The Puerto Rican Bombshell, Barbra Herr
Feast of Fun: Gay Talk Show
Fausto Fernós
4.4 • 834 Ratings
🗓️ 16 July 2020
⏱️ 77 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Television in Puerto Rico in the 1970s and 80s featured drag front in center with many comedy legends cross-dressing for laughs. During that time, Walter Mercado, the flamboyant psychic astrologer and bombshells like Iris Chacon became household names all over the world.
Iris Chacon was the spokesperson for Amelie Coolant in the 80s because the word butt and the word coolant sound the same in Spanish.
You know corrupt Gov. Roselló’s gig was up when even politically neutral Walter Mercado asked him to resign. Photo: Walter Mercado
One cabaret sensation who dazzled the airwaves was Barbra Herr, who along with her drag mamita, Pantojas brought lavish performances to life in the best gay and straight nigclubs in San Juan.
Today, Puerto Rican bombshell Barbra Herr joins us to talk her amazing career as a drag and cabaret performer, from fighting the AIDS crisis in Puerto Rico to working with the legends in New York City.
Plus– Barbra shares her amazing stories of being with Holly Woodlawn when she first heard Andy Warhol died, her friendship with Dominique Jackson from Pose, and what really happened to the dead man found in the chest belonging to Paris is Burning’s Dorian Corey.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | AI might be the most important innovation ever. It's storming every industry with literally billions being invested. So buckle up. The problem is that AI needs the right data and a lot of speed and processing power. So how do you compete without cost spiraling gas of control? Time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or OCI. |
| 0:21.4 | OCI is a single platform for your infrastructure, database and application development, |
| 0:25.9 | with AI embedded across it all. And Oracle's offering cloud helps you address your |
| 0:30.0 | requirements for location, access and data residency. OCI provides blazing fast speeds for |
| 0:35.5 | AI's demanding workloads, and in the cloud when you pay by the minute, speed matters. |
| 0:40.5 | And of course, nobody does data better than Oracle. |
| 0:43.9 | If you want OCI to help you do more and spend less, |
| 0:46.7 | like Uber, the Premier League, and Oracle Red Bull Racing, |
| 0:49.7 | take a free test drive at oracle.com slash bandwidth. |
| 0:52.9 | That's oracle.com slash bandwidth. That's oracle.com slash bandwidth. Oracle.com |
| 0:56.1 | slash bandwidth. |
| 1:00.1 | Barbara, you have a very sophisticated voice. |
| 1:08.9 | Like I smoked six packs of marbles a day and I and I smoke them downing shots of scotch. |
| 1:15.6 | Neat. |
| 1:16.2 | Just like Lauren Bacall. |
| 1:18.3 | Lauren Bacall. |
| 1:19.9 | My favorite time of day is night. |
| 1:23.0 | Do you know I met her once? |
| 1:25.4 | I had, I met her years ago. |
| 1:29.4 | When I first came to New York, and I still, I still was not Barbara. |
| 1:33.1 | I had a job at this restaurant as a waiter. |
| 1:37.6 | It was called Ur-Nat-Rourel. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Fausto Fernós, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Fausto Fernós and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.