Hop to It

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Lady Bunny. Running down a street in the West Village, this jet blast is a contrail in the concrete jungle. At base level, she is 5 feet, 11 inches, and that’s not counting her signature six-inch heels and towering lemon-yellow wig, an exquisite chapeau gâteau bigger than Macy’s and gayer than an Easter basket. She is flying toward a taxi, late for a meeting, a gig, a photoshoot, a very important date. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, and Lady Bunny has to hop. You stop in your tracks to look, to watch, in awe, this rara avis. Or should I say, rara cuniculus.

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In 1983, Lady Bunny followed RuPaul, the first person to put her in drag, from Atlanta to New York. There they worked at the late, great Pyramid Club, a queer-friendly and performance-artist freak-magnet and dive on Avenue A off Tompkins Square Park. As entertainers, visual delights, and characters bigger than the biggest lives, RuPaul and Lady Bunny took off. Lift off! In 1984, Lady Bunny launched Wigstock, an annual outdoor drag festival in the East Village that occurred almost every year until 2005. (Some time later, in 2018, she revived it briefly with help from actor Neil Patrick Harris and his husband, David Burtka.)

Off duty, Lady Bunny is hardly competition for Martha Stewart in the domestic arts. Her charms at home— an apartment in Greenwich Village she describes as a “drag closet and a bed”—are actualized best in the latter or in some similar repose. “I’m a news junkie, so I love to watch a variety of news shows. Mainstream media is in a free fall right now,” she says. Her go-to’s are Breaking Points, The Hill’s “Rising,” and Sabby Sabs, all on YouTube, and System Update With Glenn Greenwald on Rumble. She likes these shows because they are hosted by people with strong opinions who speak their minds—just like herself, and her father, who was an anti-draft counselor during the Vietnam War. “My first exposure to politics was the whole family going to Washington, D.C. for a Vietnam war protest,” she recalls.

To some degree onstage—and very much so on her social media—Lady Bunny’s political-opinion posts are the carrots of genius for many, but not so tasty for some. Although she certainly was not a Republican supporter during the most recent presidential campaign, she criticized Democrats for running Joe Biden for a second term and Kamala Harris for her first. Anger and verbal attacks against her beliefs may hunt this bunny, but she never cowers. Well-educated, well-informed, and world-traveled, she is a take-no-prisoners exemplar for authenticity and nonconformity. Also, deeply entertaining and indefatigable—I’m still trying to verify that, as long rumored, she is the inspiration for the Duracell Bunny. At the moment, she is preparing a Canada and U.K. tour of her show, “Don’t Bring the Kids,” and she will perform at the gay comedy club Boom Chicago in Amsterdam during Amsterdam Pride this summer.

For the world, she is always brave and courageous. But does anything frighten Lady Bunny? “Technology. I hate it when my phone switches from audio to video calls. Especially when I’m talking to a love interest who has never seen me out of drag! Boner killer!”

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