New York’s downtown avant-garde blurred gender and shock value by 1966.

Evidence

Having ventured downtown, the New York Times’s thirty-two-year-old reviewer Dan Sullivan pronounced Conquest of the Universe “really outré which is some trick in the unshockable 1960s.” Gender was fluid if not arbitrary. A mustachioed Mary Woronov, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable’s resident dominatrix, played the galactic conqueror Tamburlaine, with Beverly Grant as her neglected wife, Alice. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1106