Black gay drag queens in the 50s
The Orpheum and Its Flamboyant Queens
[by Glenn Tkach, creator of the Really Lgbtq+ History Tour]
This is the Orpheum Theatre on Granville Street, just two years after it opened in 1927. It’s been dubbed “The New Orpheum” because it is the fourth to be built in Vancouver. Its previous incarnation was located at the corner of Granville and Georgia, where Nordstrom’s now resides.
It was originally a venue for touring vaudeville productions. These family-oriented variety shows included singers, comedians, magicians. And of course, cross dressers. There were male impersonators as successfully as female, but female impersonators were more common.
The Big Reveal
Julian Eltinge was a world-renowned female impersonator. He appeared at the previous Orpheum in the early 1920s. While some impersonators played up the comedy of cross-dressing, Eltinge took a more nuanced approach.
He was actually billed as a female dancer. While in his feminine persona, he would exquisitely perform entire song and dance routines. And then, at the curtain contact, he would dramatically eliminate his wig. His large reveal shocked audiences into thunderous applause.
By the hour he came to Vancouver, his performances had
When 14-year-old Josh Burford first heard about a local park where gay men supposedly went to cruise, he was curious if it could be factual. It was the early 1990s in Anniston, Alabama, a small town halfway between Birmingham and Atlanta. When he got the courage to visit, he ended up chatting with the men there and thinking: "Holy shit, this is a community of Queer people."
That gay men existed, and in his small home town, wasn't a revelation: Burford's uncle and his partner had been accepted in his family for as long as he could recall. Knowing from a young age that queer men could live openly shaped how Burford came out as lgbtq+ even in a time and place where doing so could be challenging.
The early exposure to a culture beyond his family, though, led Burford to dedicating his existence to preserving the history of the queer South he loved.
"Even though more LGBTQ people inhabit in the South than in any other U.S. region, we're chronically underfunded and under-resourced."
Along with Maigen Sullivan, who also grew up in rural eastern Alabama, Burford started planning the Hidden Histories Project (IHP) in 2017, and the two contain been working full-time as co-directors since 201
9 Drag Queens Who Made History
Although RuPaul began her career as part of Atlanta’s underground fresh wave and queenly scene in the early 1980s, she’s best known for the carefully designed, polished image she created in Modern York a decade later, around the 1992 release of her hit solo “Supermodel (You Superior Work),” Dr. Lady J writes in her doctoral dissertation, “From the Devote Ball to RuPaul: The Mainstreaming of Drag in the 1990s.”
Prior to that, RuPaul’s drag persona “was based off of Black transitioned sex workers in the Meatpacking District,” Dr. Lady J explains. “Her personality then shifts to this high-end ‘Glamazon’ figure, which becomes the thing that she actually can sell and promote.” The strategy worked, earning RuPaul a record deal, and a 1993 guest spot on the Arsenio Hall Show.
“There had never been a Black queenly performer interviewed on late night before that, so for RuPaul to receive that level of exposure and for it to be respectful and positive was wild,” Dr. Lady J says. By the mid-1990s, RuPaul had a MAC Cosmetics campaign, a talk/variety exhibit on VH1 and small roles in films like The Brady Bunch Movie and To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar.
In 200
DOCUMENT: In February 1994, Allen Drexel, then a graduate scholar in history researching African American Drag Culture on Chicago's South Side, interviewed Jacques Cristion, a famous female impersonator who started his career in the 1950s. The document provides a unique window on the life of young Jet gay male living on Chicago's South Side in the 1950s. The most relevant excerpts of this interview are reproduced below. Allen Drexel's research is available in Creating a Place for Ourselves)
Can you say us about yourself?
I was born March 4th 1936. I was born and raised in Chicago. Both of my parents were born in Alabama and they moved here, and I was born here. My mother was a dress-maker and my father was a construction laborer. I did various odd-jobs, coming and going as a teenager while I was in school, and then I became a dancer. I danced while I was in elevated school.
My first performance was on a stage which was called DuSable “Hi-Jinks”, that was 1951. And then, of course, my mother died and my father remarried, and then my step-sister began taking me to various club affairs, social club affairs, and eventually I began to perform in
The Popularity of Drag Balls
From the early 1920s to the late 1950s, the most visible queer individuals - female impersonators, effeminate men, and masculine lesbians - were also the neighborhood’s most popular artists and entertainers. Female impersonators, for example, enjoyed a great popularity due to the “Drag Balls” organized every Halloween and Recent Year’s Eve.[1]
Diversity and Queenly Balls
The official “approval” was made possible by the fact that the events regularly took place on Halloween and New Year’s Eve, and thus for official purposes were competent to pass as conventional masquerade balls. The first Chicago balls were also racially integrated, a truth frequently remarked upon by those who attended or wrote about them. Sociology student Myles Vollmer observed:
Physically, all types are there. Homosexuals thin and wasted, others slender and with womanish curves, others overfed and lustfully fat. Most of the younger homosexuals have pallid complexions with rather thin hair, due, perhaps, to overindulgence. There is a preponderance of Jews and the Latin Nationalities, although homosexuality is no respecter of rac