Everybody Say Loved This Book: A Review Of Fenton Bailey's SCREENAGE
World of Wonder has been putting the cult in popular culture for decades, whether it's introducing us to the addictive RuPaul's Drag Race, which vivisects willing queens season by season, or exploring magnetic figures via probing documentaries that ask the kinds of questions queer people want answered.
Now, Fenton Bailey — who is one half of WoW, along with creative partner Randy Barbato — is turning the fagnifying glass on himself and spilling all with ScreenAge: How TV Shaped Our Reality from Tammy Faye to RuPaul's Drag Race.
It doubles as a biography of latter-day TV. With the book, Bailey describes how his lifelong interest in all things pop would eventually be distilled into a series of successful and culture-shaping endeavors from the early '80s on, leaving plenty of time to dish on events he helped create/for which he was present, and to gossip, gossip, gossip.
Of particular interest for me was his description of the origins of his partnership with Barbato — they seem to have been thrust together on the first day of film school by Kenneth Anger's cinematographer.
