Minette - Recollections of a Part-time Lady

I joined a gay consciousness-raising group and I was very lucky because my CR group was all radical young hippies. I was the oldest one of all of them, but I always had a generation gap with my own generation so that didn’t make any difference. We’d take a subject apart and we would relate our own experiences so I could see my own life as more than just a personal thing. I saw it in a better context. That was the crux of a good consciousness-raising group.

I got involved with Communitas, a gay liberation group in Brooklyn, and they wanted me to put together a show for them. The place was out in God’s country, beyond Flatbush, at the end of the subway line, so it was cursed before it started, but I decided to give it a try. And I got all these singers and dancers and all but I had to get a stripper. You gotta have a stripper to make it look professional, you know. And it couldn’t be an amateur. “It’s got to be graceful, it’s got to be done right,” I told them. And about that time Taffy Titz rang me up. “Titz with a Z,” she always said. And I had my stripper.

I met Taffy when he was a teenager named Clyde, and it was at one of Frannie’s soirees. Franny — she’s the queen that still runs The Opulent Era on Christopher Street — used to have these soirees and then she’d stop them in the middle and show people how lovely her shop things were. That was the only soiree I’d been to that had a commercial break. I met Taffy there before she was in drag, and she’d always call me up asking advice on this and that. And Taffy started getting in the business. Her specialty was a tassel dance. A tassel dancer has tassels attached to the end of the tit cups and usually on the ass, and gets them all going at once, sometimes in opposite directions. It takes enormous skill to do well.

When Taffy rang me up, she said, “Oh, I just gave away my wardrobe a few months ago and I’m out of drag now.” So I pulled together things from my Free Store. The Free Store was leftovers from rummage sales and things I get from my sisters, and from the street. I said to Taffy, “Look at this beaded top, Taffy, you could make a bra out of that, and this chiffon skirt could make gorgeous panels, and if you need any help with the stitches, I’m an experienced stitch bitch.” So Taffy returned to the business.

I arrived late for the show. I was in semi-drag in the pouring rain, climbing over a fence, my curls coming down, my shoes soggy, with a full face on, running down. The first half was over, but Taffy was yet to come. And I will say, she was lovely, like a Theda Kara with her dark hair. And she kept her mouth shut, so her routine was fabulous. She was so graceful she tore the house down.

Alter the first show, they asked me to put together other shows. They had the Hot Peaches, and Mario Montez and Alexis Del Lago (the male Marlene Dietrich, star of “Shanghai Local”), and James Mofogin, and of course Taffy Titz. But Taffy couldn’t stay graceful forever. She was supposed to be glamorous, but she had to be campy. So we put this show in a church. Can you imagine, they built a special runway for Taffy, and she came out with industrial house numbers on her ass. There she is, on the church runway, flashing 69 on her ass. Taffy was a punk before her time.

This is the Gay Day Be-In of 1972 — looks like I’ve got some campy thought buzzing around up there. That gay button I’m wearing was designed by Spin Star. I met Spin in a picket line in front of a homophobic bookstore on Fifth Avenue — I only picket in the best areas. I guess Spin and I were sort of lovers, until we started living together. This was the only Gay Day I ever marched in — I usually just showed up at the end rallies — and that was because of Spin and because he worked day and night for Gay Day.

Here I am at the benefit the Hot Peaches did for WBAI in 1977. It was my last public performance, until now anyway. It was a gorgeous show and the Peaches were at their peachiest. I sang the “St. Louis Blues” parody, which starts out “I hate to see my little son go down.”

Making money is a difficult thing to do during this Depression. My last steady job was at the Crazy Horse in 1967, and then it got so that I could make more money staying home on a weekend doing horizontal entertainment than I could make working all week long at the Crazy Horse. I had johns then, before they all got “liberated.”

I remember one I picked up about 15 years ago on the way to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which is gone now. He was sort of shot, had an awful lot to drink, and a lot of mileage, but he started calling me “Baby” and holding my hand. He was only a $10 trick, but he was a darling boy, and a marvelous lover. He was only a $10 trick, but whenever he’d come into town he’d call me up, and he’d really treat me like a lady. I last saw him about six years ago. That last time he gave me $15.

Most of these guys in recent years — well, they’re weirdoes. What’s a weirdo’? I don’t know. Use your imagination. I just used to add $5 for anything new they wanted to do. Between the Depression and my age — I’m not sweet sixteen anymore and they always want youth and they don’t make many two-watt lightbulbs — it doesn’t make much sense to do johns anymore. Maybe I’ll become a telephonic Madame.

I keep my hand in a lot of things and make the money to stay alive. I have this transie I see once in a while, Julia Child. My job is to put him in drag and give him tips on being a woman and escort him. I play the male escort. Isn’t that a camp? He’s 6′2″ and he walks like a country rube, all hunched over. And he hunches over his food, asking me if he should take his gloves off while he’s eating. If he gets to be too much for me, I say “Grace and beauty!” and he straightens up.

And of course I have my music lessons. Even if your fingers feel like toes when you tickle the ivories, my new improved music lessons (at no rise in price) will do the trick. I love turning on my friends to old tunes.

But you boys came to hear about the art of female impersonation, and this has more to do with the art of staying alive.

Well, I guess we’ve run out of pictures. So many of those people are gone. Lots from drinking — it’s easy for a queen to become an alcoholic, always working around drinks. And of course there were the benny-heads that were very very brilliant for a short time and then eventually got evil and died. The hormone girls — I’ve known several where the operation was not a success. So they’re gone and here I am, still a young flapper.

When I took my first acid trip, I saw so much, and I’ve become more of a recluse. I no longer have the desire to be the life of the party, to be an Elsa Maxwell, like my sister Tommy. I have lovely things around me here, even if this isn’t such a campy neighborhood. See, most of these things I have had for a long time. They’re old, so the material is good. And I’ve lived with them for a long time. When I first moved here it was middle class. That was 1955. I thought I would stay a short time. Now it’s 24 years later, and the neighborhood is bombed-out looking, and I’m still here. Isn’t that a camp?

Sometimes, it’s not so campy. The slumlord downstairs has this hyperactive child and they feed it sugar all day so it runs around — boom da boom boom boom. All sugar. Look out the window — all black faces — oops! There’s a white face. Must be a cop in drag. Here, let’s close these shutters — we’re not putting on a free show for those bums. Nobody’s paying.