This photograph was taken in 2013 in a dressing room at the Darcelle XV Showplace in Portland, Oregon, a venue on Northwest Third Avenue that advertises 'Las Vegas-style cabaret revues of Glitz, Glamour and Comedy'. It is operated by, and home to Darcelle XV, the Guinness World Record holder for the oldest drag performer.

This is one of a series of offstage photographs documenting the international scene of male performers taken by the Danish photographer Magnus Arrevad (b.1981) who is based in Berlin and London. Shot over a five-year period in cities ranging from New York to London, Copenhagen, Berlin and Paris, they feature the personal transformations of cabaret performers, drag queens, strippers and go-go dancers, capturing them bringing, as Magnus Arrevad has said: 'the dream of oneself into being'. Using a Mamiya 7 camera instead of a digital camera, gave Magnus: 'a sense of occasion to every shot, made each click of the shutter an event.' Many of the resulting photographs, that formed part of the 2015 exhibition and book Boy Story: A Picture Book for Boys,are imbued with the haunting sense of melancholy that the performers experience in the creation and exhibition of their 'other selves'. Arrevad shows how donning the makeup and costume was for the performers part of the process of removing a mask, not putting it on, and has said that working with them changed him from: 'a sheltered Danish photographer into a fully-immersed participant in the world of "Boylesque"'.