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When night falls and the suits and ties have all been tucked away, a magical world emerges from the darkness, setting the cities of London, Berlin, Paris, New York, Las Vegas, LA, and San Francisco ablaze as the rest of the world sleeps. This is the realm of the night performer, the drag queen or king, the burlesque dancer, the fetish artist, and now of LA-based photographer Samantha Fielding, who has devoted three years of her life to telling the stories of the world’s most gifted and ingenious underground personalities.

Base camp in the mountains © David Prince / Offset

Horse wrangler packing maize kernels © David Prince / Offset

Frozen branches with catkin © David Prince / Offset

When New York City-based photographer David Prince embarked on his journey to Bhutan, he left with no fixed ideas about what he would find, preferring instead to immerse himself totally within the lifestyles of the country’s traditional yak farmers, Buddhist monasteries, and the vast Himalayan mountains that enveloped them all.

Donna adjusts her wig before her number.

Olivia attaches her false eyelash.

For Beautiful by Night, San Francisco-based photographer and filmmaker James Hosking chronicles life in Aunt Charlie’s Lounge, the one and only gay bar left standing in the Tenderloin, a neighborhood that decades ago, was renowned for its thriving LGBT community. In tracing the nightly routines of three of its older drag queens— Donna Personna, Collette LeGrande, and Olivia Hart, Hosking traces the rich history and uncertain future of drag in the crime-ridden area.

© Food Collection / Offset

To see more of Food Collection’s work, please visit Offset.

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As soon as you see Page, you know there is something special about her. She has the ethereal elegance of Grace Kelly, married with the glittery, gender-bending, art-punk edge of downtown New York in the ‘80s and ‘90s. This was something legendary drag queen Linda Simpson noticed about the transgender performer and documented, along with the rest of the era’s drag scene, with a simple 35 mm point-and-shoot camera. In color, of course. Because if anything was ever colorful, it was drag.

Last summer, I had the privilege of being a mentor along with Liz Helman, a photographer and picture editor, on the Young Photographers’ Association program. The brief was for the mentees to explore what “home” meant to them. London-based Charley Murrell was one of our group.

Sara Hopkins is an Atlanta-based documentary and fine art photographer. About this series, Costuming the Archetypes, she writes:

I began this work as part of an exploration of myself. Part of humanity is exploring the unknown, the differences, and the similarities of any aspect of life. For me, masculinity and femininity are faux expression of the archetypes Man and Woman. I felt so strongly about this, that I wanted to incorporate the viewpoint into a very simple, but compelling work. I sought out Camp Drag performers because not only do they express the appearance of masculinity and femininity of the Archetypes, but they also question gender bending and what it means to be a man or woman through exaggeration and humor.

Romanian born photographer Alin Dragulin completed a B.A. in Painting from Portland State University. These days, he spends his time between Portland and Los Angeles, specializing in creating images that convey his unique sense of visual humor. This set of photos belongs to an ongoing series documenting the changes that occur when boys enter their teens. These portraits were taken in February 2008, when they were all aged eleven. The next series will be shot in February 2010, when they will be thirteen years old.

KARLA JAY, born in Brooklyn in 1947, is a distinguished professor emerita at Pace University, where she taught English and directed the women’s and gender studies program between 1974 and 2009. A pioneer in the field of lesbian and gay studies, she is widely published.

CHELLA MAN is a 20-year-old, deaf, genderqueer, queer artist currently transitioning on testosterone. “Every day left me exhausted as I performed traditional femininity.” Born in Pennsylvania, he moved to New York to study virtual reality programming at The New School, while creating art on the side. His main focus is to educate others on issues regarding being queer and disabled within a safe space.

Fifty years after the Stonewall Rebellion gave birth to the global LGBTQ Movement, generations have continued the fight for freedom and equality — knowing full well the moment we stop fighting is the moment that all hell breaks loose.

Consider the June 28 report of a Black trans woman who disrupted a drag show at the Stonewall Inn during the 50th anniversary celebration to call out how Pride has been co-opted by corporations even through Black trans women are being murdered — and was threatened with police action in an effort to silence her.

It was a cruel but telling episode of history repeating itself, half a century later at the very place where Gay Liberation began. In the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, by homeless LGBTQ teens, trans women of color, lesbians, drag queens, and gay men stood up against a police raid, sparking off a multi-night uprising on the streets of New York’s Greenwich Village.

In the aftermath of Stonewall, hundreds of new LGBTQ civil rights organizations took root across the country and around the world, forcing the U.S. government to change their laws. Though the war has not been won, the battles rage on.

Collier Schorr: Stonewall at 50, currently on view at the Alice Austen House in Staten Island, New York, through September 30, honors those doing the work in a series 15 black and white portraits of intergenerational activists including native New Yorker Karla Jay, an early member of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and the Radicalesbians who famously incited the “Lavender Menace Zap” at the Second Congress to Unite Women in 1970.

Here Jay shares her memories and lessons gleaned on the front lines, which we can use to continue to fight in the name of those who did not make it out alive.