Lessons in the multitude of femininity from the world’s foremost purveyors of butt pads. An excerpt from Butts: A Backstory by Heather Radke:
On a hot July day in 2019, Vinnie Cuccia stood in front of his apartment building in Brighton Beach, a historically Russian neighborhood in Brooklyn where he lived with Alex Bartlett, his partner in life and business. An effervescent man in his fifties, he smoked a cigarette in the courtyard, wearing wraparound sunglasses, slim-cut jeans, and a yellow PFLAG T-shirt.
I approached the building as he finished his cigarette, and he told me about how much he loved living in this part of the city, an area where he and Bartlett could afford to live in a building with ocean views. Coney Island was a ten-minute stroll away, and the aquarium was even closer. “Our friends always ask us to go to Fire Island,” he told me. “But we don’t need to—here, we can go to the beach and come back home to go to the bathroom!
Cuccia and I took the elevator up to the apartment where he and Bartlett lived and worked. When he opened the door, we were greeted by human-sized stacks of ivory-colored foam cut into the shape of enormous, corpulent commas. An entire room was dedicated to these foam chunks, but that didn’t stop them from spilling into the hallway.
These materials were the basis of the business Cuccia and Bartlett co-owned: they are perhaps the world’s foremost purveyors of butt and hip pads designed for use by drag queens, cross-dressers, and trans women. Several of the drag queens I had watched at Iconic used their product, as did contestants on RuPaul’s Drag Race and other well-known drag queens across the globe.
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