Minette - Recollections of a Part-time Lady

Here I am with the Navy at the College Inn. I still love seafood, seafood’s still my favorite. There were a lot of inexperienced ones, and they’d say, “Oh, I’ve never done this before.” But they did it so well. And they some of them would be more honest: “Oh, we do it with each other on the ship, but when we get to port we look for real queens.” Nowadays, they’re ashamed to wear their uniforms and I don’t blame them.

These sailors in the picture were lovely boys too. I went with one and Dixie Gordon went with the other and the one on the end passed out. I had them take me to a nice restaurant. Nothing too much — I didn’t want to break these boys — they were good for about $20. They’re probably old farts by now, but they were handsome young sheiks at the time.

Dixie Gordon once brought two sailors home at once, to her boudoir. She left these two sailors to prepare in her bathroom, and when she came back they were going at each other. Dixie came running down the hall to me. “Oh, Minette, what am I going to do? They’re doing it to each other.” “Don’t complain,” I told her. “You already got the money.” “But I was sort of in the mood,” she said, “and they were such nice boys.”

Dixie Gordon comes from Cincinnati and ran away from home to work as a stripper when she was fifteen.

The manager raped her, found out it wasn’t real, and didn’t care. And her father finally found out and came and pulled her off the stage. She did five years in the penitentiary for armed robbery during the last Depression. Miss Gordon said the first year in the cellblock was terrible, but after that she began to get privileges. She was the mistress of one of the top guards, and the other prisoners would wait on her, like a princess in prison. When they had a show, she would borrow the wardrobe of the warden’s wife — they were the same size — and she’d look capital. In drag there was no one like Dixie Gordon. When she got out she lived in drag. So, honey, if you think I’ve got campy tales...

There was always a little heat from working at the College Inn because drag was against the law and the Navy banned the sailors from coming in toward the end, afraid they might get subverted. The sailors came anyway, without their uniforms.

And, as for the law against impersonating a woman, it was fun seeing how we could push it. Boston was a semi-drag city. We could wear women’s blouses and makeup, but we had to wear trousers. I wore “patio pajamas,” now known as “culottes.” I wore French high-heeled shoes and said, “These are men’s shoes from the time of Louis XIV.” And if they looked in the encyclopedia there was something to back me up. I had a woman’s blouse from the last Depression and I told them it was a man’s shirt from the time of George Washington. Rene Lewis used to take the paper serviettes from restaurants and she made tits out of them. She had a special way with paper tits so that if the cops walked by she could crush them just like that.

When queens started coming into the clubs it wasn’t as rough. Honey, gay life wasn’t like Christopher Street. The queens then were like ladies, and if they didn’t act like ladies they got called “faggots.” See, that’s why I object to being called a faggot. To me, the faggots were the lowest common denominator, the real scuffy ones, the tearoom types.

One of the best places was the Silver Dollar. Now the Silver Dollar was a little bit of everything. They had fairies, and prostitutes, and straight people, and lots of sailors. It was called the longest bar in the world and it ran all the way from Washington Street back to Playland. On the stage they had a real woman that looked like a female impersonator, sort of a Margaret Dumont type of woman, with a campy name like Velma. She played the organ gorgeous, and it used to get real loud. We used to say, “You know, everyone thinks they’re having such a good time at the Silver Dollar because the music’s so loud they can never get lonely.” That was the theory.

This is Murry Pickford and her Royal Canadian Doves. They were really white pigeons, but she insisted you call them doves. “Doves,” she said. Murry was a deaf and dumb queen and when they closed Boston down to all the queens, Murry went to the officials and said: “Drag is the only way I can make a living, you know. I’m deaf and dumb.” So they gave her a special card from the liquor board that said she could work in drag, and Murry was the only queen in all of Beantown that could work in drag. She was born deaf and dumb so she talked funny and couldn’t hear anything. But she could read lips like crazy. She used to read them in the mirror when we were in the dressing room, only it would come out backwards and she thought everyone was dishing her. If you said she was terrific, it would come out you were dishing her. I worked with her when I was a little kid and then much later on. She had a lot of mileage by this time and she was hard to work with, although she kept on working until she died a couple years ago.

Her act was that she used to dance to “Beautiful Lady” or anything else that the band would play in the same tempo. She could feel the tempo in her body. But the band would play all kinds of crazy things, as long as it was in the same tempo, and Murry wouldn’t know, so she’d come out to dance to “Beautiful Lady’’ and the band would be playing “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You,” in waltz time.

I was working a club in Springfield, Massachusetts, with some of my sisters and we’d drive all the way back to Boston after the show. We got back at three one morning: the hotel lobby was filled with trunks and fairies in traveling wardrobes. I said “What’s happening?” and they showed me the front page of the paper. The Archbishop had written this editorial calling us the lowest crawling creatures of the earth, and he said something to do with worms. “Archie the Terrible” we called him. He later became Cardinal Cushing, and he got ill but he didn’t die. We put the bitch’s curse on him. He just suffered for many years, and that broken old man who sounded like a Bowery bum that officiated at Kennedy’s funeral: that was what was left of him.

When they closed Beantown, they closed it. It wasn’t just the impersonators, it was the strippers, too. The strippers weren’t allowed to take their clothes off, so they’d have to come out with nothing on except the bra and pasties and a g-string. And they had to wear fringe. They did what was called “an exotic” but they were showing practically everything through the whole act, which is the worst. When they closed up the town you couldn’t do anything you couldn’t do on television. You couldn’t even do a hula on a nightclub stage.

But I said to myself: I’m not leaving without any bookings. Oh, didn’t I have the nerve. So I inherited everybody’s johns, and I was on my way to making a fortune before the tip-off. There was a police station around the corner, but this waitress friend of mine that worked across the street overheard a conversation. The cops had my room number, but they had Dixie Gordon’s name. The hotel told them Dixie Gordon had checked out, and that threw them off for a while.