Gloria Swanson (1906 - 1940) performer.

Original version: October 2010


Walter Winston was born in Atlanta, Georgia.  His family, like many other African Americans, moved north to Chicago for a better life.  In the 1920s Winston took the name of a Hollywood Star and as Gloria Swanson won several prizes in Chicago’s drag balls.

In 1928 the Sepia Gloria Swanson (as she was billed) was hostess at the Book Store in the city’s Bronzeville, a speakeasy with a mainly black clientele which became popular as it was known that she was a permanent fixture. Her theme song was fats Waller’s “Squeeze Me”, which she rewrote to make it raunchier.  She was also known for her version of Sophie Tucker’s “Some of these days”.  She moved to the nearby Pleasure Inn on East 31 St, and white thrill seekers also started to come.  She then opened her own club on East 35^th St.  She literally entertained all night: the audience was so enthralled that the sun was up when they left.  As such she was a major figure in the new Pansy Craze.  Noted in her audiences were the composer William C Handy and boxer Jack Johnson.

Swanson had already performed in New York in 1932, and in summer 1933, on the eve of the end of Prohibition, Gloria moved uptown to Harlem, and quickly became the headliner at the black-owned popular Theatrical Grill on 134th Street. She sang bawdy parodies, and danced a little, and was always well-dressed in evening gowns.  She was noted for her rendition at the Harlem Opera House of “I’m a Big Fat Mama With the Meat shaking on my Bones”. A year later Swanson was starring with Gladys Bentley at the newly opened Ubangi Club.  She also performed with major jazz performers such as Fletcher Henderson.

She was a creature of the night, breakfasting in the evening and dining at dawn. She wore mainly evening gowns, was rarely in street clothing, and almost never in male attire. She was plump, jolly and bawdy, and also a good cook. She was completely accepted by the underworld and bohemian types who came to her club. Apart from those in the know, many of her clients never suspected that she was not a woman.

This lasted until Fiorello La Guardia became mayor of New York in 1934 and as part of his reforms had the police stamp out the pansy subculture. One-by-one they picked off the queer nightclubs.   The Ubangi, almost the last to survive, closed in April 1937.

Swanson returned briefly to Chicago in 1934, and then performed in Baltimore and Philadelphia 1935-6, and then returned to Harlem as a headline act.   However she was forced into male attire offstage, and as such, Gloria's admirers failed to recognize her.


She also became ill, and had to withdraw from public life altogether. After several hospitalizations for heart conditions starting in 1936, the Sepia Gloria Swanson died in 1940 at age 33. Over 200 attended the funeral.

• “ ‘Gloria Swanson’ Buried in Harlem: Entertainer Won Fame as a Female Impersonator”.  Chicago Defender, May 3, 1940.
• George Chauncey. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. Basic Books 1994: 251.
• Richard Bruce Nugent edited by Thomas Wirth. Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance: Selections from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugen. Duke University Press. 2002: 221-2.
• Chad Heap.  Slumming:  Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885-1940.  The University of Chicago Press, 2009:  91-4, 233, 245, 256, 266-7, 270, 324-5n70.
• David Freeland.  Automats, Taxi dances, and Vaudeville: Excavating Manhattan’s Lost Places of Leisure.  New York University Press, 2009: 160.
• St Sukie de la Croix.  Chicago Whispers: A History of LGBT Chicago before Stonewall.  The University of Wisconsin Press, 2012: 143-5.
• Jim Elledge.  The Boys of Fairy Town: Sodomites, Female Impersonators, Third Sexers, Pansies, Queers, and Sex Morons in Chicago’s First Century,  Chicago Review Press, 2018: 143-4, 155. 
• James F Wilson. Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance.  University of Michigan Press, 2010: 194-5.

Queer Music Heritage.

Two own-voice impersonators

Sometimes we get only a snapshot of a person, and never find out what happened to them later.   Here are two trans woman surviving as performers, who are incidentally mentioned in books on other topics.  This is all that we have of them.

Loretta Zotto (193? - ?)

During the filming of Trouble Along the Way, 1953, about a failing Catholic college that employs a has-been sports coach (John Wayne) trying to regain his lost wife and daughter, director MichaelCurtiz (who made Casablanca and Mildred Pierce) was noticed spending time with Loretta Zotto, an extra on the cast.   Zotto was tall, beautiful, well-endowed and was compared to film-star Jane Russell.   

One night Judy Garland, Peter Lawford and Merv Griffin (who had an uncredited voice part in the film) went to the West Hollywood club, Tabu.   Judy said: “I hear there's a drag queen there who does Judy Garland better than I do”.   

They sat through three ho-hum acts, and then the star, billed as Stormy Weather, came on and performed “The Trolley Song” from Meet Me in St Louis, 1944 and “Over the Rainbow”.   Judy graciously conceded that Stormy sang “Over the Rainbow” better than she did.   Merv recognized Stormy, instantly, as Loretta Zotto from the film set, and Peter scored a date with her, and reported back to the other two on Stormy’s actual genital sex.   

Merv blew his chances of a better, bigger part in Michael Curtiz’s next film by telling him that they knew.

• Darwin Porter.  Merv Griffin: A life in the Closet.  Blood Moon, 2009: 213-4.

Ruth Brown (194? - )

Ruth had a troubled career, divided between church gospel, drag bars and jail.  She  took the name of the well-known rhythm and blues singer, Ruth Brown, and was even presented in a night-club as if she were the Ruth Brown (several cis women also were so presented in other nightclubs).  

She was at the Stonewall riots, and performed at Harlem drag balls.

In 1976 Marion Williams, the gospel and blues singer, appearing at New York’s Town Hall encouraged the audience to sing along, but they were unable to match her range.   It was Ruth who stepped down from the balcony and sang a duet with Marion. 

A few years later, when Anthony Heilbut had produced Marion’s album I’ve Come So Far, a group of critics and fans were invited to hear her sing.   Among them were a group of what were taken to be church ladies, but were not.  Among them was Ruth who led the ladies in holy dance.   

Heilbut then got to know Ruth. In the late 1980s, he accepted her invitation to hear her sing at Sally’s Hideaway.  He describes her act: 

“She was indeed a powerhouse, a combination of Wilson Picket and Little Richard, but better than either.  She sang a typical soul repertory, including songs that predated her audience.”

·         William G Hawkeswood.  One of the Children: Gay Black Men in Harlem.  University of California Press,1996 :86.

·         Chip Deffaa.  Blue Rhythms: Six Lives in Rhythm and Blues.  University of Illinois Press,1996: 263n9.

·         Anthony Heilbut.  The Fan Who Knew Too Much: Aretha Franklin, the Rise of the Soap Opera, Children of the Gospel Church, and Other Meditations.  Alfred A Knopf, 2012: 22-5, 30, 34-5, 48, 70, 109.

La Bella Otero (187?–?) performer, sex worker

Luis D, from Madrid, sometimes said that he became homosexual after being seduced by a neighbour. On arrival in Buenos Aires at the end of the 19^th century, she took the name La Bella Otero after the celebrated Spanish actor-dancer.

However in the life history that she wrote for Dr Francisco de Veyga she said that she always considered herself a woman, and had worn female clothing all her life. She had married a man and borne two children before being widowed. De Veyga commented:

“Only exceptionally does he wear male garb, preferring feminine accoutrements, which he wears with ease and even elegance. He leaves his house seldom and generally in a carriage, to avoid tiresome street incidents that would be impossible to evade, given the relative notoriety among the aficionados of the genre”.

Her account was published by de Veyga separately from that of Aurora and Rosita. He commented that Otero did not

“hide very well his desire to figure as a case history in the book on sexual inversion that we are preparing”.

• Francisco de Veyga, "La inversion adquirida-Tipo profesional:' Archivos de Psiquiatria y Criminologia, II, 1903: 493-4.
• Francisco de Veyga, "La inversion sexual congenita:' Archivos de Psiquiatria y Criminologia, I, 1902.
• Jorge Salessi. “The Argentine Dissemination of Homosexuality, 1890-1914”. Journal of the History of Sexuality, 4, 3, Jan 1994: 356-8, 361.
• Jorge Salessi & Patrick O’Conner. “For Carnival, Clinic and Camera: Argentina’s Turn of the Century Drag Culture Performs ‘Woman’”. In Diana Taylor & Juan Villegas Morales (eds). Negotiating Performance: Gender, Sexuality, and Theatricality in Latin/O America.Duke University Press, 1994: 266-8.
• María Belén Ciancio & Alejandra Gabriele. “El archivo positivista como dispositivo visual-verbal. Fotografía, feminidad anómala y fabulación”. Mora (Buenos Aires), 18,1, ene/jul 2012. Online.

Rosita de la Plata (187? - ? ) female impersonator

In the 1890s and the first few years of the 20th century, it was a lot more difficult to proceed down the transgender path.   Many settled just for stage performance.   The person described here, a porteña  (a resident of Buenos Aires) for whom we have neither a male nor a female name, just a performance name, could be regarded as either a heterosexual transvestite or a heterosexual drag queen, a full eight years before Hirschfeld's book that is given credit for pointing out that not all transvestites were 'homosexual'.

De Veyga collected several gay and trans life stories in the first few years of the century.   While he was ahead of Hirschfeld in doing this, he published only in a journal, and never published a book on the topic.  In 1904 de Veyga left off his clinical histories and became the Surgeon General of the Argentine army.

(all quotes are translations from de Veyga by Salessi)

In 1895 in Buenos Aires, a city quickly growing, two-thirds of the immigrant population were men; in 1914, nearly four fifths of Buenos Aires male adults were foreigners. (statistics given in Salessi)

“Rosita” was one of the minority of men to have a wife in the city. He began by wearing costumes during carnival in the 1890s, continued to do so at other times of the year. He performed in song and dance groups, became well known in the local gay scene, “mixing with uranists of every species".

He took the name “Rosita de la Plata” which was already being used by an Argentinian circus equestrienne. For a while his fame surpassed that of the other Rosita, although with time other performers displaced him.

“To what does he owe his fame? To very little, to be sure. To his care in always lying in wait for parties and to his indefatigable activity in the labour of feminine imitation. ‘Rosita’ follows fashion, and sets the fashion for his peers. Here, he is portrayed in the photograph, in a matinee dress, inciting envy in many for his gracious air and arrogance at the same time. She has imposed the fashion of several costumes and of these outrageous portraits that seem to be a speciality of these people, so idiosyncratic are they.”

de Veyga captioned the photograph: “Rosita de la Plata - Inverted by Suggestion”.

• Francisco de Veyga, "La inversion sexual adquirida,"Archivosl, 1903: 203.
• Jorge Salessi. “The Argentine Dissemination of Homosexuality, 1890-1914”. Journal of the History of Sexuality, 4, 3, Jan 1994: 337-368.
• Jorge Salessi & Patrick O’Conner. “For Carnival, Clinic and Camera: Argentina’s Turn of the Century Drag Culture Performs ‘Woman’”. In Diana Taylor & Juan Villegas Morales (eds). Negotiating Performance: Gender, Sexuality, and Theatricality in Latin/O America.Duke University Press, 1994: 263-273.

Vicki Strasberg (193?–?) sex worker

Vicki took her surname in homage to Susan Strasberg, the daughter of Lee, the famous acting teacher.

Vicki was 6 feet (1.8 m), on hormones and gorging on food to be plumper and more sexually desirable, when she met photographer Diane Arbus in 1969. She lived full-time as a woman, and none of her sex customers had ever complained. She was ogled wherever she went.

Arbus commented: She had "the most unbelievable walk. I couldn't see the man in her."

Vicki knew how to use a knife, tortured her cats and once had stabbed a customer. For that she was sent to the Tombs jail.

Vicki took to Diane and gave her presents (which she had stolen from department stores). Vicki invited Diane to her birthday party, and Diane found that she was the only guest.  But she took one of her best known photographs.

• The London Magazine, 24,7-12: 75.
  
• Albert Goldbarth. Across the Layers: Poems Old and New. University of Georgia Press, 1993: 214.
  
• Patricia Bosworth. Diane Arbus: A Biography. WW Norton, 2006: 226.
  

Brenda Lee (1948 – 1996) sex worker, business woman, Aids activist.

Cicero Caetano was born in Bodocó, Pernambuco, Brazil (map)and moved to Bexiga in São Paulo at the age of 14. Using the name Brenda Lee, she was one of the first travesties to work in Paris in the late 1970s as a prostitute.


She returned to São Paulo in 1984 and bought a house in the Bixiga neighbourhood at rua Major Diogo, 779, which she decorated in gold and white, inside and out. Her car was also done in the same colours. She turned the building into a Casa de Apoio to care for those with HIV who were rejected by their relatives, as many were after a series of murders of travesties in the South Zone of Sao Paulo in 1985.

It started with three patients and in 1988 an agreement was signed with the São Paulo Ministry of Health, and in 1992 was legally incorporated. She worked with the Emilio Ribas Hospital which took those who needed hospitalization. Brenda also had a car repair business and a hairdressers in the building.

In 1987 she was featured in Pierre-Alain Meier’s documentary about São Paulo trans women.

In 1996 she was brutally murdered and her body found in an abandoned VW van, after she went to sort out a cheque that had been altered after she signed it. She was given a full Catholic funeral with representation from the Cardinal-Archbishop.

A Brazilian award for defending human rights was named the Brenda Lee Award.

* Not the Country singer.

• Moira Ashford. “Escaping Manhood”. New Internationalist. 175, September 1987. www.newint.org/issue175/queer.htm.
• Pierre-Alain Meier & Matthias Kalin (dir). Douleur D’Amour. With Brenda Lee and others. Brazil/Switzerland 59 mins 1987.
• Frederick L. Whitam “Culturally Universal Aspects of Male Homosexual Transvestites and Transsexuals”. In Bonnie Bullough, Vern Bullough & James Elias (eds). Gender Blending. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books. 1997:199.
• “Brenda Lee“. Wikipédia, a enciclopédia livre. pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenda_Lee.
• Confissões agridoces [de uma sereia trans]. 09 Janeiro 2009. aquariodasereia.blogspot.com/2009/01/biografias-trans-da-cplp-brenda-lee.html.
• Rita Colaço. “Trans in Memorian: Brenda Lee, O anjo de guarda des Travestis”. Astra Rio: Associacao des Travestis e Transexuais do estado do RJ. 22 Janeiro 2010. associacaodastravestisetransexuaisrj.blogspot.com/2010/01/trans-in-memorian-brenda-lee-o-anjo-da.html.

Mario Montez (1935 - 2013) underground film actor

++updated March 2014

René Rivera was a Puerto Rican New Yorker, born 1935, a drag performer, with a day job as a postal worker or maybe as shipping clerk, who appeared in many New York under-ground films and avant-garde plays in the period 1963-6, working with the seminal directors of the genre: Jack Smith, Ron Rice, Bill Vehr, Charles Ludlam, Avery Willard and Andy Warhol. He designed and sewed most of his costumes, and often those of his co-actors.

He was cast-listed as Dolores Flores in Flaming Creatures, 1963, his debut, an underground film of an extended party on the roof of the Windsor cinema in New York's Lower East Side with lots of drag and nudity, and where Flores dances a fandango. The film became famous when New York City police seized the print at the premier.

He then became Mario Montez in homage to the 1940s film star, Maria Montez. Mario's characters were all much alike: flamboyant and narcissistic, and as the milieu was one where acting per se was suspect, Mario mainly played Mario - no matter the character's name. The distinction observed between cross-acting and androgynous characters loses its meaning in these films.

The only film where Mario is actually stated to be a 'man' is in Warhol's Screen Test Number 2, 1965, with Salvador Dalí and Lou Reed, where he is confronted about his gender and must admit that he is male, but he does so, he says, only because he is a woman. This was redone the next year on stage by the Ridiculous Theatre Company, again with Montez.

Mario was a guest performer singing "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend" in the seminal film The Queen, 1968, hosted by Jack Doroshow (Sabrina).

In  1977, René moved to Orlando, Florida where he worked in clerical jobs.   In 2006 he was featured in a documentary about filmmaker Jack Smith.  In the last few years of his life he again appeared in avant-garde films, and was honored:  March 2010, Montez was honored by Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race; February 2012, Montez was honored with the Special Teddy Award 2012 at the Berlinale for her outstanding role in underground film history.

He died of a stroke in 2013, aged 78. 

• Avery Willard. Female Impersonation. New York: Regiment Publications. 95 pp 1971: 11-15. Online at: www.queermusicheritage.us/fem-willard4.html.
• “Mario Montez”. WarholStars. www.warholstars.org/warholfilm/warhol5.html.

EN.WIKIPEDIA