As the war in Ukraine surges on and Russia does its best to subjugate or, if that doesn’t work, wipe out the Ukrainians and their culture, it’s worth noting that the Soviet Union did it’s best to do something similar to Sergei Parajanov in the 1960s – 1980s.
In today’s LGBTQ community the gay male has two aspects of his personality that might be considered by some as somewhat outré: “drag or drag queens – men dressing as women” and “beefcake males – hyper-muscular men.” Their true origins date from the ancient Greeks where the muscular male body was celebrated in stone and reflected in the images of the gods and where the female characters in plays were performed by boys. However, today’s interest in drag queens and beefcake males actually date from end of the 19th Century.
As described in a previous blog, Drag Before RuPaul, drag grew out of the blackface minstrel show, which evolved into vaudeville. The origin of the term drag is uncertain; the first recorded use of drag in reference to actors dressed in women’s clothing is from 1870. It may have been based on the term “grand rag” which was historically used for a masquerade ball.
With vaudeville becoming more popular, it allowed female impersonators to become popular as well. At this time being a female impersonator was seen as something for the straight white male, and any deviation was punished.
The most successful female Impersonator of his day, seen here in a 1915 portrait of him in COUSIN LUCY, a Broadway play at the Cohan Theatre with music by Jerome Kern.
In the early to mid-1900s, female impersonation became identified with homosexuality and thus criminality, so it had to change forms and locations. It moved from being popular mainstream entertainment to something done only at night in disreputable areas, such as San Francisco’s Tenderloin. Here female impersonation started to evolve into what we today know as drag and drag queens came to prominence in these clubs. People went to these nightclubs to play with the boundaries of gender and sexuality and it became a place for the LGBT community, especially gay men, to feel accepted.
Finocchios was a San Francisco cabaret which offered drag shows and was in business for over three quarters of a century. Featuring a roster of drag performers, it may well have been the longest-lived club of this kind in the US, lasting from 1936 to 1999. The booklet contains portraits of various of the establishment’s drag performers.
Craig Russell was an actor and self-identified female impersonator, whose roster included his takes on Bette Midler, Anita Bryant, Shirley Bassey, Judy Garland, Bette Davis and Tallulah Bankhead. By 1971 he was a regular performer in Toronto gay clubs, and soon after had a major international career. He starred in the 1977 movie OUTRAGEOUS! which added to his reputation.
This poster is for a Carnegie Hall event one year after that film’s release.
Originally born Harris Glen Milstead just after the end of WWII, Baltimore’s most outrageous resident eventually became the international icon of bad taste cinema, Divine, as the always shocking and highly entertaining transvestite performer/drag queen.
Milstead met maverick film director & good friend, John Waters, at high school in Baltimore, and the two combined to star in and direct several ultra low budget, taboo breaking cult films of the early 1970s. Their most famous being the amazing Pink Flamingos (1972). Divine also starred as career criminal Dawn Davenport in Female Trouble (1974), as bored housewife Francine Fishpaw in Polyester (1981), as outlaw gal Rosie Velez in Lust in the Dust (1984) and in Waters’ loving salute to teen dance TV shows as Ricki Lake’s mother in the superb Hairspray (1988).
In 1959 Drag went mainstream becoming the comic centerpiece for the motion picture, Some Like It Hot, directed, produced and co-written by Billy Wilder. It stars Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon. The film is about two musicians (Curtis and Lemmon) who disguise themselves by dressing as women in order to escape from mafia gangsters whom they witnessed committing a crime.
It opened to critical and commercial success and is considered to be one of the greatest films of all time. The film received six Academy Award nominations, including Best Actor, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay, winning for Best Costume Design. In 1989, the Library of Congress selected it as one of the first 25 films for preservation in the United States National Film Registry for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.
The term “beefcake” came along in October of 1949. The Chronicle Telegram of Elyria, Ohio noted that movie moguls realized that the female half of the population enjoyed seeing well-built men. As a result, movies began featuring males with muscled chests and arms stripped to the waist and motion picture cameramen transformed “cheesecake, which described beautifully “built” women into “beefcake” to describe equally “built” men. The term was believed to be first formally used by Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky.
While the term “beefcake” came into use in the late 1940s, Eugene Sandow (born Friedrich Wilhelm Müller: April 2, 1867 – 14 October 1925) was a Prussian bodybuilder and showman and was the first body builder to turn body building into a global business. He began by entering strongman competitions, and in 1889 encouraged to travel to London to take part in a strongmen competition. Sandow handily beat the reigning champion and won instant fame and recognition for his strength. This launched him on his career as an athletic superstar.
Soon he was receiving requests from all over Britain for performances. He became so famous, Florenz Ziegfeld arranged to display Sandow at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Ziegfeld found that the audience was more fascinated by Sandow’s bulging muscles than by the amount of weight he was lifting, so Ziegfeld had Sandow move in poses which he dubbed “muscle display performances.” Sandow quickly became Ziegfeld’s first star.
A shrewd business man, while on tour in the United States, Sandow gave one of his “muscle display performances” at the 1894 California Mid-Winter International Exposition in Golden Gate Park at the “Vienna Prater” Theater and was a sensation. On his return to England, he opened the first of his Institutes of Physical Culture, where he taught methods of exercise, dietary habits and weight training.
His ideas on physical fitness were novel at the time and had a tremendous impact. The Sandow Institute was an early gymnasium that was open to the public for exercise. In 1898 he also founded a monthly periodical, Sandow’s Magazine of Physical Culture that was dedicated to all aspects of physical culture. This was accompanied by a series of books published between 1897 and 1904 – the last of which coined the term ‘bodybuilding’ in the title (as “body-building”).
In 1901, Sandow organized the world’s first major bodybuilding competition in London’s Royal Albert Hall. The venue was so full that people were turned away from the door. The three judges presiding over the contest were Sir Charles Lawes the sculptor, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle the author, and Sandow himself.
Sandow travelled around the world on tours to countries as varied as South Africa, India, Japan, Australia, New Zealand. At his own expense, from 1909 he provided training for would-be recruits to the Territorial Army, to bring them up to entrance fitness standards, and did the same for volunteers for active service in World War I
Sandow’s resemblance to the physiques found on classical Greek and Roman sculpture was no accident, as he measured the statues in museums and helped to develop “The Grecian Ideal” as a formula for the “perfect physique”. Sandow built his physique to the exact proportions of his Grecian Ideal, and is considered the father of modern bodybuilding, as one of the first athletes to intentionally develop his musculature to predetermined dimensions.
A very famous image created by Herb Ritts entitled “Fred with Tyres” from the “Bodyshop, 1984” series. This poster was created for an exhibit at the Staley-Wise Gallery in New York. It was subsequently signed and dated “1988” by Ritts in ink at the extreme bottom right.
A poster with artwork by Stefan for a popular West Village gay bar on Christopher Street in NYC (back in the day when Christopher Street was a popular cruising area).
An exceedingly scarce oversize color photo of a naked Joe Dallesandro in his breakthrough starring role as a bisexual heroin addict who is working the streets as a gay prostitute to support his and his bisexual wife’s addiction. “Dallesandro is generally considered to be the most famous male sex symbol of American underground films of the 20th century, as well as a sex symbol of gay subculture.”Fine
Mark Wahlberg, then performing as Marky Mark, did a few underwear ads and accompanying posters for Calvin Klein in 1992. This accompanied another poster, in which he grabbed his crotch. Since this poster was only sent to clothing stores, very few originals of it survived.
This poster illustrates part of a wall mural created by queer painter and illustrator Dom Orejudos (under the pen name Etienne) for this bar, a long-lived Chicago leather venue, which was divided into three spaces — a large front room, a middle bar and a dimly-lit back room (and in that back room a strict dress code was enforced, requiring that “a major article of leather, rubber or uniform or camouflage” be worn).
Poster from the famous New York gay disco (see our blog The Saint Collection for a sampling of the posters, and a description of the disco and its place in the gay subculture of New York). The club opened September 30, 1980, and closed in 1988; however, it continued on through a variety of pop-up events which went on and continued into this century. Most of the posters from this period were created during the era of the AIDS crisis.
.
In honor of Black History Month we celebrate the ”What Becomes A Legend Most” icon, Lena Horne. When Lena Horne was asked to become the image for Blackglama’s 1969 ad campaign poster (see above), she follows in the heels of such female icons as Marlene Dietrich and Joan Crawford; she was the first African American celebrity to do so. For more information see: https://www.walterfilm.com/shop/posters/lena-horne-blackglama-poster/
African-American Memorabilia, Black Memorabilia, Hollywood Movie Memorabilia, Movie Star Photos For Sale, Original Vintage Lobby Cards
The term “Drag” is the shortened version of “Drag Queen” which, in many circles today, is a derogatory description of men who like to dress as women either as a life choice or as a female impersonator.
RuPaul changed “Drag Queen” to “Drag” in 2009, when he became an international celebrity, turning his success as RuPaul Female Impersonator, recording artist, spokesperson, actor, author and talk show host into a reality competition television series, RuPaul’s Drag Race, which he produces, hosts and judges to this day.
The success of that show has spread around the world in a variety of formats. For RuPaul’s Drag Race, he has received eleven Primetime Emmy Awards, becoming the most-awarded person of color in the history of the Primetime Emmys. In 2017, he was included in the annual Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world. Outside of film and television, he continues to write and record music, releasing fourteen studio albums as of 2022. His success couples the entertainment value of Drag with the sensibilities of an enlightened audience.
Boys dressing as women was a requirement of actors in all of Shakespeare’s plays as it was illegal for women to appear on the stage. It wasn’t until the restoration of Charles II of England and bawdy “Restoration comedy” became a recognizable genre that theatre licenses granted by Charles required that female parts be played by “their natural performers”, rather than by boys.
In the late 1800s to the mid-1900s, pantomime dames became a popular form of female impersonation in England and Europe. This was the first era of female impersonation to use comedy as part of the performance, contrasting with the serious Shakespearean tragedies and Italian operas. The dame became a stock character with a range of attitudes from “charwoman” to “grande dame and continues today in British “Pantos.” These “entertainments” can be found across England during the Christmas holiday season where well-known male actors have great fun impersonating ‘evil queens’ and ‘nasty sisters’.
The first person known to describe himself as “the queen of drag” was William Dorsey Swann, an African American, born enslaved in Hancock, Maryland, who in the 1880s started hosting drag balls in Washington, DC attended by other men who were formerly enslaved, and often raided by the police.
Development of the drag queen in the United States was influenced by the development of the blackface minstrel show. Originally the white performers would only mock African American men, but as time went on, they found it amusing to mock African American femininity as well. They performed in comedic skits, dances, and “wench” songs.
The broad comedic stylings of the minstrel shows helped develop the vaudeville shows of the late 1800s to the early 1900s. With the United States shifting demographics, including the shift from farms to cities, Great Migration of African Americans, and an influx of immigrants, vaudeville’s broad comedy and music expanded the audience from minstrelsy.
With vaudeville becoming more popular, it allowed female impersonators to become popular as well. Many female impersonators started with low comedy in vaudeville and worked their way up to perform as the prima donna. They were known to perform song and dance routines with multiple outfit changes.
At this time being a female impersonator was seen as something for the straight white male, and any deviation was punished. Connection with sex work and homosexuality eventually led to the decline of vaudeville during the Progressive Era. Both the minstrelsy and vaudeville eras of female impersonation led to an association with music, dance, and comedy that still lasts today
(Above – Vintage original 41 x 27” (104 x 69 cm.) one sheet poster, USA. Julian Eltinge, dir: William De Mille; Paramount. On linen, with some touchups in blank margins and along old fold lines, very good+. View Poster)
(May 14, 1881 – March 7, 1941), born William Julian Dalton, was an American stage and film actor and female impersonator. As his star began to rise, he appeared in vaudeville and toured Europe and the United States, even giving a command performance before King Edward VII. Eltinge appeared in a series of musical comedies written specifically for his talents starting in 1910 with The Fascinating Widow.
The success of The Fascinating Widow led producer A. H. Woods to give Eltinge one of the entertainment industry’s highest honors, having a theatre named for him. A year to the day that The Fascinating Widow opened, Woods opened the Eltinge Theatre on New York’s 42nd Street.
Hollywood beckoned Eltinge and in 1917 he appeared in his first feature film, The Countess Charming. This led to other films, including 1918’s The Isle of Love with Rudolph Valentino and Virginia Rappe. By the time Eltinge arrived in Hollywood, he was considered one of the highest paid actors on the American stage.
In the early to mid-1900s, female impersonation had become tied to the LGBT community and thus criminality, so it had to change forms and locations. It moved from being popular mainstream entertainment to something done only at night in disreputable areas, such as San Francisco’s Tenderloin.
Here female impersonation started to evolve into what we today know as drag and drag queens. Drag queens first came to prominence in these clubs. People went to these nightclubs to play with the boundaries of gender and sexuality and it became a place for the LGBT community, especially gay men, to feel accepted.
As LGBT culture has slowly become more accepted in American society, drag has also become more acceptable in today’s society and now, with RuPaul and RuPaul’s Drag Race, it has become an international sensation.
––Wikipedia
Canadian Russell Craig Eadie, who preferred to go by his stage name of Craig Russell, made a career for himself impersonating a wide range of female artists. His diverse repertoire included Carol Channing, Bette Davis, Mae West, Shirley Bassey and even Anita Bryant.
Promotional poster for the Brazilian singing duo LES ETOILES, which consisted of Rolando Faria and Luiz Antonio, who made a splash in Europe performing in full drag.
Poster designed by Mel Byars for New York City stage production of DRAG QUEENS FROM OUTER SPACE by Sky Gilbert. Gilbert is a preeminent name in LGBTQ theater, and an enormous influence on Canadian theater. This play followed Gilbert’s equally successful DRAG QUEENS ON TRIAL (1985).
Very scarce poster (the OCLC records no known copy) for a 1968 run of the first play written by and starring Andy Warhol superstar Jackie Curtis. This play had had its world premiere a year before, also at the Playwright’s Workshop, and an entirely different poster was created for this 1968 revival.
Jackie performed as both a man and a woman throughout her career. While performing in drag, Curtis would typically wear lipstick, glitter, bright red hair, ripped dresses, and stockings. Curtis pioneered this combination of trashy and glamour, a style that has prompted assertions that Curtis inspired the glitter rock or glam rock movement of the 1970s.
Drag, drag artist, Drag Queens, famous American drag performer, female impersonator, RuPaul
New York: Booth Theatre, [1988]. Vintage original 36 x 24 1/2″ (92 x 62 cm.) poster, USA. Folded (as issued), JUST ABOUT FINE. VIEW DETAILS
Poster for SANDRA BERNHARD: I’M STILL HERE… DAMN IT, a one-woman comedy show given in a limited engagement on Broadway, which ran from November 5, 1988 to January 2, 1989. In the late 1980s,
In the middle of the 1970s Sandra Bernhard became a staple at The Comedy Store. As her popularity as a comedian grew, in 1977 she was cast as a supporting player on The Richard Pryor Show. Her big break came in 1983 when she was cast by Martin Scorsese to star as stalker and kidnapper Masha in the film The King of Comedy for which she won the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actress. Bernhard was also a frequent guest on David Letterman’s NBC program Late Night with David Letterman, making 28 appearances starting in 1983.
She began performing her first one-woman show called I’m Your Woman in 1985, and an album version was released. She launched an off-Broadway one-woman show called Without You, I’m Nothing, With You, I’m Not Much Better in 1988.
It was during the run of ‘Without You, I’m Nothing, With You, I’m Not Much Better’ that Bernhard appeared with her then-good friend (and rumored lover) Madonna on a 1988 episode of Late Night with David Letterman. The two alluded to their romantic relationship and staged a sexy confrontation; the appearance received much publicity.
In 1991, Bernhard began playing the role of Nancy Bartlett on the hit sitcom Roseanne. She appeared in 33 episodes between 1991 and 1997 and was one of the first actresses to portray an openly bisexual recurring character on American television.
Bernhard returned to Broadway in 1998 with the show I’m Still Here… Damn It!, recorded for a live comedy album. At that time of the show, Bernhard was pregnant. She gave birth to daughter Cicely Yasin Bernhard on July 4, 1998 whom she has raised with her longtime partner, Sara Switzer. Bernhard is bisexual and a strong supporter of gay rights.
For more information about her career, please visit Wikipedia from which this content was extracted.
UC BERKELEY The Gay People’s Union proudly presents: An Evening with CASSELBERRY & DUPREE plus special guest STEVEN GROSSMAN (May 30, 1980) Vintage original 17 x 11″ (43 x 27 cm.) musical performance poster. Slight marginal creasing, JUST ABOUT FINE. VIEW DETAILS
Jaqu’e Dupree and J. Casselberry met in high school and have, for more than a decade, worked together in a duo called, quite naturally, Casselberry-Dupree.
The duo has performed with Harry Belafonte and Whoopi Goldberg and in the Academy Award-nominated documentaries “Art Is” and “The Life and Times of Harvey Milk.”
“We have different backgrounds,” says Dupree, explaining the diversity of their music. “I grew up listening to church music, and J. grew up listening to big band and classical.” “Our music comes from the many places we’ve been to as Blackwomen and Lesbians in America. We want to sing, we want to be heard, we want you to listen.”
Vintage original 20 x 14″ (51 x 36 cm.) window card poster. Minimal bumping at edges, JUST ABOUT FINE. VIEW DETAILS
“Employing a heavily cut text and minimalist setting, the production relied on the power of voice to illuminate Shakespeare’s poetry. Yet most viewers were unable to see past Anderson’s seventy-three-year-old female body to the spirit of her Hamlet, and her performance was widely criticized. Despite its disappointing reception at the time…, Anderson’s Hamlet was an extraordinary exercise in boundary crossing—rejecting conventions of Shakespearean performance alongside those of age and gender. Furthermore it refused to be aligned with either classical theatre or avant-garde performance, existing in a state of otherness and demanding to be assessed on its own terms.” (Gregory, “Crossing Genre,” JADT, vol. 26, No. 1.)
Dame Frances Margaret Anderson, AC, DBE (10 February 1897 – 3 January 1992), known professionally as Judith Anderson, was an Australian actress who had a successful career in stage, film and television. A preeminent stage actress in her era, she won two Emmy Awards and a Tony Award and was also nominated for a Grammy Award and an Academy Award. She is considered one of the 20th century’s greatest classical stage actors.
Judith Anderson had an extraordinary career and was married twice, declaring that “neither experience was a jolly holiday.”
To see the breadth and depth of her career please visit Wikipedia.
Three vintage original 8 x 10″ (20 x 25 cm.) photos, USA. One photo has diagonal creases near bottom and other signs of light handling, VERY GOOD-; the other two are linen-backed keybook photos, NEAR FINE. VIEW DETAILS
Dorothy Emma Arzner (January 3, 1897 – October 1, 1979) was an American film director whose career in Hollywood spanned from the silent era from 1927 until her retirement from feature directing in 1943. Arzner made a total of twenty films and launched the careers of a number of Hollywood actresses, including Katharine Hepburn, Rosalind Russell, and Lucille Ball. Additionally, Arzner was the first woman to join the Directors Guild of America and the first woman to direct a sound film.
Arzner would maintain a forty-year relationship with Marion Morgan, a dancer and choreographer who was ten years older than Arzner. Even though she tried to keep her private life as private as possible, Arzner had been linked romantically with a number of actresses, including Alla Nazimova and Billie Burke. She never hid her sexual orientation, nor her identity; her clothing was unconventional for a woman of that time, she wore suits or straight dresses. In 1930, Arzner and Morgan moved to Mountain Oak Drive, where they lived until Morgan’s death in 1971.
Arzner’s Legacy
Arzner’s work, both as a female filmmaker and a lesbian filmmaker, has been an important area of film studies. Perhaps due to Arzner’s leaving Hollywood in the 1940s, her work had been all but forgotten until the 1970s when she was rediscovered by feminist film theorists. Since then Arzner’s films have been studied for their depictions of gender and female sexuality.
Wikepedia
Alla Nazimova, Billie Burke, Emmy Award Winner, Film Critics Award, lesbian filmmaker, member Directors Guild of America (DGA), The Comedy Store, Tony Award winner
Easily purchase pieces online with secure checkout, multiple payment options and global shipping.
_-_Eugen_Sandow_(1867-1925)-_1894-cropped.jpg){kind=link}