John D'Emilio: drag and street fairy life; Chicago, 1965-1970
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This essay appeared in the Windy City Times under the headline: xxxxx. Copyright (c) by John D'Emilio 2008. All rights reserved.
In 1963, as a high-school sophomore, I saw my first Broadway play. Afterwards, strolling through Manhattan's theater district with my friends, I also saw my first homosexuals: three young men, thin as toothpicks; with long teased hair; their fingers fluttering; mascara, rouge and powder on their faces. I couldn't take my eyes off them. Their appearance thrilled and terrified me.
In the 1960s, before rainbow flags and equal signs on SUV bumpers, gay and lesbian visibility came primarily through gender bending. Occasionally, queerness might attach to an individual in the public eye. Bayard Rustin's arrest on sex charges was widely publicized. Allen Ginsberg's sexually explicit poetry provoked outrage. Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo played roles that suggested lesbianism but that's because they wore men's clothes. Lesbian moviegoers might hope that, maybe, they were lesbians in real life. I'll never know whether the young men I saw that day in 1963 were gay. But crossing gender boundaries – especially through dress and hair style – was so closely tied to homosexuality that it didn't matter. I saw them and I knew: they were what I felt I was. I came back to Times Square many times, hoping to find someone else who was queer. Eventually, I did. Those street fairies, as they were widely termed in those days, helped me discover gay life.
My experience was not unique. Recalling her days in New York in the 1950s, Joan Nestle, a founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, has written that butch-femme couples “made lesbians culturally visible.” She describes these couples, who “often provoked rage” when they appeared on the streets, as models of courage. Histories of lesbian life in San Francisco, Detroit, and Buffalo all make the same point.
Esther Newton's Mother Camp
We don't have a book-length account of lesbian life in Chicago in the decades before Stonewall. But we are blessed with a richly detailed study of the culture of drag performance and street fairy life. Esther Newton, who is one of the great figures in contemporary queer studies, was a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Chicago when she decided to do her dissertation on a gay topic. Mother Camp, the book she produced a generation ago, was based on field work in Chicago and Kansas City in 1965 and 1966.
“Drag,” Newton wrote then, “symbolizes gayness.” She described drag as “an open declaration, even celebration, of homosexuality.” Those who cross-dressed, she argued, were effectively saying “I'm gay, I don't care who knows it; the straight world be damned.”
When Newton made her observations, drag was a big part of gay bar life in Chicago. In 1966, seven gay nightspots had full-time drag shows, employing roughly thirty performers. At a time when much of Chicago life was racially segregated and Martin Luther King, Jr. was planning massive protests, many of these performers were African Americans. Drag shows packed in patrons on weekends; 200 or more might press into the space. Some bars with drag shows were located near each other, and the crowds moved back and forth during an evening in order to catch all the shows. The experience helped create a sense of community.
