Drag is forever. Histories of Gold Rush California tell of saloons in which some male patrons donned aprons and assorted finery and danced as the female partner with the other men. But drag goes back much further than that. The early Greeks had young men who wore the make up and garb of women and worked as hetaerae, or “professional ladies.” Early Native American tribes had their berdaches, men who dressed and lived as women; of course they had no bars in which to hang out, but I’m sure they enlivened those evenings around the campfires.
In the fifties there were world-famous drag bars such as Finocchio’s in San Francisco, which had started as a speakeasy in the twenties and evolved into a show bar by the forties. Most of these bars, though, were more often tourist-oriented than truly gay bars. This is an example of the sort of psychology common to most comics—if they are going to laugh at you anyway, try to get them to pay for the privilege.
Let me tell you something else while I’m at it—many of those “straight” men in the audience who were laughing so heartily were getting plenty turned on. There are many, and I do mean many, men who would not dream of fooling around with a “queer” who have no reluctance in playing with a drag queen, even though they know without any doubt that the woman is a man. We all have ways of fooling ourselves, don’t we?
Now, I am not one of those gays who believe, as many seem to do, that all men are gay at heart. So far as I can figure out, the only thing that all men are is male. I do believe, however, and my entire experience has borne this out, that many, many more men than the statistics would indicate have been willing at one time or another to experiment. This would jibe with Kinsey’s sexual preference scale, which put absolute heterosexuals—a small percentage—at one end, and absolute homosexuals—ditto—at the other. The fact is, most men are really somewhere in the middle. They are just inclined to lie about it when asked by pollsters.
And not only to pollsters. I have had one-on-one conversations with many heterosexual men who talked frankly to me about homosexual inklings they had discerned in themselves—perhaps nothing more than a secret pleasure they took in being cruised by a gay man, or sometimes realizing that they thought another man was attractive, though not so much so that they would ever have acted upon it. More than once I have subsequently heard the same men vehemently deny to buddies, wives and girlfriends, that they could ever possibly have experienced such feelings. It is an area in which many men feel threatened.
Nevertheless the old expression remains true, a stiff willie has no conscience (yes, yes, that’s not the way I heard it either, but your mother might read this); and it can safely be amended to add, not much discrimination either. Especially in the dark.
There is a story told of Voltaire. He and a friend expressed their curiosity regarding sodomy and decided, in the interests of philosophy and solely as an experiment, to give it a try together. Afterward, they agreed that neither of them had enjoyed the experience.
Some years later the friend wrote Voltaire to tell him that he had performed the experiment a second time and found it no more enjoyable than the first. Voltaire’s swift reply was, “Once, a philosopher, twice, a sodomite.”
In a like vein, Ted Morgan, in his biography of Somerset Maugham, tells of a chat between Maugham and Winston Churchill in which Sir Winston confessed to trying it once with a man just to see what it was like.
I am inclined to think that most men, at the right time (read, when really horny), with the right companion (whom they are confident will be discreet), under the right circumstances (a cocktail or two can do much to loosen inhibitions), are agreeable to a little philosophy, if only just a little.
I should probably add, however, before my straight male friends start running for the hills, that at this stage in my life I am very much hors de combat. Here is an item for those of you who used to thrill to The Shadow on radio or in comics. This is the secret of invisibility; get older and go to a gay bar. At least I am more fortunate than many others in this respect because I am entirely comfortable with my own company. To be honest, I mostly prefer it. And that is fortunate for a gay man of my years. It is as well to be at ease with the inevitable.
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The laws regarding drag were often muddled to the point of inanity. In Los Angeles, even in the fifties, it was not illegal for a man to wear women’s clothes—else they would have had to arrest Milton Berle, Ray Bolger, Jack Benny, and countless other entertainers in a long tradition of movie and TV cross-dressers ranging to today’s Tom Hanks.
The litmus test was whether the individual was wearing men’s underwear. You could be ordered at any time to “hoist those skirts and show those skivvies.” If you had on your boxers you got the USDA stamp of approval. Panties got you a set in the slammer and very mixed doubles.
As an aside, I suppose it is worth mentioning that over the years I have run across quite a few entirely straight men who liked to wear women’s panties. I’m not going to try to explain this. I am only reporting it.
In general the authorities looked the other way when it came to performers in drag in nightclubs, but in most of those instances protection money was being paid. The Jewel Box Revue toured the South and New Orleans had its “feathers and finery.” Regardless of the city, however, you wore drag in public at your own peril.
Jay Little’s 1956 novel, Somewhere Between the Two, probably ought to be required reading for any drag queen, if you can find it—it is long out of print, but copies can often be found in used bookstores. Despite the period setting it is still the most realistic and sympathetic portrayal I have ever read of the world of the professional drag performer.
One thing Little does make clear as well is a fact not always known to those outside of that world—that many, maybe most, female impersonators are straight. Cross-dressing isn’t a question of sexual orientation. It has been said that the late Aristotle Onassis, beloved of Jackie and Maria, liked to dress up on his yacht, Skorpios. I can’t imagine it was a pretty sight, but so long as it made him feel pretty, who’s to complain. Bear in mind, his sailors were Greek.
Infamous FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and his partner, Clyde Tolson, were said to like dressing up. And according to Esther Williams, fifties he-man movie star Jeff Chandler had an entire dressing room full of dresses and wigs. Her only real complaint is that he was too big for the polka dots he apparently favored.
My point is; this certainly had nothing to do with his being “that way.” I recently chatted with a young straight man, a lawyer, who shyly and only after long conversation confessed that he liked to dress as a woman and thought he looked pretty good, too. Apparently, this had been worrying him. He was enormously relieved when I assured him that this did not mean that he had a queer streak in him. Which was unfortunate from my point of view. He was awfully cute.
Some of the drag queens of the past assumed the status of legends for those of us living under the cloak. T. C. Jones (straight, I’m told) played legitimate clubs in New York and even did parts in straight plays, almost unheard of then. I saw him only once towards the end of his career but he was a wonderful entertainer. The highlight of his act was a pantomime done to “Ten Cents a Dance,” in which he played the part of an over-the-hill taxi dancer spurned by customers looking for younger and prettier partners. Funny, and poignant.
Rae Bourbon was a gay version of Belle Barth, a practitioner of a type of bawdy humor that faded after the sexual revolution. Moms Mabley and Rusty Warren (“all right, ladies, get those knockers up”) had similar acts.
Rusty was younger than the others but mostly these were older women of one minority or another. They say all humor is based on pain. The foul-mouthed humor seemed all the funnier coming from a little old lady. It was funnier, too, because this sort of talk was forbidden, taboo, definitely no-no. Women weren’t supposed to talk about sex in those days—weren’t, in fact, supposed to know about sex—let alone tell dirty jokes in nightclubs. You didn’t hear those words or subjects on radio or television, or even stage shows. And maybe these ladies got away with it in part because the cops were reluctant to drag a grandmotherly looking old lady out of a club in handcuffs, though that wouldn’t have, and almost certainly didn’t, help the drag