text & photos. latefy dolley

My name is Latefy Pazzarro Dolley. I'm 22, from Memphis, Tennessee and currently a student at Memphis College of Arts.

Sexuality is strange point of interest for me. I think I spend a great deal of my time trying to dismiss sexuality. There is something animalistic and restricting about sexuality that is uncomfortable for me to face.

I think I have become more observant to how people interact when sexuality is of importance. Those observations have become really important to the work that I'm making at the moment. Gay culture is so strange in the way that the language used amongst each other is aggressive and places an emphasis on segregating by type. So I spend a lot of time thinking about how to define those ideas into art. That's how, where the idea of Whites Only came from. Casual racism is rampant so when I came across this phrase on Grindr, I just wanted to respond as passive aggressively as I could. I was interested in taking the phrase out of its original context and change its function by making it into to a commodity, something cheap, pedestrian and accessible.

I have been doing drag for about two years. One night a friend of mine and I saw these really cheap bob wigs at Walgreens. We bought them on a whim and I have been doing drag ever since. The reason why I become so obsessed with doing it habitually is because not only do I like the experience of putting on make-up and a sexy outfit, but once somebody told me, "Latefy, you make a horrible woman. You look horrible, you look better as a boy." I guess out of stubbornness I wanted to prove her wrong and be the most prettiest female impersonator I could be.