Chris Harder is a burlesque performer and writer based in New York City who created stripteases that are comedic as well as titillating. His persona draws of ideas of hypermasculinity, as well as on Tom of Finland, Liberace, and The Village People. He has headlined at the Vienna Boylesque Festival, and is seen here backstage in 2011 at the G Lounge, a gay club in New York's Chelsea which opened in 1996 and closed in 2016.

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"'.