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"There Was A Light In Her:" New Haven Mourns Bubbles, An LGBTQ+ Legend

Lucy Gellman | November 1st, 2024

Culture & Community  |  LGBTQ  |  Arts & Culture  |  New Haven Pride Center  |  Arts & Anti-racism  |  Trans rights

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Bubbles closes out a drag show on the New Haven Green, part of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, in June 2021. Lucy Gellman File Photo.

A mother, mentor, fashion designer, fierce “artivist” and queer Connecticut icon has taken her final bow on New Haven’s earthly stage. Now, it’s on community members to keep her torch burning brightly—and to vote like their lives depend on it, because they do.

If she had made it to next week, she would have expected nothing less.

That’s how friends, family, and members of the city’s LGBTQ+ community are remembering Tia Lynn Waters or “Bubbles,” a beloved drag queen, trans rights activist, multimedia artist, and community cheerleader who died Monday morning at the age of 56. Known and loved by hundreds, Waters was an LGBTQ+ trailblazer and a trend-setter, creating space for Black trans women before the city even had the language for it.

“She was my baby,” said her mother, Lynn Waters, in a phone call Wednesday afternoon. “She always had a smile on her face. You couldn't take her anywhere without her stopping to talk to people—you couldn’t walk a block without her stopping. She loved people. If somebody asked her, she would go and help them.”

“I always called her my fairy godmother,” said Tiana Maxim, a New York-based drag performer who became close with Bubbles during her time at the University of New Haven over a decade ago. “I always had her to lean on, to make me feel powerful. She had all the best advice, always, and I know I have really big shoes to fill. Knowing that she’s gone is almost like her telling me, ‘I know you’re ready.’”

A lifetime of tenacity, profound kindness and resilience started the moment Bubbles entered the world, a bright and contemplative ball of creativity born in June 1968. In the U.S., the term transgender was neither recognized nor accepted; it would be a year before Marsha P. Johnson made history at the Stonewall Inn. The country had three decades to go before Pride Month gained national recognition.

And yet, when a doctor made an offhand comment about how beautiful and feminine Waters’ baby seemed, it just instinctively felt right.

As a child, Bubbles was a curious and quiet learner, most at home when she was experiencing the world through visual art. When she found out that she could express herself through drawing, something clicked. That sometimes made it hard at home, Lynn Waters remembered: Bubbles’ father and older brother both loved sports, and expected that she would too. When she didn’t, her mom became her fiercest advocate and cheerleader. 

“They made it extremely hard for her,” Waters remembered Wednesday. “She said, ‘I don’t want somebody hittin’ on my body!’ I said, ‘You make your own decisions!’”

Instead of the sports field, her passion led her to the then-nascent Educational Center for the Arts (ECA), where she flourished under the tutelage of artist Anna Broell Bresnick, who was leading the visual arts department at the time (“they really brought out what she could do,” Lynn Waters recalled). ECA became her launchpad to New York City, where she studied design at the Parsons School of Design and the Fashion Institute of Technology. During that time, she also began her long career in drag performance, first at a Christopher Street bar called Two Potato and later at the Manhattan spot Lips.

For decades afterwards, New Haven was blessed with her work as a designer, with fashionable fits that ranged from long, silky dresses with plunging necklines to soft, cowl neck sweaters that folded just so when the wearer lifted their arms.   

When Bubbles finished school in the 1990s, she moved back to New Haven, where she’d spent the bulk of her childhood. By then, she was also performing drag, largely in venues that no longer exist in New Haven and Hartford. Before each show, she would methodically design and sew each costume, just as she did until the end of her life. It was part of the process of becoming unapologetically herself.

“She had this one dress, this white dress that had feathers coming out the sides,” Lynn Waters recalled Wednesday. “They [Bubbles and fellow queens] were walking on Chapel Street to where they were going to have a show, and it stopped traffic.”

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Bubbles and Laiylah Alf Aw Laiylah at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas in June 2022. Lucy Gellman File Photo.

She may not have known it then, but she was making a way for hundreds of queer and trans young people (and adults who weren’t yet out) who came after her. Designer Andrew Rubenoff, whose knack for transforming spaces spans decades of past and present city history, remembered working with her during those years, in the 1990s and into the early 2000s. After meeting her on Chapel Street, the two remained friends through the end of her life.

“No one understood it [being trans] at that point,” he remembered. And yet, she never allowed any judgment to stop her from being who she was. She charmed his clients, who loved her universally. Surprised and delighted by this new artist in his life, Rubenoff offered her full access to his warehouse, where she breathed new life into old bolts of fabric, long-forgotten props and knick-knacks that became glorious costume pieces.

Her vision, and her talent, never ceased to amaze him. “I would sometimes see her doing a drag performance using fabric I had bought for a Bar Mitzvah,” he said with a laugh.

“There was a light in her,” he added, remembering a Halloween benefit at which she performed in the early 1990s. Leading up to the event, which supported the then-in-progress Yale New Haven Children’s Hospital, the two had turned an empty building into a haunted house, with a ghoulish kind of nightclub at its center. During a final performance, Bubbles emerged from a coffin with a crown of wires and lit votive candles on her head.

Around her, several other performers were singing “A Pretty Ghoul Is Like A Tragedy,” to the tune of Irving Berlin’s “A Pretty Girl Is Like A Melody.” Bubbles, who had made it through a narrow hallway, up through the coffin, and down from the stage without setting the place on fire, was in her element. The crowd went wild.

“Even when she was discouraged, she had a lot of fortitude, and she found a way to express herself creatively,” he said. “She was a force of nature. For someone to become well known in New Haven, that's not a remarkable thing, because New Haven’s a small town. But the fact that all of her life, she found a way to create things, to make things … I think she was a very strong, generous person and I think that’s why people were drawn to her.”

“She always tried to help everybody else. That’s why people tried to help her.”

Those years, which saw the beginning of the HIV/AIDS epidemic (of which New Haven was Connecticut’s epicenter), also marked a distinct chapter of Bubbles’ fierce and often tireless advocacy in and for the LGBTQ+ community. While she hadn’t been particularly political as a young adult, Lynn Waters said, “some of her friends ended up being murdered or hurt,” and it flipped a switch somewhere inside of her. Already a visible member of the LGBTQ+ community—which was and is a form of resistance—she began to advocate for trans rights, one of few New Haveners to do so at the time.

It was a transformative time to do so. Around her, the city’s LGBTQ+ scene was continuing to shift and change and blossom, including the formation of the New Haven Pride Center in May 1996. That November, the organization opened on 1 Long Wharf Dr., its first home before 12 years at 50 Fitch St. and five at 114 Gilbert Ave. in West Haven. Years later, its 84 and 50 Orange St. offices became her second home, where she poured herself into board leadership and the Center’s long-running Rainbow Elders support group.

John Allen, founder of the Pride Center, said he doesn’t recall seeing her at early events, including a visit from Stonewall royalty Sylvia Rivera in 2000. But about a decade ago, he began hearing her name as she became an integral part of the Center’s programming and an increasingly visible part of LGBTQ+ New Haven and Connecticut. In an email Friday, he described her as “a force.”

In those years, Bubbles was also thrilled to see a national recognition of LGBTQ+ Pride for the first time in the country’s history (while Pride marches began in 1970, Pride Month did not gain national recognition until 1999, during Bill Clinton’s presidency). From the moment she could attend Pride festivities, she did, first in New York City and then in New Haven, where they began on the New Haven Green in 1998. That they took place during her birth month was an added cause for celebration.

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Tia Lynn Waters, more affectionately known as Bubblicious or Bubbles, at a Trans Day of Remembrance observance at the New Haven Pride Center in 2019. “There are so many girls that could be my sisters, my aunts, my cousins … who are not here because people think that we are not worthy of life,” she said at the time. “We need to be as visible as possible. We need to be as vocal as possible.” Lucy Gellman File Photo.

“She loved Pride Month,” said her mother, who attended New York Pride with her for the first time about 15 years ago. “Wherever they had it, she was there.” For years, long before mobility issues slowed her down, she rode on a float for Gotham Citi Café in New York, and made time for marches and gatherings in New Haven and across the state.

Meanwhile, her star continued to rise in New Haven, as she took several Elm City and Connecticut queens under her wide, warm wings. While Bubbles performed drag for decades, it was in recent years that she transitioned from queen to queen mother, a legend that several performers both revered and still credit with their sense of safety and community within the art form.

Tiana Maxim, who met Bubbles at a Halloween drag show 13 years ago this month, described her as endlessly present, with a kind of generosity that knew no bounds. Within a year of meeting, the two spoke weekly, with a sweet back and forth that often included tough love. It wasn’t uncommon, for instance, for Bubbles to chide Maxim for not finishing her costumes earlier, or check in on her plans for higher education. In turn, Maxim loved her as family.

“We developed a mother-daughter relationship,” she said in a phone call Wednesday. When the two talked, they would always start with the same greeting—“Thank you for calling Wendy’s, this is Keisha”—as if it was their own secret handshake or inside joke. The two often spoke of people she had loved and lost too soon, including the late Charles Todd and a drag daughter, Ebony Sierra Jade.

“To see her fearlessness in all these years is just really inspiring,” Maxim said. As they became close, Bubbles also told Maxim—a fellow Black trans woman, in a state where few Black trans women were raising their voices—that it was on her to continue that legacy. She didn’t take it lightly.

“Her body wouldn’t have let her go if she didn’t think I was ready,” she said in a phone call Wednesday, pausing as something caught in her throat. Honoring her memory means “just carrying on in the way that she wanted to.”

That generosity of spirit extended to dozens of queens across the region and the state. Patrick Dunn, who performs as Ms. Kiki Lucia, said he can’t remember a time when he didn’t know Bubbles—but pinpoints watching her perform at the Robin Banks Show in 2011 as the first time he realized what a mover and a shaker she was. The two became close, checking in on each other at least once a week, and often more.

He was thrilled when, in 2020, she won an award from the Arts Council of Greater New Haven recognizing her resilience.

“It’s hard to assign a single title to her,” he said. “Family. That’s the word. Family. There were days that we would kiki like she was my sister, days when it was like she was like my mother, days like she was the aunt who would encourage you to do the bad stuff—she was all of those things.”

This weekend, he plans to recreate a drag performance that Bubbles first performed to CeeLo Green’s “Fuck You” in 2016, shortly before the election of Donald Trump. As she danced, she held a paddle with Trump’s face attached to it. Doing it on the weekend before the election—for which she thought she would be here—feels fitting, he said.

Because the two talked constantly, “I keep looking down at my phone expecting to see her ringing,” he added.

Kishorn Henry-Walker, who performs as Ms. Sparkle Diamond, first met Bubbles in 2021, when the two performed together during the International Festival of Arts & Ideas. In the same years, they overlapped on the board of the New Haven Pride Center. In both capacities, Henry-Walker was struck by how devoted to, and aware of, Bubbles always was of those around her.

“She would reach out and say, ‘Is the food pantry stocked? What do you all need?’” Henry-Walker recalled. “I saw her as the glue between our community and a lot of our nonprofits.”

It also touched the New Haven Pride Center, where she was a board member and active leaderin the Rainbow Elders support group, many times over. Even as Bubbles slowed down—the last years of her life included dialysis, chronic pain, and challenges with her mobility and her vision—she kept showing up, not only attending LGBTQ+ events but also organizing and facilitating them, weaving her artwork into everything she did. This year, she was a speaker at the Center’s LGBTQ+ youth conference, where she had the chance to both educate youth and meet keynote speaker Big Freedia.

Pride Center Executive Director Juancarlos Soto, who began his tenure during a tumultuous leadership transition last year, stressed the importance of advocacy and leadership as people honor her memory. So too did fellow Rainbow Elder Paul Nadziejko, who was close with both Bubbles and her mother through a mutual friend who was also a drag queen.

“She was a community member, a board member, a caretaker within the community, and someone who shared her art, and her way of looking at life,” Soto said. “It’s sad to not have that here, but it’s up to us now.”

Part of that charge, he and others added, is holding fast to Bubbles’ legacy of leadership and civic engagement (Or as she said many times, “Just don’t sleep on what is going on.”). For years, Bubbles spent election day as a poll worker at Lincoln-Bassett Community School, which is the primary voting location in the city’s Newhallville neighborhood. She planned to do the same this year.

“She was so excited to see a Black woman running and to feel like change was coming,” Dunn wrote by text message on Wednesday. “She’d been trying to organize get out the vote efforts and wanted to do a big drag show to promote voting.”

Her mother added that people can honor her daughter’s legacy with acceptance of the people around them. This month will mark the first Thanksgiving in years that Bubbles hasn’t decorated the whole house, then picked a theme for Christmas, and decorated it all over again. That absence is already an ache. Waters can’t imagine not wanting to be with her daughter, exactly as she was.

“The one thing people have to understand is that they may be who they are, but they need to be accepting of other people,” she said. “Everybody has their own journey, and my journey is not the same as yours, but I should be able to live it, and to love who I want to love, to the best of my ability.”