Dressing in drag was illegal in the 1950s. But they did it anyway.
Meet the underground drag queens of New York City.
Meet the underground drag queens of New York City.
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TVTranscript
00:00People have changed. There's been an acceptance level, I think, among people for the community that we're in now.
00:08I will be 85 on the 5th of July this year. I'm lucky that I have features that have held up, but we all get old.
00:33I look at pictures of myself from when I was in my 20s and 30s, and I go, damn, I look good.
00:38I didn't come into New York until the early 60s, and I worked in a nightclub down in the village, the 82 Club.
00:45It was Mafia run, and we were very well protected. We did actually three shows a night.
00:51If you dressed as a woman and you got stopped, you had to have two pieces of male clothing on.
00:57I've been on the street in New York with Brandy Alexander in front of Macy's.
01:02We were both in drag, went up to a police officer to ask directions just to see if we would be read, and we weren't read.
01:09So we felt, all right, kids, we got it here. We're looking real.
01:13And sometimes that's all people want to do. They just want to go out and be accepted somewhere, not be questioned.
01:19I dressed up when I was, oh my God, I was probably 11 or 12 years old.
01:29My brother put on my daddy's hat and my daddy's clothes, and I drew a mustache on him.
01:34And I put on my mother's hat and my mother's dress, and we just played in the yard.
01:38I mean, it was just perfectly normal.
01:40I have been very fortunate all my life because I've never, knock on wood,
01:45I've never had a lick of trouble in my life about my lifestyle.
02:04And this is me. I'm naked here. Don't turn me over.
02:10We have a government that had been trying to actively erase this history from the 50s.
02:14I think there's a huge misconception that if you were queer in the 50s, you lived this closeted life and you were sad and you were depressed,
02:23or you had a wife and kids at home and you were in the closet. That was not true. That was not the case.
02:30And when we started doing the research and realized how little there was on this decade,
02:35we did our best to try to reconstruct that decade through the stories of the people who actually lived it.
03:05Dear Reno, Saturday night I decided to go to the Cork. New York is very hot. Cops all over. They have to be careful.
03:14The thing about the letters were they were very vague. We didn't have return addresses.
03:18We had drag names, you know, because if in case, you know, a lot of these young queens lived with their parents.
03:25So if they were to find the letters, they could be like, oh, that's not me. That's Gigi, you know.
03:30So the process really came down to trying to find as much information as we could get,
03:35starting our own research and then ultimately hiring a private investigator.
03:48I think we as the older gay men have helped make some of this progression because we've stood up for our rights.
03:56We as gay men went to City Hall and said, we want to franchise for our balls, our gay balls.
04:04You have straight balls that you don't raid. So why are you raiding our gay balls?
04:09And we were awarded that. And today they still go on in New Orleans.
04:14We've lost a few of our queens in the last year.
04:17And we're just so lucky that we've been able to speak to these extraordinary people to tell this story and to share this history.
04:25One of the big things that we did, Michael, myself and Craig, is we started a nonprofit so we could raise money to help archive and record stories
04:35and reorganize archives that already exist because they are a mess.
04:39We kept finding archival material of drag queens in the 50s, but they were filed under mental disorders or they were filed under psychiatric evaluation.
04:49It was just so wrong that we've come so far, yet there's still things that we kind of need to reorganize and make right.