Greer Lankton was a groundbreaking American transgender artist, known for her eerily lifelike dolls — some modelled after celebrities like Candy Darling and Andy Warhol, while others represented versions of herself. Her work was deeply personal, often reflecting struggles with gender dysphoria, addiction, and body image. 

Lankton’s life was as complex as her art. She underwent gender-affirming surgery at 21, and spent years battling addiction, which led to multiple stints in rehab. In 1996, she tragically died of a drug overdose at the age of 38. Despite her short life, she left behind a radical body of work that continues to influence contemporary art and challenge conventional notions of beauty, gender, and identity. 

Since her passing, her widower, designer Paul Monroe, has worked to preserve her legacy by establishing the Greer Lankton Estate in his Palm Springs home. “In 2009, I noticed that nobody was showing Greer's work anymore, so I gathered all the pieces I had – around 43 in total– and started the Estate”, Paul explains to Dazed. In the years since, the collection has grown significantly. 

Paul gave Dazed a generous tour of the Estate, pulling sketchbooks and photographs from the shelves and flipping through them as he brought her story to life, offering an intimate glimpse into Lankton’s world, and the life lessons that endure within it. 

EMBRACE THE DOLLWORLD

For Lankton, dolls were more than just kitschy objects – they were powerful, emotional extensions of herself. “(My dolls) are all freaks. Outsiders. Untouchables,” she once said. “They’re like biographies – the kind of people you’d like to know about. Really interesting and fucked up.”

Lankton’s dolls were born as much from necessity as from imagination. “She wasn’t allowed to have a doll as a kid,” Monroe tells Dazed. “So, she made them – first with flowers, then with socks. Then she realised she could bend hangers to create arms so that the dolls could move. Mostly, she just found objects like empty bleach bottles or soda bottles, which became parts of the dolls’ throats.” 

When Lankton worked on her dolls, she became completely consumed by the process, often forgetting to eat or sleep. Her dedication was obsessive. In just a few months, she could create dozens of them, each carefully hand-painted with surgical precision.

At 18, Lankton created DeeDee Deluxe, a life-sized doll inspired by drag queen Divine, which won her a Halloween contest and a $500 prize. Her work quickly began to attract attention: local libraries displayed her dolls, newspapers featured her pieces, and her eerie figures started finding an audience. Lankton’s devotion to the dolls became the foundation of a remarkable career.

Would Lankton be surprised by her fame today? “Not at all”, Paul says. “She’d be expecting it.” She always believed in her own star power, boldly declaring to her friends, “I’m going to be famous.” And she was right – her legacy lives on, immortalised in every stitch and brushstroke.

CHANNEL PAIN INTO ART

Lankton’s life was marked by trauma from the very beginning. “I’ve been in therapy since I was 18 months old, started drugs at 12, was diagnosed as schizophrenic at 19,” she wrote in her artist statement for It’s All About ME, Not You in 1996. “Started hormones the week after I quit Thorazine, got my dick inverted at 21, kicked heroin six years ago. Have been anorexic since 19 and plan to continue... Oh, and I was fucked up the ass by my grandfather since age five, been brutally raped twice, and have had almost every major organ in my body fail at some point.”

According to Monroe, much of her physical decline stemmed from an undiagnosed hormone allergy. “The reason Greer had so many health issues is because she was allergic to hormones,” he explains. “And they didn’t figure that out until after her (gender-affirming) operation. So, from age 22 until she died at 38, she had no hormones in her system at all. That made everything worse – eczema, asthma, and anorexia. She was in constant pain. That’s why she did drugs – to get out of her body.”

Her parents, devout Christians, urged her toward gender-affirming surgery as an alternative to being gay. Her father, a minister, helped raise the funds for her surgery by asking his congregation for donations when she was 21 – an act of complicated “support” that underscored the shame and misunderstanding surrounding gender identity at the time. It didn’t save her. She would endure electroshock therapy twice and several hospitalisations.

Lankton’s struggles, however, began long before the operating table. She was bullied relentlessly at school and often sat alone at lunch break playing with Troll dolls. “She had absolutely no friends—that’s also why she made the dolls,” Paul explains. For Lankton, her dolls became her friends and her way to cope with loneliness. Even during her darkest years in New York – addicted to heroin and crack, anorexic, grieving the loss of her friend Peter Hujar – she kept making dolls. “When Greer worked, she’d go into a trance and couldn’t feel the pain anymore,” Monroe recalls.

Eventually, Lankton moved back to Illinois in 1992, attempting recovery through outpatient programs. One photo in the Greer Lankton Estate, the last one of her and Paul together, shows them in a hospital ward in November 1991, both pale and fragile. Lankton’s work teaches us that pain isn’t just something to endure; it can be reshaped into something meaningful. Through her art, Lankton made her pain visible, transforming her struggles into powerful pieces that continue to resonate today.

SEEK OUT KNOWLEDGE (NOT WEALTH)

To Lankton, knowledge was the ultimate tool of liberation. She believed in sharing what she learned, refusing to hoard the information that could empower others. As she wrote in her sketchbook in 1977, “The rich just have access (to information).” Lankton saw how the powerful kept valuable knowledge just out of reach – setting prices on education, opportunities, and resources that the average person couldn’t afford. This, she believed, created a false illusion of superiority. The wealthy appeared capable not due to greater intelligence or merit, but because they had better access to information.

Lankton saw through the illusion of class. “The poor look up to the rich and try to emulate them,” she wrote, “but they should be chasing knowledge, not wealth.” She argued that those born into privilege are often raised to believe they’re superior; they must uphold that façade because, deep down, they lack genuine self-belief. Meanwhile, those without wealth are forced to cultivate a self-validation that money can’t buy. In Lankton’s world, knowledge was power, freedom and rebellion. It was the currency that truly mattered – and the one she urged us all to seek.

BE A FREAK 

As a teenager, Lankton was already drawn to the strange. She would pore over Diane Arbus’ photography books, captivated by the haunting portraits of people living on the fringes of society – “freaks”, as the world called them. But she didn’t just look at them with fascination; she identified with them. She found kindred spirits in the fragmented beauty of Hans Bellmer’s dolls and the raw, contorted figures in Egon Schiele’s drawings, which echoed her own fascination with the human form in all its peculiarity. Lankton was equally captivated by the trash-glam aesthetic of Warhol’s factory and the bold, performative femininity of Candy Darling, a trans icon who became one of her ultimate obsessions. “That’s how Greer and I met,” Paul recalls. “We were both obsessed with Candy Darling.” To Lankton, Darling represented everything she admired: unconventional, eccentric, and proudly unlike anyone else.

Horror movies also played a significant role in her distinctive style, particularly those that blurred the line between unsettling and poignant. Her favourite film was Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932). “Freaks. That’s it,” she once said. “Not even a weirdo: a freak. That’s what I’m obsessed with.” But for Lankton, being a freak wasn’t about shock value – it was about owning the things that made you different. She didn’t just admire outsiders – she was one. And in doing so, she inspired others to embrace their own unique, beautiful freakiness.

PROTECT YOUR PEOPLE

Lankton was at the heart of New York’s East Village art scene during the 1980s – a fiercely creative and devastating time. Her closest friends, including David Wojnarowicz and Peter Hujar, weren’t just companions; they were her chosen family. Hujar was the best man at Monroe and Lankton’s wedding, and Nan Goldin captured the moment in a photograph now held in the Greer Lanton Estate. 

But that community faced relentless loss. Monroe remembers him and Lankton attending 34 funerals in just one year, mourning friends and loved ones taken by the Aids crisis. He recalls visiting friends in the hospital with Lankton and how emotionally overwhelming the experience was. “We were forced to wear masks and gloves inside, but as soon as the doctors left, we took them off,” he recounts. Even then, they both knew that Aids wasn’t transmitted through simple contact.

Lankton’s circle of true friends – David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar, Ragen (who was also trans and died a year before Greer) – are mostly gone now. “Most of her real friends are dead,” Paul explains. “A few of them with regular lives, remain in New York, but the truth is, if I hadn’t made new friends, I wouldn’t have any living ones.”

Despite the heartbreak, Monroe stayed fiercely loyal to Lankton, standing by her side through love, grief, and loss. After her death, he took on the mission of protecting her legacy, establishing the Greer Lankton Estate in his home, where he preserved her work, her story, and her spirit. For Monroe, protecting your people isn’t just about being there while they're alive – it’s about making sure they’re not forgotten. “I do it for love and respect for Greer”, he says.

Today, Greer Lankton’s art continues to be celebrated, with numerous exhibitions eager to showcase her work. But her story is a powerful reminder: the people you protect and the community you build are everything. They are the ones who carry your legacy forward long after you’re gone.