his way onto the stage, he waved to the crowd, who watched open-mouthed as the willfully freakish crew made their way onto the stage.

The other Club Kids — Ernie Glam, a nightlife reporter for The Village Voice, James St. James, an Alig associate, and Amanda Lepore, a transsexual party queen — did their best to shock the bourgeois Americans in the crowd with their outrageous outfits and rejection of conformity. Were it not for the fact that she had begun life as a man, Amanda Lepore would have been