Drag queens have never been treated like royalty but they have been at the forefront in the battle for gay acceptance, writes Charl Blignaut
On the top of my stack of photocopies of old issues of the Golden City Post filed away in the Gay and Lesbian Archive of South Africa (Gala) is a particularly freaky photograph.
The year is 1956 and the smudgy page 12 picture features two coloured drag queens masked for a ball. The younger, wearing an elegant hooded cape and evening frock, helps a fossilised old dear in mortuary drag on to a Cape Town pavement. The caption: “Two moffies, one still near the beginning of her tragic life and the other towards the end of it, arrive at the ‘drag’ in a taxi.”
In the accompanying story, a Post journalist is granted exclusive access to the “moffie drag”, coming away from the experience distinctly traumatised. He describes the fake women as “tired butterflies” whose “powder-heavy faces” add to the “grotesqueness of everything”.
Though his initial genital panic subsides, he becomes bewildered by the copious amounts of alcohol being consumed and by the flashing lights. Finally he becomes depressed by two “bitter spinsters” in the corner who, despite “the frenzy of longing” in the dingy club, can’t attract a suitor.
As a study in straight meets queer and media meets subculture, the story is no less revealing than the copy of Julian Fleisher’s 1996 guidebook The Drag Queens of New York that’s lying next to my Golden City Post stories. Claiming the cover of Fleisher’s book is Mistress Formika in fierce leopard print, in the prime of her drag queen career as a thoroughly modern Manhattan punk rock promoter and club hostess.
How drag – in almost all major cities – got from “True confession: My terrible double life” to “Drag queen makes off with loot!” is anyone’s guess, though the media are certain to have had something to do with it.
“At its best,” says professor and author Bell Hooks in Fleisher’s book, “Drag really is a form of radical play that can test the boundaries of gender and challenge outmoded social norms.” At its worst, as most of us know, it’s fancy dress.
Let it be said right away that a cursory paging through the newspaper reports and personal histories collected by Gala in Johannesburg reveals a tendency towards the latter. Pretty, yes. Witty, yes. Gay, sure. Just not too often all in the same person.
Still, good or bad, Neurotic Nellie or Donna Summer, theatre queen or pre-op prostitute, South Africa’s drag queens and kings have, like everywhere else in the world, traditionally been the most visible members of the country’s gay and lesbian community – and in so doing have been a social lightning rod. Under apartheid, of course, the voltage was higher.
By the mid-1950s, when the Post attended its first “moffie drag” and also published the life story of lesbian gangster drag king Gertie Williams, writes Mark Gevisser in Defiant Desire, “the public image of homosexuals swung between two stereotypes: the child molester and the drag queen …”
It was really only in the 1960s that Cape Town’s drag queens would demand a voice.
“Publicity for us is never good,” said Queen Rita to the Golden City Post in 1959, “but there are times when the truth should be told and it seems that time has arrived.” Queen Eartha Kitt, the reigning moffie queen of Cape Town, had been stabbed to death at a party and “Moffies mourn murdered queen” was front page news.
The real story for the Post, though, would be drag competitions like the battle for Eartha Kitt’s throne and subsequent battles up until the mid- 1960s. Elderly Ada Garcia was sneaked in as the new queen to replace Queen Eartha and the Post reported: “Young moffie rebels declare war”. Said rebels proceeded to crown their own queen for a new generation – Queen Milly Perkins (16) of District Six.
Milly would never gain as much press attention as the likes of Kewpie Doll, Doris Day, Piper Laurie or Kay Kendall, though, and by now the Post’s sister publication Drum was also dishing the drag.
Cross-dressers in South Africa, writes Edwin Cameron in Defiant Desire, could be – and were – prosecuted under an obscure statute prohibiting disguises. As arrests were made, Drum and the Post told the stories, sometimes with surprising sympathy. Like the tale of lovely model Lena Sibiya (29), who won the 1963 Johannesburg Mannequin Contest only to be exposed as a man after being “arrested in Yeoville while sipping a cool drink with friends”.
Lena, described by a doctor in the story as a “one in a million freak”, puts her case for transvestism calmly and dispassionately and is stylishly photographed near the bustling Carlton Hotel downtown.
The doctor’s figures were steadily proven inaccurate as more and more swish drag queens and passing prostitutes in Johannesburg and Cape Town were made to appear in court. In 1965, for example, Drum profiled Soweto hairdressers Sonia and Edna, who responded to charges of masquerading as women by appearing in court resplendent in Third World Chanel chic and high hair.
Drag queens, it was becoming clear, were more than just freaks or substitute wives to miners, prisoners and paying customers. Try telling that to the police, though. Following the now-famous 1966 Forest Town raid in Johannesburg – a private party that led to the arrest of 341 gay men and nine drag queens, including lovely society hostess Michelle Bruno – the police set about preparing a report on homosexuality for proposed tightening of anti-homosexuality laws.
The report includes winners like: “Queers usually occupy flats that they keep very neat and furnish fashionably … All true homosexuals drink excessively,” and “The older members of the queers derive pleasure in getting an attractive young man dressed as a female. The latter then performs a vulgar ‘striptease’, thus satisfying the onlookers sexually.” Still fashion- conscious child molesters.
When, in New York, drag queens and rentboys led the 1969 Stonewall Riot, in South Africa the disco scene was only emerging and it would be in the 1980s that Johannesburg clubs like The Dungeon, Zipps and Mandy’s would be raided and cause the gay community to fight back, with figures like Johannesburg’s premier loud drag Granny Lee up front.
By then, though, drag queens in South Africa, in a blur of Hollywood meets hi- energy, were already becoming pop culture commodities – at least according to journalists like James Burt. He dismisses a 1984 drag show at Zipps as “a tiresome attempt at entertaining the overbearing non-gay clientele who goggle at the gay parade every Friday night”.
Although there is a danger that drag can become a way of putting gay freakishness on parade to entertain the straights, it can also uncompromisingly inject gay style into the mainstream.
Pieter-Dirk Uys has taken his finest creation, Evita Bezuidenhout, to theatres around the world, to embassies and on the election trail; the Countess Coral von Reefenhausen, created by Edwin van Wyk, entertains and educates corporations through highly paid industrial theatre. Dainti Delischia makes guest appearances at openings and restaurants. Names like Viagra Falls, Shirley Bassey and the Leoness have become staples of the urban nightlife, and transvestism is a part of township life – a way of expressing new sexual options.
The all-African Miss Thandi, once funded by the Dutch cultural attach, is the only star able to do local standards such as The Click Song, and will be flying home from Amsterdam to do her Miriam Makeba impersonations at the Pride afterparty.
It’s a far cry from the first all-male drag revues that, according to the archives, emerged in army variety shows under conscription.
Although gay life is becoming accepted in the townships (Miss Glow is being held in Sebokeng on September 23) and Ru Paul has rocketed up the charts, and although Madonna was taught to vogue by Harlem drag queens and local artist Steven Cohen has incorporated monster drag in his award- winning art work, it has taken South Africa’s drags another decade to come to be regarded as artists and entertainers, let alone foot soldiers in the gender debate.