Minette - Recollections of a Part-time Lady

I didn’t really understand what it meant to say, “Why don’t you come up and see me sometime?” I might have known it was sexual, but I didn’t really know what “sexual” was.

When I was a kid, I used to think of myself as a little girl. When I was particularly feminine, my aunt would say “D.D.G.” That meant, “delicate, dainty girl.” I saw impersonators, but I didn’t know what they were.

I thought they were another type, like a soubrette or an ingénue. I just thought they were these extraordinary women. When my aunt would talk about a fairy, she would always say, “Oh, he’s so artistic.” So I thought fairies were these certain people who were born with genius, and when I saw someone acting swishy I thought he was a genius and a fairy. I always wondered why Franklyn Pangborn wasn’t a star.

Going to school was bearable for me only because of Camillo, my first and most faithful lover. Sex at six has no climax, but plenty of experience. Camillo was valiant and protected me from plenty of gay knocks. Wonderful, sweet Camillo died young, and I blame myself for that.

It happened when we were teenagers, and all these people thought I was a fairy and I had to be careful because people wanted to seduce me. And they would tell me all these tall tales about gay people. “They can’t hold their vegetables,” they used to tell me. “Their bowels are loose, they can’t hold anything in there.” I never became a browning queen — for good reason — but all this scared me at the time. Right after this Camillo said to me that people were talking about us. I got scared and ran away from Camillo. And that was the last I saw of him. He was drinking and got killed in this automobile accident. It’s not so traumatic now, but it was then.

And it turned out Camillo was right. I was one of those people. I was a fairy.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. For most of my childhood I had this double career — showbusiness and school. But I became more and more disenchanted with school and yearned to be a grade school dropout. The school felt the same way about me. The principal decided I was “too nervous,” a code word for gay at that time. I was sent to a psychiatrist and this headshrinker was an amiable young woman. At the end of our meetings together she said to me that I would one day become a female impersonator. I didn’t pay much attention at the time — I was far too elated with her decision that I didn’t have to go to school anymore.

And then I got to be a teenager. And honey, it was a great help to me to be a teenager in show business. If I was a teenager in staid normal Boston culture, I would have committed suicide or gotten murdered. But I could always get away from the so-called “real world.” I had all these campy, campy people around me. I knew only campy old people — and there were other old people who were not so campy. But show people were always campy, because, see, when I was growing up, show people were like drag queens. They used to have signs in rooming houses: NO SHOW PEOPLE. The whole spirit of showbusiness — at least the lesser type show people — was a camaraderie system: the customers were the marks and the show people were your buddies. This system has long been on the wane but the carnival people still hold onto it, very traditional with a carnie code of honor.

Show people were my family and I was always the baby, always the youngest, and then all of a sudden I was the oldest and it seemed to happen overnight.

When I was 14 they passed a law that said you had to be 16 to work public shows, so I quit vaudeville to go into clubs where I was a boy crooner. But I was never very comfortable working as a boy. After the first number, I would always undo the first button, because I felt choked by the collar. For a while I was too uncomfortable and thought about leaving show business to design dresses.

When I came back, it was in a dress. I was 16 and it caused a regular separation among my friends. Among my agents, see, I was working cheap-time because I was working drag, and they could have gotten more money from me in other ways. But I felt so liberated, finally, working in drag. To be me, to be feminine. It felt gorgeous.

Most of these album pictures are from 1949 to 1954. It was fabulous showtime for queens. Lots of sailors during the Korean War, cheap booze, and lots of shows. Everything that was important, you know. A very campy time.

Scully Square in Boston was the center of things, like Times Square years ago, with clubs and theaters. I remember one club that was a redo of one of the burlesque theaters when it burned. It was a whole mass of bars, and they covered the place in a snakelike network, so wherever you were there was a bartender at your disposal. So you’d drink more. See, Boston had no cover — no minimum. And there was a tradition then of big spenders. People would come into a bar and buy everybody a drink. So liquor was cheap in these huge barny places that needed decoration for the last fifteen years. Dingy looking places, but lots of acts and cheap booze. It was a good showtime, and the common people supported nightclubs. It wasn’t the Coconut Grove they went to, but clubs like the Rex and the Showtime.

I opened one night at the Showtime when the Navy had just gotten paid. I wasn’t used to the Showtime and I got scared to death. The Showtime was like they were all Marines, even though they were mostly sailors. I had to follow this real pig of an act, a real woman, a fat woman. “Peggy O’Day” was her name. Everything about Peggy O’Day was real pig-like. She couldn’t sing and she was vulgar, but she wasn’t funny. She was just dirty. As roaring drunk as the Navy was, they hated her. They threw beer bottles at her. And she cursed the Navy right back. So there it was: “bastards,” and beer bottles and “sons of bitches” and worse stuff — Peggy O’Day knew them all. And I had to follow that.

The band tortured out this unrecognizable version of “International Rag” in the key of Z. But I belted it anyway and those boys were kind to me. Nevertheless, there were several free-for-alls between songs and I made that my last night at the Showtime.

In the clubs I mostly sang regular songs, but I also wrote lots of gay parody songs that I’d sing when I could get away with it. I’ll sing you one called “Dodle Doo Doo.” “Doodle Doo Doo” was a popular number in the twenties.