Rev. Yolanda

BROOKLYN — Artist, musician and performance artist Roger Anthony (Tony) Mapes, aka Rev. Yolanda, was born in 1956 in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Yolanda emerged at the end of the 1980s, between the East Village and a Radical Faeries community in Vermont.

Yolanda—trans femme gender queer actor, storyteller, singer, songwriter, reverend, drag artist— was inducted into the GLBT Hall of Fame for her activism role in 2005. In 2014, she received a MAC award, which honors cabaret, jazz and comedy artists in Manhattan. In 2015, she was honored by the New York Blues Hall of Fame.

She has taken part in dozens of theater shows, had her own cable-television show and has navigated the music world as a solo artist and as the lead singer for bands. She has taken drag, music and reading into New York schools and libraries. And a few years ago she became an ordained interfaith minister.

The dynamism of her professional portfolio is the product of an even more eclectic life journey we got to talk about while shipping some green matcha tea in Bay Ridge. The conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.

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