Minette - Recollections of a Part-time Lady

Peggy always had a place in the show because she was very well loved. Peggy was always willing to stake people and she was very faithful, so there were people she knew in her old age that were ride boys when she met them and now owned the show. When she finally retired they couldn’t get Peggy into the house — I suppose the central heating would get to her — so she lived out back in a truck. She was a legend among the queens, Peggy Yule.

Carnivals and clubs were two different seasons — in the summer you’d work carnival and in the winter you’d work clubs. But a lot of the carnival queens did not like working clubs — it was the difference between outdoor daytime entertainment and working evenings. The real regular old carnies, if they’d done it a long time, were so used to the routine with certain people. They kept going on to different towns but you’d still be in the same trailer and still be with the same people, and you’d always have to carry water, unless you could get someone to carry it for you.

Here’s Robbi Del Mar, sort of a subdued Carmen Miranda, half-Spanish, half-Hungarian. See the almond eyes. They used to bill her as “the boy with the longest hair in Providence.” This was in 1951, see, they didn’t have the hippies yet. She was very bright and went to college and she had her whole family working the carnival with her. See her poster here, “Front Page People" — that’s Robbi and her family. Her sister married a Naval officer, and they were naturally well-bred, but from what I heard it was not her father’s side of the family that made her well-bred.

And here’s Talla Rae. She’s dead now, I think. She was a circus queen and had never worked clubs before. And she put her lipstick on by applying it to a spool and putting it on her mouth with a spool instead of using a lip brush.

When I left Fonda on one of those road trips I didn’t have any boy’s wardrobe left, so I went to New York and became Rose Revere, Real Woman. I lived in drag for about two months.

I didn’t know New York as well as Boston, of course, but it was very conservative. The only cabaret left on the Bowery was Sammy’s Bowery Follies, and prices for queens were low and going down. It was the summer of 1949 the prices went right down. My sisters used to hustle in Washington Square and business got bad, so they went to 42nd Street — that’s where the Johns were. Then the Puerto Rican queens came in — when a queen would ask for $5, one of the Puerto Rican queens would raise a hand behind her, and someone else would make a lower offer behind her. In a fortnight, business was shot to hell. They should have had a gay hookers’ union.

Here’s Chris Scarlet and my sister Bobby Dale at Sammy’s Bowery Follies, along with some johns. The headliner at Sammy’s was Dora Pollitier, who cut down at the end of her life to weekends and kept working at Sammy’s until she was 96. She’d always close her act dancing a cake walk to the last chorus of “Waitin’ For the Robert E. Lee.”

And that’s Chris Scarlett on the right with some john. When I first met Chris, she was the male partner of The Dancing Wallaces. They were teenagers and they won the national jitterbugging contest. The families made them get married because they were teenagers and this was Lowell, Mass. So the Dancing Wallaces jitterbugged all over the country and then they came back and did what was left of vaudeville.

His wife started getting dates with all these johns, so Chris said, “Well, if she can do it, I can do it.” So the juvenile make-up became a little more pronounced, the cheeks a little rosier, and she started getting johns and she and her wife split up. They had a little child. Little Robin. Of course, Little Robin is a grown up man now. Little Robin.

Here’s Chris Scarlett in one transformation, doing the fan dance.

The queen clubs in New York in the late forties and early fifties were Phil’s 111, and the Moroccan Village, and the 181. But Phil never paid his help so the 111 closed and the 181 closed in 1950 and became the Club 82, until it closed in 1972, and now it’s reopened as a salsa dance parlor. The Club 181 was a sort of Jewel Box Revue with not as much sparkle but a lot of talent. A lot of benny heads, too.

One of the big names at the 82 was Titanic. Titanic was a beautiful queen and she could come out on stage with this gravelly voice and just dish and the audience would love her. Real corny material. She’d pick out someone in the audience and say, “Oh, I wish I had your picture, I have a perfect frame for it. A toilet seat.” But Titanic could always pull that material off, because Titanic was something special. She used to do Carol Channing’s numbers from “Gentlemen Prefer Blonds” — my favorite musical since “Anything Goes” — and had her hair cut like Channing. Carol Channing would come down to the club all the time, and she loved the queens. She was just like one of the queens: six feet tall, a camp. And she’s still going strong, honey.

And before the legend that drag queens oppress women came along, the lezzies and the queens used to mix at Tony Pastor’s. See, it wasn’t the lezzies that were angry about the queens — it was a group called the Faggot Effeminists, one of the lesser lights of gay liberation. One of them said to me, “Minette, do you know that drag queens oppress women?” And I said. “Honey, I was always under the impression that you can’t oppress someone unless you have power over them. When you get in drag, you oppress women. When I get in drag, I glorify them.”

The lezzies used to mix with the drag queens. The fairies and the lezzies didn’t mix, but the queens did because we all used to hustle at Tony Pastor’s on West 3rd Street. The johns would come in looking for something kinky or to try to convert a lezzie. If a lezzie was looking to make it with a man, she wouldn’t be a lezzie, right? Well, that was what was so rare about those johns. So after a few drinks, the lezzies would turn them over to us and the john would end up with a queen. The queens looked so much prettier anyway, cause we tried. We used to put on a face that was like juvenile makeup onstage. We used Magic Touch, this powder and pancake combined so you could put it on like face powder but it had more body. We did look good, we were young then, we were pretty. Sometimes you’d get a john. I’ll sing you a song I used to do. It was a parody of a song called “The Lady in Red.” I called it “The Lezzie in Red.”