Requiem for a drag queen

by Michael Yamashita

The New York Times obituary for Barry Humphries extolled the life and career of a beloved actor of stage, screen, and television. You could be forgiven if you didn’t recognize his name, but surely not if you did not recognize his alter ego. Humphries made a seven-decades long career in the United Kingdom, the U.S., and Australia by dispensing ad-lib sarcasm, wit, and humor with interview guests and audiences while under lilac-colored bouffant wigs, behind oversized rhinestone glasses, in sensible pumps, and donning garish, flamboyant gowns as the character Dame Edna Everage. Nowhere in this obituary – and those published in most media around the world – was the word “drag” mentioned.

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A performer adored by straight audiences – and a straight man himself – he was never fully embraced by gay audiences, who nonetheless regarded Dame Edna as an insinuation and a soft acceptance of drag in mainstream popular culture. Humphries had not explicitly referred to himself as a drag queen but insisted that as an actor, his portrayal of Dame Edna was a performance. He treated Dame Edna as an alternate, separate character and, while in character, spoke of himself, Barry Humphries, in the third person.

Never calling it drag but performance was a neat semantic trick that eased the discomfort of, and removed the stigma of, seeing a tall man in outlandish women’s attire who could get away with saying things usually left unsaid. Perhaps when a straight man dresses as a woman, even a ludicrous caricature that borders on misogyny, the audience can suspend belief just enough to experience a safe, nonthreatening flirtation with the subversive and the taboo in pursuit of humor. What began as a satire of a middle-class Australian housewife was soon elevated to the honorable, chivalrous title of dame, all the while retaining the same (although sometimes veiled and at times explicit) intolerant, right-adjacent tendencies. Periodic controversies would erupt following racist, anti-trans, or other offensive comments she made over her career. The amazing thing about Dame Edna was that she was never considered as a man in drag, she was simply Dame Edna.

Humphries’ craft as performance derived from the vaudeville, burlesque, and English pantomime traditions of transvestism combined with the adlibbing standup comic. He insisted he was neither a female impersonator nor a cross-dresser; but LGBTQ people were not fooled. It was obvious that Dame Edna was a clear appropriation of the gay drag queen aesthetic repackaged as a singular original creation for entertaining mainstream audiences. But, despite the qualifications, Dame Edna was a drag queen – although one without the genealogy, the history, or queendom of real drag queens, like two who also recently passed away and deserved far more recognition for their true and steadfast call to duty.

Real drag queens are performers who, like Humphries did, create a character, but, un like him, they are corporeal and rule over realms that extend beyond the stage and encompass real people and their communities. There is no fourth wall that provides a false safety barrier between contrived performance and “normal” people, between the conventions of the stage and “perceived” experience, between suspended reality and the hard truth. Real drag queens are rulers who rally their subjects using their creative talents and personas to cultivate community in order to transform their people and domains.

Darcelle XV

Darcelle XV was a real drag queen. By the time he died at 92 in March, Walter Cole was the cherished icon of Portland, Oregon’s LGBTQ community and had been certified as the world’s oldest living drag queen performer by Guinness World Records in 2016. Teased as a “sissy boy” growing up, Cole was drafted into the Army in 1952 and a few years later returned to Portland married with two children. In 1967 he purchased the derelict Demas Tavern in the rundown Old Town neighborhood and, soon after, came out to his wife (they remained legally married) and met his life and business partner Roxy Leroy Neuhardt, a dancer who helped to develop the club’s drag cabaret show. Neuhardt christened Cole’s drag persona Darcelle, whom

Cole described as “sequins on eyelids, lots of feathers, big hair, big jewels, and lots of wisecracks.” The club’s unofficial motto was “That’s No Lady, That’s Darcelle.”

Many shows and wigs later, in 1973 Darcelle was crowned the 15th empress of the Imperial Sovereign Rose Court of Oregon, an LGBTQ charitable organization of the Imperial Court System. The tavern was renamed Darcelle XV Showplace –home to the longest running drag show west of the Mississippi. The showplace grew into a Portland institution drawing straight and LGBTQ audiences, and is credited with forming relationships between the city’s LGBTQ and business and political communities. In 2011, Darcelle XV served as grand marshal of the Portland Rose Festival’s Starlight Parade and received the city’s Spirit of Portland Award. Darcelle XV was an advocate for LGBTQ youth and a tireless fundraiser for innumerable causes. The showplace also functioned as a de facto community center and would host Christmas Eve meals for the homeless. In 2017, a monument to Oregonians who died of AIDS was installed in a Portland cemetery and dedicated as the Darcelle XV AIDS Memorial in honor of her lifetime’s work for the cause. Over the course of her career, Darcelle XV created over 1,500 costumes for shows that raised hundreds of thousands of dollars over the decades. Darcelle XV Showplace was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2020 for its contribution to LGBTQ history.