Remembering Stephanie Johnson, 1944-2025

Images from Grand Central Station, and some reflections on Legends

I’ve been fortunate to spend many, many hours in the company of what my burlesque community calls “Legends.” Within this community, the term generally refers to people who did burlesque before the 1980s. When I started visiting Exotic World in 2004, it usually meant people who had performed before the 1970s. I suppose it will keep moving up as we lose generations; so many of the legends I knew in 2004 are gone now. I started working as a stripper in 1980, and as a feature dancer doing what we’re calling burlesque in 1991. I’m also on the verge of being a senior citizen, so I’ll likely qualify as a Legend, whether or not I think of myself as such, before the end of this decade.

When my community members talk about Legends, they are often referring to retired performers who’ve attended the annual Burlesque Hall of Fame Weekender, whether as audience members, panel members (the panels are, sadly, under-recorded), teachers (and the organizers of the classes, since I left, have moved on to including “title holders”), or performers. However, but all performers who knew about BHoF wanted to come to the Weekender, for a variety of reasons. My close friend Sherry Britton, who began her career as a teenager in the 1930s, was never well enough to go.

Stephanie Johnson, better known to the world as Tanqueray, became internationally famous through Humans of New York, but we in NYC knew her as Stevie, as did people in her neighborhood. She showed up to shows decked out in her finest 1980s gear, including a spectacular rhinestoned and studded cowboy hat, and she had OPINIONS. And she knew so much — she had been a top feature stripper, had worked in the fetish community dressing adult babies, and was a stage costumer. She did mentor at least one person I knew of, but overall, she wasn’t as into what we were doing as some expected her to be. And she was not very interested in going to the BHOF Weekender. Whether it was because travel was hard, she’d heard negative things about the event (it’s fair to say that some younger members of our community have simultaneously admired, and yet been dismissive of the opinions of, some of our Legends), or simply because she preferred to stand alone rather than be one of many Legends, she never told me. I wondered if, because she was very sure of herself and her value and didn’t care about the potential validation, she wasn’t interested in being part of a crowd of Legends. She was always prepared to stand alone.

When Humans of New York interviewed her, her incredible stories, featuring her trademark confidence and rawness, went viral. I’ve been promoting the history of burlesque and striptease for decades, and I’ve never seen anyone capture the public imagination the way she did. She wasn’t motherly; she represented herself, rather than herself in relation to other people. She held nothing back, and it was riveting to hundreds of thousands of people. Her fans raised over $2 million for her health care. She published a best-selling book. Her death made The New York Times.

Stevie absolutely stood alone in the level of appreciation and recognition she received. It was incredibly gratifying to watch a stripper finally get her flowers. It was especially important because Black women have so often been left out of burlesque histories, and they’ve had so much to do with its development. From the perspective of the burlesque community, she wasn’t much interested in our culture, but she was sure of her place in the world at large. It was miraculous to see.

When she passed away on October 11, she was mourned on an unprecedented scale. Most spectacularly, she was honored at Grand Central Station as part of the “Dear New York” exhibition from HONY, which Brandon Stanton called “a love letter to New York.” On October from midnight to 8-midnight, the main hall of Grand Central was dedicated to her.

I wanted to celebrate her life, even though we were never close, and wanted to share about the exhibition so that those who didn’t know about it or weren’t able to go see it could experience some of it. Here’s what I saw.

Thank you for all your stories, Stevie.

As always, I’m working on my own with no editor, so feel free to make suggestions and corrections.