At the center of the documentary is Flawless Sabrina, the organizer of the pageant and a prominent figure in the early ball scene, an underground subculture of pageant-style competitions started by queer people of color. More than two decades before Jennie Livingston’s “Paris Is Burning” brought New York City drag balls to the masses, director Frank Simon profiled contestants in the 1967 Miss All-America Camp Beauty Pageant, which attracted the likes of Andy Warhol as a judge. Somehow, the cat-and-mouse romance makes for the film’s most progressive moment, when the noticeably unladylike Daphne - likely a result of Lemmon’s resistance to being coached onset by the high-wire performer and drag artist Barbette - contemplates whether the much older suitor may just be her prince charming. Jerry (Lemmon) then ends up with millionaire problems of his own, as one of the seaside resort’s male audience members begins courting the double bass player’s female persona, Daphne. Their plan starts to get more complicated when Joe (Curtis), or Josephine in drag, falls for the troupe’s glamorous lead singer, Sugar Kane (Monroe), and begins moonlighting as a fictional, emotionally stunted millionaire to win her heart. Snatched.In Billy Wilder’s “Some Like It Hot,” Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon play opposite Marilyn Monroe as musicians who don drag to elude the mob and join an all-female band headed to Miami. The New York Times said of Milstead's '80s films: "Those who could get past the unremitting weirdness of Divine's performance discovered that the actor/actress had genuine talent, including a natural sense of comic timing and an uncanny gift for slapstick." He was also described as "one of the few truly radical and essential artists of the century… was an audacious symbol of man's quest for liberty and freedom." Since his death, Divine has remained a cult figure, particularly with those in the LGBT community.ĭisclosure as Edna Turnblad (archive footage)īEAT. In the 1970s, Milstead made the transition to theater and appeared in a number of productions, including Women Behind Bars and The Neon Woman, while continuing to star in such films as Polyester, Lust in the Dust and Hairspray. These films have since become cult classics. Concurrent with his acting career, he also had a successful career as a disco singer during the 1980s, at one point being described as "the most successful and in-demand disco performer in the world."īorn in Baltimore, Maryland, into a conservative, wealthy middle class family, he became involved with John Waters and his acting troupe, the Dreamlanders, in the mid-1960s and starred in a number of Waters's early films such as Mondo Trasho, Multiple Maniacs, Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble. He was often associated with independent filmmaker John Waters and starred in ten of Waters's films, usually in a leading role. Even so, he considered himself to be a character actor and performed male roles in a number of his later films. Described by People magazine as the "Drag Queen of the Century", Divine often performed female roles in both cinema and theater and also appeared in women's clothing in musical performances. Divine (19 October 1945 – 7 March 1988), né Harris Glenn Milstead, was an American actor, singer and drag queen.
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