Spotlight shines once again on the late drag artist Doris Fish

by Matthew S. Bajko

Anew book released this month and an upcoming museum exhibit in San Francisco are once again shining a spotlight on the late drag artist Doris Fish, who dazzled the Bay Area and was the grand dame of Sydney’s Mardi Gras Parade during the 1980s. Her home country of Australia is feting Fish this month as it hosts World Pride in conjunction with its largest annual LGBTQ celebration.

“It is time, I think, time to acknowledge what a force of nature Doris was for sure. And the part she played in moving from the drag of the 1950s and 1960s and pulling drag out of where it was – not that there was anything wrong with that – but helping it to evolve,” said Bradley Chandler, a close friend who performed with Fish under the stage name of Miss X. “She was a force in the evolution of drag.”

Fish was the drag persona of Philip Clargo Mills, who was born on August 11, 1952. One of six siblings, he grew up in the Sydney suburb of Manly Vale. A gay man and art school student, he turned to prostitution to make money and became a member of Sylvia and the Synthetics, described as a Down Under version of the famed pioneering drag troupe the Cockettes of San Francisco.

As Craig Seligman, who befriended Mills in San Francisco, recounts in his new biography “Who Does That Bitch Think She Is? Doris Fish and the Rise of Drag,” the origin story of Doris Fish’s name depends on who is telling it. A friend of Mills’ claimed to have given him it due to his “old-lady drag,” while Mills told Seligman it was a nod to the actress Doris Day as well as a cat named Lillian Fish.

PublicAffairs, part of the Hachette Book Group, released Seligman’s book this week in

Australia and it goes on sale in the U.S. February 28. He drew on interviews he did for a profile about Mills that ran in the San Francisco Examiner in 1986, conducted additional interviews with Mills’ family and friends, as well as researched various archives in order to reconstruct not only Mills’ life story but also that of a number of his close friends and drag collaborators.

“Doris was one of the most interesting people I had ever known. If I didn’t tell Doris’ story, I feared no one would,” Seligman told the Bay Area Reporter during a video interview from Perth, Australia in early February. “The U.S. media is centered in New York and was more so then. I felt the story of drag and AIDS from a West Coast perspective has not yet been told.” Mills ended up moving to the City-by-theBay in the summer of 1976, having first visited the year prior. Over the ensuing years Mills would mostly call San Francisco home, but he would make near yearly pilgrimages back to Australia in December to spend the holidays with his parents and extended family.

He would stay for weeks on end in order to also connect with friends and work on fantastical floats and costumes for Sydney’s unique LGBTQ Pride parade. Mills also penned a column for the city’s gay newspaper Campaign.