Thu 9 Jun 2016 In: New Zealand Daily News View at Wayback View at NDHA
Niccole Duval, and her younger self, at last night's opening. A primarily photographic exhibition drawn from the personal collection of one of the country's last surviving great trans showgirls of decades past has opened featuring a wall of women's flimsy underwear. Primarily curated by photographer Fiona Clark of Go Girl fame, the exhibition centres on hundreds of photographs from the collection of Niccole Duval who was a performer and occasionally cafe proprietor from the late 1950s through until the early 1990s. The wall of images of coloured knickers recalls a 1959 incident Duval experienced as a young trans woman when, crossing Karangahape Road, she was arrested by police officers, locked up and strip-searched in a method of official humiliation and harassment which was also meted out to other trans women of the era. Viewing the often intimate photos last evening, Wayne Otter, aka Miss K, who has vivid memories of the trans scene of yesteryear, says in those days it was illegal for a person legally considered to be a man to wear women's clothing, even just women's underwear. "You couldn't even be a drag queen," he recalled. 'Female impersonators' were allowable as a stage act "but on the street you had to be a man or a woman. If the police considered you to be a man wearing an item of women's clothing you were in trouble." Clark says Duval's collection is "extraordinary, very well-kept and a beautiful archive... and this is only a little part of it." The exhibition runs for four weeks at the Michael Lett Gallery on Karangahape Road.
Credit: GayNZ.com Daily News staff
First published: Thursday, 9th June 2016 - 10:08am