Stephanie “Tanqueray” Johnson made viral history on the Humans of New York Instagram account. She died at 81 years old recently.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Stephanie “Tanqueray” Johnson died this past weekend at the age of 81.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
While not a household name, Johnson had a moment on social media in 2020 on an account called Humans of New York. She was in her 70s at the time.
CHANG: Humans of New York is a project on Instagram that’s been around for 15 years. It features portraits and photographs of people in New York City. And sometimes the stories are saccharine sweet. Other times, they are all-out hilarious (laughter).
KELLY: Most of the time, they are complex, complicated portraits of the people who make New York New York.
CHANG: People like Stephanie “Tanqueray” Johnson.
BRANDON STANTON: People are obsessed with Tanqueray.
CHANG: That’s Brandon Stanton. He’s the creative mind behind Humans of New York. And he became close friends with Johnson after interviewing her for a multipart series on his Instagram account.
KELLY: The first post ended up with more than half a million likes and created a viral moment for Johnson – a woman who lived as a burlesque dancer for many years under the name Tanqueray.
STANTON: The reason the story captured so many millions of minds is Stephanie is a hilarious storyteller. But sprinkled in there is just these hilarious, one-off stories about James Brown, The Temptations – all of these legendary figures in the New York scene.
CHANG: Stanton says the dancer formerly known as Tanqueray grew up in a harsh world. She ran away from a difficult childhood in Albany, New York, and made her way to the city to start a new life.
STANTON: She didn’t have a lot of opportunities. She didn’t have education. This was a very racist world. And she describes all the obstacles she faced because of her race. And so she went into the burlesque world, which is just kind of a euphemism for, as she describes it, stripping.
KELLY: In her September 2020 interview with Stanton, Johnson told him 10,000 men in New York City knew the name Tanqueray. Quote, “my signature meant something to them. They’d line up around the block whenever I was dancing in Times Square just so I could sign the cover of their nudie magazine.”
CHANG: She reached notoriety during the height of the pandemic. Stanton believes that’s another reason why her story stood out.
STANTON: During that time – the pandemic – there’s so much depressing news. I think she just came in and just took everybody’s worries away for a couple weeks.
KELLY: Stanton says it was the way Johnson told her story that captivated so many people. And the stories she told were unfiltered.
STANTON: And I think that’s what people just grabbed onto so much. It was just this 80-year-old woman who just did not give a d***.
CHANG: Johnson died on Saturday after suffering a stroke. She’ll be honored at Grand Central Station in New York this week.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
Copyright © 2025 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
Accuracy and availability of NPR transcripts may vary. Transcript text may be revised to correct errors or match updates to audio. Audio on npr.org may be edited after its original broadcast or publication. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
