The New Yorker, September 25, 2000 P. 62
AT THE GALLERIES about a new exhibition of the late work of Peter Hujar, accompanied by Hujar's photo of the late Ethyl Eichelberger... Eichelberger is better known as a zany and flamboyant figure who appeared, more often than not in drag, in performance spaces in downtown New York in the nineteen-seventies and eighties. An actor, composer, writer, fire-eater, accordion player, tumbler, and wigmaker, he specialized in playing female historical figures—Clytemnestra, Medea, Lola Montez, Nefertiti. In his adaptation of the Ariadne story, he took on the roles of Theseus and Bacchus, plus a mermaid on roller skates... Peter Hujar photographed many performers and artists, [and] ...gained attention in the early seventies with a series of homoerotic nudes that influenced the work of Robert Mapplethorpe... Hujar, who influenced many other photographers more famous than he, including Nan Goldin, died of AIDS in 1987, six months after the death of Charles Ludlam and a year and a half before Mapplethorpe died. Ethyl Eichelberger died in 1990.
