THENEWYORKER,MARCH8, 2021 15
concluded, “Our enemies now have a
twenty-year imagination gap on us.”
Brooks is the only child of Mel Brooks
and the late Anne Bancroft. You can see
traces of his father in the way he under-
scores a point by cocking his head and
grinning. He dates his productive obses-
sion with zombies to an evening in adoles-
cence when his parents were out. “I snuck
onto their cable TV, probably trying to
find a shot of boobs.” It was 1985, and he
was thrilled to happen on a closeup of a
woman’s open shirt. “What I didn’t know
was that it was an Italian cannibal-zombie
movie”—a genre known for depicting ex-
treme gore and using footage of real atroc-
ities. “That freaked me out,” he said. “But
a few years later I saw ‘Night of the Living
Dead,’ and that movie gave me hope, be-
cause instead of just screaming and blood
the characters discussed the rules: ‘Oh, if
you destroy the brain, you can move on?
O.K.’ So I could start to think tactically.
What are the rules of my enemy?”
—Bruce Handy
1
AUTHENTICITYDEPT.
YEARSLOST
T
o see Pearl in all her glory, you
have to make an appointment at
the Watermark, a new “luxury senior
community” in Brooklyn Heights. You
enter a lobby with a grand piano, get
motions,” she said. “I felt more like I
was in drag as Ken.” Just before she
turned fifty, in 1999, she had an odd
experience on Fire Island. “I said to
one of the performers, ‘Something is
wrong. For some reason, Pearl’s not let-
ting me take off this dress.’” She took
the train back to town as Pearl and
never wore men’s clothing again. After
a year, she began hormone therapy: “I
would wake up and I would touch my
breasts and say, ‘Ah, that wasn’t just a
dream!’” In “Not Another Second,” the
participants each tabulate their “years
lost,” before they began living as their
authentic selves. Pearl’s number is fifty.
Ray Cunningham, eighty-three, and
Richard Prescott, seventy-nine, were
photographed together. Both served in
the Navy in the fifties. One of Cunning-
ham’s duties was to file paperwork for
“undesirable” discharges, including ho-
mosexuals. “I realized that I could be in
their boat—excuse the pun,” he said. “It
hurt, to the point where I went into the
Navy with the idea of having a career
and retiring in thirty-five years or what-
ever, and I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t live
under those circumstances of always
looking over my shoulder.” He left the
Navy and moved to San Francisco. He
and Prescott were both middle-aged
and driving buses when they met, in- “We enjoyed camping. We enjoyed
model trains,” Prescott said. They mar-
ried in 2008, in Palm Springs. Years lost:
a combined hundred and fifteen.
Lujira Cooper, seventy-three, was
born in Queens. At twenty, she started
working as a telephone operator at
the Y.M.C.A. on Thirty-fourth Street,
known as a gay haven, and dated a fe-
male co-worker. When Stonewall hap-
pened, she shrugged. “I remember say-
ing, ‘Oh, they’ve actually decided to do
something about how we’re treated,’”
she recalled. “I’m sorry that I didn’t pay
more attention, but at the same time I
don’t like crowds, particularly.” A few
years ago, she was homeless for ten
months. “My biggest challenge became
not blaming other people for anything,”
she said. She got a place on the Upper
West Side, earned three degrees in four
years, and is working on her second de-
tective novel. “I don’t think I ever came
out, because I don’t think I was ever in
the closet,” she said. Years lost: zero.
—Michael Schulman
a thermal scan, then emerge onto a
mezzanine. You scan a QR code on the
wall and download an augmented-
reality app. Pearl’s photo hangs to the
right: drawn-on eyebrows, hand over
mouth, delighted eyes. If you hold up
your phone, the portrait comes to life
on the app, and you can watch Pearl
tell the story of how she became her-
self. If this level of technology eludes
you—maybe, like Pearl, you’re sev-
enty—you can use a pair of headphones
connected to an iPad.
There are some three million
L.G.B.T. seniors in the United States;
twelve of them are represented in “Not
Another Second,” the residence’s inau-
gural exhibition. Many carry the bur-
dens of less accepting times, before
Stonewall or gay marriage or “RuPaul’s
Drag Race.” Their numbers are dimin-
ished from AIDS, and thirty-four per
cent of them fear having to go back into
the closet when seeking senior hous-
ing. Watermark, a national chain, is try-
ing to change that, by pursuing a plat-
inum accreditation from SAGE, an or-
ganization that serves L.G.B.T. elders.
(SAGE avoids the “Q,” for “queer,” be-
cause it still sounds pejorative to many
of its members.)
For “Not Another Second,” the sub-
jects were photographed by Karsten
Thormaehlen. “They gave me the su-
perstar treatment,” Pearl said, recall-
ing her shoot, at a warehouse in Green-
point. “There was a full buffet. There
was a makeup artist. They said, ‘What
music would get you in the mood to
relax?’” (Whitney Houston.) Her last
name is Bennett, but it took many years
to become Pearl. She grew up in West
Palm Beach, Florida; her father was a
landscaper, and her mother cleaned
houses. Her brothers were jocks, but
she was more interested in Easy-Bake
Ovens. She moved to Brooklyn in 1970
and got into the underground disco
scene, living as a gay man. Some nights,
she and her friends would hit the clubs
on Christopher Street in drag. “I would
wake up the next morning, still in that
dress,” she recalled. “I wouldn’t want to
take it off.”
She started performing on Fire Is-
land as Mother Pearl—a church-lady
drag character, modelled on her mother.
But something was off. “My life felt
hollow, like I was going through theMax Brooks