Cynthia Carr on Candy Darling, with Lucy Sante, Tues, Oct 8, the Graduate Center

Cynthia Carr on Candy Darling, in conversation with Lucy Sante
Tuesday, October 8, 6:30 pm
the Skylight Room, the Graduate Center
365 5th Ave., New York, NY 10016

The Warhol superstar and transgender icon Candy Darling was glamour personified, but she was without a real place in the world. Growing up on Long Island, lonely and quiet and queer, she was enchanted by Hollywood starlets like Kim Novak. She found her turn in New York’s early Off-Off-Broadway theater scene, in Warhol’s films Flesh and Women in Revolt, and at the famed nightclub Max’s Kansas City. She inspired songs by Lou Reed and the Rolling Stones. She became friends with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, borrowed a dress from Lauren Hutton, posed for Richard Avedon, and performed alongside Tennessee Williams in his own play.

Yet Candy lived on the edge, relying on the kindness of strangers, friends, and her quietly devoted mother, sleeping on couches and in cheap hotel rooms, keeping a part of herself hidden. She wanted to be a star, but mostly she wanted to be loved. Her last diary entry was: “I shall try to be grateful for life . . . Cannot imagine who would want me.” Candy died at twenty-nine in 1974, just as conversations about gender and identity were beginning to enter the broader culture. She never knew it, but she changed the world.

Cosponsored by Public Programs

Cynthia Carr is the author, most recently, of Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar. Her previous books are Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz (winner of a Lambda Literary Award for " Gay Memoir/Biography’’ and finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize); Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America; and On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century. Carr chronicled the work of contemporary artists as a Village Voice writer (with the byline C. Carr) in the 1980s and 1990s. Her work has also appeared in Artforum, The New York Times, TDR: The Drama Review, and other publications. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007 and from 2016-17, she was a Fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at CUNY Graduate Center.

Lucy Sante's books include Low Life, Kill All Your Darlings, The Other Paris, Maybe the People Would Be the Times, and, most recently, I Heard Her Call My Name. Her awards include a Whiting Writers Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Grammy (for album notes), an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, and Guggenheim and Cullman fellowships. She recently retired after 24 years teaching writing and the history of photography at Bard College.