1.
GET READY FOR ME
When I die,
my angels,
immaculate
Black diva
drag queens,
all of them
sequined
and seductive,
some of them
will come back
to haunt you,
I promise,
honey chil’.
—Essex Hemphill, from “The Tomb of Sorrow”
Back in the 1960s, when Tiki Lofton was a boy, she used to wait until the eleven o’clock flight took off from LAX, right over her grandmother’s house, and as the jet vroomed and her grandmother dozed in front of the evening news, Tiki would ease open her bedroom window and climb out to meet Monique Hudson. The plane’s tiny wing lights blinked in the California sky, specks of sparkle over unglamorous Inglewood. Tiki always left her necessities—one of her grandma’s wigs, preferably red, and an outfit, preferably shiny—outside the window. She would grab her goodie bag, and Monique would show up on the street corner with hers, and they’d head over to one of the Disquotay apartments, like one on Ninety-second and Vermont that Miss Larry had rented, and beat their faces and rat their wigs and listen to music and smoke weed and drink like the teenagers they had recently become.
The apartments were usually big, with two or three people sharing a few bedrooms. But the living rooms barely had furniture, as the Disquotays needed lots of room for other endeavors. On party nights, it was like an assembly line. You’d lie down on the floor and one person would dust your face, and then you’d sit up and Tammi* would do the eyes and blush the cheeks and paint the lips with meringue lipstick. Dooni, who would later become the Fabulous Sylvester, would do your hair and move on down the line: wig, wig, wig, wig, wig. You’d put on two pairs of eyelashes, top and bottom both, just like a cover girl. Your face would be like a picture. You’d slip into a girdle and adjust your water-balloon titties; Monique or Dooni would fix up your outfit; and then you’d head off—a gang of in-charge glamour girls—following the noise to the party in Watts or Compton or wherever.
The first Disquotay bash that Tiki went to was over on 120th and Athens, at Etta James’s house, sometime around 1965. Etta, who would later be inducted into both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (largely on the strength of her 1961 hit “At Last”) and the Betty Ford Center (largely on the strength of her smack addiction), was already a recording star and a friend to many local Los Angeles drag queens, with whom she shared a brazen sensibility and a taste for platinum hair and pumps. When Etta James was out of town, her house-sitter was Miss Foxy, whom the queens called the Jack-o-Lantern, or the Pumpkin, on account of her wide, gap-toothed smile. On one visit to the Etta James residence, Foxy’s friend Miss Larry Hines had declared the place “made for a party,” and sent out the call to gather. Had she known about any of this, says former Disquotay Diane Moorehead, “Etta James woulda killed Foxy and Larry.”
* * *
Tiki hadn’t started dressing yet, and wasn’t yet named Tiki. She was still a pretty gay boy, skin pearly smooth and light. To go to that first party, she had worn a cowboy hat, big wide bell-bottoms, and earrings. For Tiki, walking into that particular scene had been like leaving black and white for Technicolor. The house, with its swimming pool and fireplace, had stunned her. Women, drag queens, and guys, all sending joyful noises in Tiki’s direction; the music had been jumping: Walter Jackson’s version of “Lee Cross,” Jr. Walker & the All Stars’ “Shotgun,” “Nowhere to Run” by Martha and the Vandellas, Fontella Bass singing “Rescue Me.” Gay kids all perched on gigantic speakers, singing and carrying on. I said shotgun! Shoot him ’fore he run now. Folks were dancing, jumping into the pool. Nowhere to run to, baby, they’d scream-sung, nowhere to hide. “Ooh, I like this,” Tiki had said to herself. “This here—honey, where is this world?” Within months, she would be a full-fledged Disquotay, made-up, bewigged, bejeweled.
A Disquotay party was an art form. During the week, a few club members would head out to Dolphin’s of Hollywood to get the latest 45 or eight-track, often something Dooni had heard on KGFJ, where the Magnificent Montague would cry “Burn, baby, burn!” while spinning something new and hot. The club members would then meet for “music appreciation night,” to play records and familiarize themselves with the new material. “Just to get ready, honey, you had to,” says Diane.
Out on Vermont Street, where there were several black nightclubs, they’d pass out the address of that night’s get-together. Or someone would decide to throw a party, and word of mouth would fill up the place. Outside, cars would be double-parked for blocks around, and there was a line to get in. “You would see Cadillacs, Jaguars, Mercedes-Benzes, low-riders, Momma and Daddy’s car,” Diane says. “You had bulldaggers, femmes, straight men, straight women, wanting just to party,” says former Disquotay Jackie Hoyle, “and just to see us.”
The Disquotays worked on their outfits the whole week. Some would buy clothes, some would have them made, and some would use whatever was handy. They’d buy makeup and wigs—preferably human-hair ones—or steal them, or pay someone else to steal them. When it came time to join the party they would sit outside on the cars and wait. Every Disquotay wanted to be the last to arrive—the one who steals the show. Everyone wanted to enter with the right song backing them. So they’d wait, sometimes an hour or more, until their tune hit, the song that matched their particular fabulousness on that particular night. Only then would they walk.
Inside, there might be topless dancers on top of tables, straight folks who’d wandered in from nightclubs, and, of course, black drag queens galore. ’Cause I know that beauty’s only skin deep, yeah, yeah yeah. People danced to the Temptations, the Rolling Stones, Barbara Lewis, Wilson Pickett, Martha Reeves, Marvin Gaye. Ride, Sally, ride. The Disquotays themselves were more to be looked at than touched. They had taken bubble baths and washed themselves with Jean Naté. They might be willing to get nasty later in the evening, but they had reputations and hairstyles to uphold, and they worked way too hard on their Max Factor to let just anybody mess it up early on.
“We were not allowed to fuck during the party, because we were ladies,” Jackie Hoyle says. Their parties, though, were unrestrained. “We had the pimps, we had the drug dealers, we had the college boys. We had the butch queens out in the driveways taking care of their business. It was a lot of punks, honey, in the driveway, suckin’ all night long,” Diane says. “We’d be inside with our perfume and our dresses on, hostessing. We were dancing queens.” It takes two, baby. Marijuana was still heavily penalized, so some folks would wear big Afros, and upon arrival they’d pull four or five joints right out of their hair. A good song would seem to go on forever. “Four more bars!” a Disquotay would scream, and whoever was spinning would back that record up and start it all over again, seven or eight times, right when it was getting to the good part, teasing you until you were really feeling it, giving it to you just when you really had to have it. I can’t get no. Satisfaction. I try and I try and I try and I try.
Time at the Disquotay parties went by like nothing, like a dream you thought you might have had. Come four-thirty or so in the morning, Tiki would skip out, Cinderella dashing from the ball, while the other Disquotays were heading off with that evening’s admirer, or going out as a pack for breakfast, or soaking their feet in a bucket of water. She would ease back through the window before the five o’clock jet entered its landing pattern over Inglewood. She’d take off her face, hide her clothes, and do her best to flatten her grandma’s wig back down to normal. When she woke, it was 1965 and she was a sixteen-year-old boy named Warren again.
* * *
The Disquotays—among them Dooni, Tiki, Monique, Diane, Benedetta, Shelley Newman, Jay Freeman, Barbara, Garetha, Tammi, Shirley Floyd, Jackie Kennedy, Jackie Hoyle, Cleola Balls, Miss LaLa, Miss Louella, Miss Marcia, and Larry Hines, their “founder and lifelong president”—were a cross between a street gang and a sorority. They began gathering in 1963. In their own minds, at least, they were the toast of mid-1960s Los Angeles. This was their fantasy. “Everybody wanted to be a Disquotay,” says Diane. “It was like Folies Bergère in the ghetto.” They were the most fabulous girls around, and the toughest. They could kick people’s asses and look good doing so. They would sometimes kick each other’s asses just for looking good, in fact. Especially if someone looked too good. Tammi, tall and pimply and rarely the center of attention, could go into the bathroom for what seemed like days and emerge a glamour girl. One night she showed up in her pink safari pants, pink fingernails and toenails, and wraparound sandals. Everyone agreed that this was Tammi’s time to shine—everyone except Larry Hines. Wigs flew; nails were broken. History was made.
When the girls competed over clothes and boyfriends—among themselves or with other queens—things could sometimes explode into Jets-and-Sharks rumbles. A run-in with Louella, for instance, or with Duchess, who did her own thing entirely but knew all the Disquotay girls’ business, might result in a reading contest of tasty brutality. “They’d be poppin’ their fingers,” Diane says. “The words would be tripping off their tongues like magic, just like rhythm: ‘Look-at-your-hands, look-at-your-feet, look-at-your-neck, look-at-your-eyes, look-at-your-fingers.’ They’d bring up news bulletins. They would hit a line just to build to the next line. And you’d be laughin’ cause they’d be making it rhyme.” In such situations, Miss Louella was the most dangerous. When she read you, the half-hidden truths she spat out came so fast and hard your own retorts seemed to flutter away. “She was like a machine gun,” Diane says. “She would get you off of her with just her mouth.”
Some, like Miss LaLa, might use other means of offense. LaLa, as Duchess remembers her, was “this big old horrible queen, nine feet tall, light-skinned with green eyes, with minidresses on and high heels and feet like garbage trucks, real dumb, and a mean Motorola.” LaLa lived with her family in Watts. “The whole family, they were just terrible,” says Duchess, hyperbolically. “They were not bad-looking people. They just had little tiny brains, and they were all violent. Even the grandma carried a shotgun.” Some of the Disquotays called LaLa the Menace of Society, and balked at letting her into the club. She loved fighting as much as she loved blond wigs and minidresses, and when she was around, someone was going to get their ass whupped. You didn’t necessarily want her at your events, since her family had been reported to shoot up people’s festivities just for sport, sending people running and jumping out of windows. She often traveled Los Angeles with Cleola Balls, who at six two was a few inches shorter than she.
“They were both jailhouse queens,” says Jackie Hoyle, who referred to the two as Red China and Russia, “and they could tear a house up.” LaLa, in order to expand her own hair options, would sometimes bring a pillowcase and demand the wig right off everyone’s head—she was partial to blond human-hair wigs, in particular—leaving behind a roomful of boys in makeup and stocking caps. “Pin your wigs up,” the Disquotays would call, “LaLa’s comin’.”
* * *
LaLa eventually bullied her way into the Disquotays, aided by the fact that she could deliver clothing or wigs from a store she’d hit. But though she was tough, she was not invincible. One time, for instance, when Miss Larry Hines and LaLa were fighting over a boyfriend, Cleola held down Miss Hines while LaLa cut off Miss Hines’s hair. Queens jumped in cars and buses to console Miss Hines, who was known for growing her own dark, blond-frosted hair and brushing it in people’s faces. They found her sitting on some stairs with her hair in her hands, crying. Most were sympathetic, although Miss Louella, upon seeing Miss Hines’s big, hairless head atop her tiny body, privately called her “the Screaming Skull.” Next weekend, next party: Miss Hines arrived in a wig the same exact color, with the same exact blond frost, and the same exact length, as the tresses that LaLa had chopped off. It was a solid, fuck-you victory for Miss Larry Hines and his adherents, further proof, if any were ever needed, that there is no weapon more powerful than the right hair.
In peaceful times, though, the Disquotays were about the look, the entrance, and the scene. Tammi and Dooni were always flipping through Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar for new ideas. They could recite the names of all the major models: Verushka, Twiggy, Penelope Tree. “We used to name Vogue models like they were our relatives,” Diane says. “Like it was part of our duty.” They patterned their makeup and fashions after them, too, and then “would just sit around and glorify each other just for being beautiful.”
Without much money, this could be a challenge. Once, when she was still a penniless schoolboy, Tiki dyed her hair with red food coloring, which melted down her face that day in the school-yard sun. Social events brought in some funds. As with Harlem “rent parties” in the 1920s and 1930s, whoever threw a do would charge people fifty cents or a dollar to get in, which helped pay for the apartments. Some of the queens, like Diane Moorehead and Jackie Hoyle, had jobs to get “pennies for our fashions,” using their pay to buy material, beads, wigs. Some were too effeminate to be employable; as Jackie puts it, “Ain’t nobody going to hire you with no eyebrows.” Many lived with mothers or grandmothers who would slip them some money once in a while. Several worked at the airport, a different girl in each terminal. Shoplifting was a useful and oft-used craft. One queen, for instance, known for her fur fetish, would dress up in a moving man’s uniform and simply wheel a whole rack of minks from a store. Other entrepreneurs made money on the street. “If you couldn’t steal the dress,” says Marapasa (who had joined the scene as a freckly fourteen-year-old named Cherisse), “then maybe you would turn a trick.” You had to be resourceful.
When most of the girls, Disquotay club members or not, grew dissatisfied with water-balloon bosoms and towel hips, a lot of them took hormones, since, as Duchess tells it, “everyone wanted titties and the soft hip flow.” But many took to cutting up store-bought foam or furniture or car seats—from Cadillacs, of course—to make themselves a body. Dooni, the future Sylvester, taught them how to whittle foam pieces with a razor blade, tapering them down the thigh and up toward the waist. They would cut the rear out of a girdle and insert a foam ass and hips, and sometimes getting ready for a party would be not unlike suiting up for a football game.
“If somebody would’ve slammed us up against the wall we would have just bounced off,” says Jackie Hoyle. Miss Dakota, once a Houston high school star quarterback named Harold Johnson, was famous not only for her Diana Ross and Tina Turner impersonations but also for wearing a big, obviously padded bottom. “Everybody knew that booty was somebody’s chair,” Diane says. “This one guy stuck a hatpin in her ass, and she was walkin’ around all night shakin’ her ass with this pin in it. And she ain’t said ouch yet.”
* * *
“In those days, we knew that if you got caught in the wrong place you got your ass whupped, or we whupped your ass, however it was to happen,” says Jackie Hoyle. “But it was our own little world. We just had fun, living our lives. It was the secret of getting over.”
The Disquotays knew it was illegal to drag, in their hometown as everywhere else in the country. The police still called such behaviors “harboring a disguise,” or “masquerading,” and could send you to jail for wearing an item of female clothing or lining your eyebrows. A city law, Rule No. 9, made impersonating the opposite sex illegal, and under its aegis the LAPD routinely raided drag parties and drag bars. Toward the end of the Disquotay days, the ACLU took on the case of Lady Java to challenge Rule No. 9. Lady Java was a married hermaphrodite with large breasts who made her living as a female impersonator in black L.A. clubs. She was, according to Diane Moorehead, “a high-yellow, Creole, green-eyed, long-black-hair beauty wonder.” Java portrayed Josephine Baker in feathers and bananas, and a crawling Sheena the Jungle Queen in leopard skins. Her 1967 case, triggered by a performance at the Redd Foxx Club, would help legalize drag in the city of Los Angeles. Until then, and for a while afterward just in case, many Disquotays carried a rag for emergency makeup removal.
The police weren’t the only ones you needed to fool. For a while, Tammi and Tiki dyed their hair blond for school; Tammi taught Tiki to color-comb her hair, blackening it back down every afternoon and covering it with a head rag so her grandmother, Mrs. Warren, wouldn’t notice. The principal of L.A. High noticed, though, and called in Mrs. Warren, who was not at all amused by the blond girl who was supposed to be her grandson. She called Tiki’s stepfather. “Take that child to the barbershop,” Mrs. Warren told him. The barber cut off all of Tiki’s hair. “I drew me some hair on with an eyebrow pencil,” Tiki says. Kicked out of L.A. High, she transferred to Washington High, from which she later graduated in drag. A Disquotay would simply not be outdone.
* * *
In a world where “ridiculous” was the highest of compliments, Miss Dooni was the most ridiculous of them all. There were others, for sure, who could give her a run for her money—like Jackie Kennedy, who once stumbled down Western Avenue carrying a can of Olde English with a straw and wearing a natural wig bigger than her own body. But Dooni’s creativity was legendary and bottomless. He would sit up at night watching black-and-white movies on television with his baby sisters, sketching the brassy-dame clothes and gestures of Katharine Hepburn (high-collared white blouse, sleek slacks, hands on hips) or Rosalind Russell (purple gown with fur sleeves, purple-gloved hand holding a lengthy cigarette holder).
Dooni was constantly scribbling designs. He would read about princes and queens in exotic places, far, far away from his own neighborhood, and he’d imagine their clothes. He could transform a face beyond recognition and rat a wig like nobody’s business. Dooni was tall and big-boned—he fluctuated between pencil thin and slightly chunky—with an oval face that looked good with any hairstyle and skin that was so soft and smooth, people likened it to whipped chocolate. People looked to him for all kinds of support, Marapasa says, but mostly “beauty support.” Even among the Disquotays, you would notice Dooni first.
“There’s a line of us, and then there’s Dooni,” Diane says. “We’re all lookin’ like sisters and cousins, and then there’s Dooni. Dooni was always arranged. Every detail would be addressed.” He would enter a room without fanfare, but all eyes would go to him and return to him. “If everybody had on black and gray, he wouldn’t come in red,” Jackie says. “He’d have on black and gray also, but his would be constructed totally different than everyone else’s. He wasn’t going to put on purple, but Dooni’s gray was going to be something where you just had to view him.”
One day in 1968, in their heyday, a gaggle of Disquotays was hanging out at the Clowns, a club on Jefferson where they often met. Dooni was nowhere to be found. He had said he would be there. He had told them that morning, “Get ready for me.” You knew what that meant in a general sense—it was both a promise and a warning—but you simply could not predict the specifics. Once, “Get ready” had meant a dress made entirely of paper, the first in a long series of disposable “one-nighter” outfits. For the first-ever Watts Summer Festival in 1966, Dooni had stapled together aluminum pie tins into matching dresses for him and Tiki, and Tammi had made Styrofoam earrings to match. When they walked through the festival people were drawn, confused and squinting in the sun, to the blinding silver light that turned out to be Tiki and Dooni.
Another time Dooni had appeared in a knit dress, bright lipstick and nail polish, and a Batman belt, and once in a babydoll dress, windowpane stockings, and square-toed, big-buckled Pilgrim shoes, his hair in Beatles bangs with so many curls on top that his head looked like a chocolate fountain. He could wear a full-length sequined gown, or two odd-shaped pieces of fabric glued together just so. He was known to have worn a snazzy dress cinched with a big wide camping belt, into which were stuck a knife, fork, spoon, and canteen. He would tear out a page from Vogue and put it in his purse one day, and the next he would look a lot like that picture.
He might be a teased-up redhead, or he might have a huge black natural or maybe just a bun sitting there like an upside-down bowl of pudding. When Elizabeth Taylor did Cleopatra in 1963, Dooni was the first to have her bangs, and when Funny Girl came out, in 1968, Dooni had Streisand’s frosted, frothy hairdo. For a while in between, partly to trick LaLa out of stealing the wig right off his head, Dooni wore a platinum-blond wig and rubbed the top with black shoe polish, so it looked exactly as if his own roots were growing out from a dye job.
With his big eyes, Dooni often had an expectant look. Like all the girls, he would certainly have two sets of eyelashes on top of his own, but for Dooni, the word “eyes” didn’t quite go far enough. He called them “aye-ees”: Once he arrived with checkerboard eyelids he’d seen in Vogue, another time with eyelids decorated in Star-Spangled Banner glitter; in both cases, he had made earrings to match. His feet were so big and wide that some of the Disquotays called them “yams,” or “dinner rolls,” or “aircraft carriers”; his pumps were from the Tall and Smart Shop. Since Dooni’s fashions, hair, and face were irreproachable, a queen who wanted to read Dooni usually went after the huge feet. “Can’t you chisel those damn things down?” a Disquotay would ask. “Kiss my ass,” Dooni would reply. If someone asked him what size shoe he wore, he would tell them, tartly, “My size, honey.”
“With Dooni,” Diane says, “it was always an ongoing saga. What’s she going to do next? Dooni would come on a pogo stick, it didn’t matter. She was her only competition, ’cause nobody was on her level. Dooni could always walk away with the spotlight, honey, without even making a big deal out of it.” Sometimes, Tiki says, it seemed as if Dooni had come from outer space. Legend has it that he once won a prize at a ball wearing a sheet, a rose, and angel hair from a Christmas tree, and all he did was twirl the rose and spin around.
* * *
When years later Dooni became a big star named Sylvester, fans and friends alike would know him for his movie-scene entrances and his What’s-she-going-to-do-next-ness. On stage in San Francisco, London, or New York, he would rise into a spotlight as if he was ready for his close-up: round, dark face framed by a sparkling headdress; head tilted upward into the light; silver-shadowed eyes closed, as if to accentuate that he was not beholder but beheld. Or he would come down a staircase and pull out a jeweled mirror while everyone waited for him to start singing “You Are So Beautiful” to himself. Or he would let his band tease the audience with a Sylvester song they had danced to many times, the instrumental refrain of one of his huge hits (“Mighty Real” or “Disco Heat” or “Do Ya Wanna Funk”), entering only when he was certain that the crowd had worked its way to near frenzy.
Or he would see the proper backdrop and make a picture of himself for whoever happened to be around: if steam was coming out of a grate in Manhattan at night, he would pause to let it roll up his full-length white fur coat; if someone was selling silver balloons in San Francisco, he would buy some in order to raise a hand into the air and release them into the blue sky. In the Paris airport during a European tour some thirteen years after the Disquotays’ heyday, Sylvester’s bandmates would look toward the tubed escalator and watch Sylvester descend in his white fur, silver pumps, and a diamond tiara, carrying a handful of French Vogues. No one could dream herself up quite like Dooni.
Back in 1968, waiting outside the Clowns on Jefferson, few of the Disquotays saw stardom in Dooni’s future. He was one of them, and though they heartily believed in themselves as stars, they also had reliable evidence that most Americans viewed them with less enthusiasm. Still, Dooni was Dooni, and when he was late that day at the Clowns, the Disquotays were wound up, jittery in that way you turn when you’re getting ready for something you know you can’t get ready for, like a tornado or a spanking or a first kiss. Then they saw Miss Dooni: pigtails, an A-line dress, licking a big sucker, gliding down the streets of South Central on his way to the Clowns. On roller skates. And not in a rush, either.
* * *
Later, when everyone was sick or dying, on the day 1986 turned into 1987, Sylvester—who had not been Dooni for almost twenty years—made an appearance on The Late Show, where Joan Rivers was hosting a festive New Year’s Eve. High on his head was a poofy, shoulder-length red wig he’d bought on Seventh Avenue in New York; friends called it his Lucy Ricardo wig, and it indeed resembled the hair of a slutty Lucille Ball emerging from a wind tunnel. One of Sylvester’s lapels sparkled with a silver design, and bracelets twinkled and jangled on his wrist. Backed by a mostly white band and two big black women singers, he sang “Someone Like You,” a pop song that was getting good radio play, though nothing like what his big disco hits had gotten ten years before. He jumped and danced as he sang, but his voice was off: scratchy and strained, as if his chops weren’t quite right.
Sylvester plopped down on the couch next to the preceding guest, the Tony Award–winning actor and seventies game-show fixture Charles Nelson Reilly. It was hard to imagine a queenlier trio: Reilly, whose childhood nickname was Mary; gossipy Rivers, the drag queen without a penis; and Sylvester. After a bit of chitchat about jewelry and furs and Sylvester’s boyfriend, Rick, Sylvester reminded Rivers and Reilly that they had all three done one of the earliest AIDS benefits together several years earlier, before AIDS benefits were the thing to do: “The two of you,” he said, and “me, that black drag queen you always talk about.” Apparently, Ms. Rivers did not hear the warning in his words or the hurt he had felt at being reduced to a label. “What do you wear in real life, when you just want to be Mrs. Rick?” she asked, plainly assuming that Rick played mister to Sylvester’s missus. Sylvester laughed, despite the hint of strained patience on his face, and spoke vaguely about having “something for everyone.” Joan Rivers persisted. “So what did your family say when they found out you were going to be a drag queen?” she asked. Sylvester gave her a look. “I’m not a drag queen!” he exclaimed sharply but with a big, full-toothed smile, sitting in his wig, makeup, and jewelry. He threw his head back and held his arms to his chest in a small self-hug, laughing. “I’m Sylvester!”
Joan Rivers stumbled and stammered a bit (“But—well you sometimes—I know—sometimes…”) as Sylvester stepped back in to smooth out the conversation. He looked up toward the ceiling for a second. “What did my parents say,” he repeated, and then he looked at Joan Rivers and explained the situation as nicely and succinctly as he could manage. “When I was little I used to dress up, right? And my mother said, ‘You can’t dress up. You can’t dress up. You’ve gotta wear these pants and these shoes, and you have to, like, drink beer and play football.’ And I said, ‘No, I don’t,’ and she said, ‘You’re very strange,’ and I said, ‘That’s okay.’”
That’s as pretty a summary of Sylvester’s philosophy as you ever could see: I said, “No, I don’t,” and she said, “You’re very strange,” and I said, “That’s okay.”
Copyright © 2005 by Joshua Gamson
