With all the buzz in London about the 11th-century Bayeux Tapestry that is on display in London’s British Museum, for the very first time, we decided to up our cultural content of Queerguru this week.    So, as we couldn’t afford to send our Special Commentator RICHARD BOLTON (we are a free site after all) so we despatched him to NY with a very simple Brief: find an equivalent cultural masterpiece.  He returned very excited, so say his finding from this current century could be considered as equally important by our queer readership.

He stumbled upon Bonhams ….. the English Auction House that was founded in London in 1793... and has a base in NY, and he was so excited to find an Exhibit that (in his mind), in music terms, had a similar importance to the Bayeux. Cyndi Lauper Suitcase of Memories, Part I.  As it happens very few people know that before she became a superstar in the 80s’  she was the cash register queen at the edgy Manhattan boutique Screaming Mimi’s.

She captivated a generation with performances which combined music with art and fashion, selling more than 50m records and a making her an  icon figure in the queer cimmuinmty Her fantastic debut She’s So Unusual became the first debut album from a woman to produce four top-five singles upon its release in 1983. Hits like True Colors and I Drove All Night followed, as well as new ventures: she co-founded the True Colors United foundation in 2008 to benefit homeless LGBTQ+ youth and, in 2013, won a Tony award for her Kinky Boots score.

As well as ephemera such as handwritten lyric sheets, the exhibition features a Raggedy Ann doll from the Girls Just Want to Have Fun video and a multi-colored spotted couch that could have come from the set of Pee-wee’s Playhouse. “I did this to inspire people,” Lauper says of the show. “To inspire us who are older to remember the individuality of creativity, and to inspire the young to discover that creativity is individual.”.”

She sees the exhibition as coming at a “great time to have people inspired and come alive again” as the midterms approach. Despite gentrification squeezing out artists from the city, she says “the good news is that, because of Mamdani, the billionaires might be moving out, giving us our city back.””

The exhibition shows how Lauper’s tastes evolved . In the 90s, she became increasingly drawn to sculptural pieces from Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen, styling designer pieces with a DIY twist. For 1994’s Twelve Deadly Cyns album, she paired an electric blue Dolce & Gabbana shrug with a bowler hat that she spray-painted and decorated with feathers to match. “I wanted it to look like art,” she said, pausing by the ensemble as she wraps up the tour. “I remember that because it was another invention.

“That’s what makes it exciting,” she says. “That a young person would look and go, ‘I could do that.’”