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The Fabulous Sylvester

The Legend, The Music, The Seventies in San Francisco

Picador

GET READY FOR ME

    When I die,
    my angels,
    immaculate
    Black diva
    drag queens,
    all of them
    sequined
    and seductive,
    some of them
    will come back
    to haunt you,
    I promise,
    honey chil'.

— Essex Hemphill, from "The Tomb of Sorrow"

Back in the 1960s, when Tiki Lofton was a boy, she used to wait until the eleven o'clock flight took off from LAX, right over her grandmother's house, and as the jet vroomed and her grandmother dozed in front of the evening news, Tiki would ease open her bedroom window and climb out to meet Monique Hudson. The plane's tiny wing lights blinked in the California sky, specks of sparkle over unglamorous Inglewood. Tiki always left her necessities — one of her grandma's wigs, preferably red, and an outfit, preferably shiny — outside the window. She would grab her goodie bag, and Monique would show up on the street corner with hers, and they'd head over to one of the Disquotay apartments, like one on Ninety-second and Vermont that Miss Larry had rented, and beat their faces and rat their wigs and listen to music and smoke weed and drink like the teenagers they had recently become.

The apartments were usually big, with two or three people sharing a few bedrooms. But the living rooms barely had furniture, as the Disquotays needed lots of room for other endeavors. On party nights, it was like an assembly line. You'd lie down on the floor and one person would dust your face, and then you'd sit up and Tammi* would do the eyes and blush the cheeks and paint the lips with meringue lipstick. Dooni, who would later become the Fabulous Sylvester, would do your hair and move on down the line: wig, wig, wig, wig, wig. You'd put on two pairs of eyelashes, top and bottom both, just like a cover girl. Your face would be like a picture. You'd slip into a girdle and adjust your water-balloon titties; Monique or Dooni would fix up your outfit; and then you'd head off — a gang of incharge glamour girls — following the noise to the party in Watts or Compton or wherever.

The first Disquotay bash that Tiki went to was over on 120th and Athens, at Etta James's house, sometime around 1965. Etta, who would later be inducted into both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (largely on the strength of her 1961 hit "At Last") and the Betty Ford Center (largely on the strength of her smack addiction), was already a recording star and a friend to many local Los Angeles drag queens, with whom she shared a brazen sensibility and a taste for platinum hair and pumps. When Etta James was out of town, her house-sitter was Miss Foxy, whom the queens called the Jack-o-Lantern, or the Pumpkin, on account of her wide, gap-toothed smile. On one visit to the Etta James residence, Foxy's friend Miss Larry Hines had declared the place "made for a party," and sent out the call to gather. Had she known about any of this, says former Disquotay Diane Moorehead, "Etta James woulda killed Foxy and Larry."

* * *

Tiki hadn't started dressing vet, and wasn't yet named Tiki. She was still a pretty gay boy, skin pearly smooth and light. To go to that first party, she had worn a cowboy hat, big wide bell-bottoms, and earrings. For Tiki, walking into that particular scene had been like leaving black and white for Technicolor. The house, with its swimming pool and fireplace, had stunned her. Women, drag queens, and guys, all sending joyful noises in Tiki's direction; the music had been jumping: Walter Jackson's version of "Lee Cross," Jr. Walker & the All Stars' "Shotgun," "Nowhere to Run" by Martha and the Vandellas, Fontella Bass singing "Rescue Me." Gay kids all perched on gigantic speakers, singing and carrying on. I said shotgun! Shoot him 'fore he run now. Folks were dancing, jumping into the pool. Nowhere to run to, baby, they'd scream-sung, nowhere to hide. "Ooh, I like this," Tiki had said to herself. "This here — honey, where is this world?" Within months, she would be a full-fledged Disquotay, made-up, bewigged, bejeweled.

A Disquotay party was an art form. During the week, a few club members would head out to Dolphin's of Hollywood to get the latest 45 or eight-track, often something Dooni had heard on KGFJ, where the Magnificent Montague would cry "Burn, baby, burn!" while spinning something new and hot. The club members would then meet for "music appreciation night," to play records and familiarize themselves with the new material. "Just to get ready, honey, you had to," says Diane.

Out on Vermont Street, where there were several black nightclubs, they'd pass out the address of that night's get-together. Or someone would decide to throw a party, and word of mouth would fill up the place. Outside, cars would be double-parked for blocks around, and there was a line to get in. "You would see Cadillacs, Jaguars, Mercedes-Benzes, low-riders, Momma and Daddy's car," Diane says. "You had bulldaggers, femmes, straight men, straight women, wanting just to party," says former Disquotay Jackie Hoyle, "and just to see us."

The Disquotays worked on their outfits the whole week. Some would buy clothes, some would have them made, and some would use whatever was handy. They'd buy makeup and wigs — preferably human-hair ones — or steal them, or pay someone else to steal them. When it came time to join the party they would sit outside on the cars and wait. Every Disquotay wanted to be the last to arrive — the one who steals the show. Everyone wanted to enter with the right song backing them. So they'd wait, sometimes an hour or more, until their tune hit, the song that matched their particular fabulousness on that particular night. Only then would they walk.

Inside, there might be topless dancers on top of tables, straight folks who'd wandered in from nightclubs, and, of course, black drag queens galore. 'Cause I know that beauty's only skin deep, yeah, yeah yeah. People danced to the Temptations, the Rolling Stones, Barbara Lewis, Wilson Pickett, Martha Reeves, Marvin Gaye. Ride, Sally, ride. The Disquotays themselves were more to be looked at than touched. They had taken bubble baths and washed themselves with Jean Naté. They might be willing to get nasty later in the evening, but they had reputations and hairstyles to uphold, and they worked way too hard on their Max Factor to let just anybody mess it up early on.

"We were not allowed to fuck during the party, because we were ladies," Jackie Hoyle says. Their parties, though, were unrestrained. "We had the pimps, we had the drug dealers, we had the college boys. We had the butch queens out in the driveways taking care of their business. It was a lot of punks, honey, in the driveway, suckin' all night long," Diane says. "We'd be inside with our perfume and our dresses on, hostessing. We were dancing queens." It takes two, baby. Marijuana was still heavily penalized, so some folks would wear big Afros, and upon arrival they'd pull four or five joints right out of their hair. A good song would seem to go on forever. "Four more bars!" a Disquotay would scream, and whoever was spinning would back that record up and start it all over again, seven or eight times, right when it was getting to the good part, teasing you until you were really feeling it, giving it to you just when you really had to have it. I can't get no. Satisfaction. I try and I try and I try and I try.

Time at the Disquotay parties went by like nothing, like a dream you thought you might have had. Come four-thirty or so in the morning, Tiki would skip out, Cinderella dashing from the ball, while the other Disquotays were heading off with that evening's admirer, or going out as a pack for breakfast, or soaking their feet in a bucket of water. She would ease back through the window before the five o'clock jet entered its landing pattern over Inglewood. She'd take off her face, hide her clothes, and do her best to flatten her grandma's wig back down to normal. When she woke, it was 1965 and she was a sixteen-year-old boy named Warren again.

* * *

The Disquotays — among them Dooni, Tiki, Monique, Diane, Benedetta, Shelley Newman, Jay Freeman, Barbara, Garetha, Tammi, Shirley Floyd, Jackie Kennedy, Jackie Hoyle, Cleola Balls, Miss LaLa, Miss Louella, Miss Marcia, and Larry Hines, their "founder and lifelong president" — were a cross between a street gang and a sorority. They began gathering in 1963. In their own minds, at least, they were the toast of mid-1960s Los Angeles. This was their fantasy. "Everybody wanted to be a Disquotay," says Diane. "It was like Folies Bergère in the ghetto." They were the most fabulous girls around, and the toughest. They could kick people's asses and look good doing so. They would sometimes kick each other's asses just for looking good, in fact. Especially if someone looked too good. Tammi, tall and pimply and rarely the center of attention, could go into the bathroom for what seemed like days and emerge a glamour girl. One night she showed up in her pink safari pants, pink fingernails and toenails, and wraparound sandals. Everyone agreed that this was Tammi's time to shine — everyone except Larry Hines. Wigs flew; nails were broken. History was made.

When the girls competed over clothes and boyfriends — among themselves or with other queens — things could sometimes explode into Jets-and-Sharks rumbles. A run-in with Louella, for instance, or with Duchess, who did her own thing entirely but knew all the Disquotay girls' business, might result in a reading contest of tasty brutality. "They'd be poppin' their fingers," Diane says. "The words would be tripping off their tongues like magic, just like rhythm: 'Look-at-your-hands, look-at-your-feet, look-at-your-neck, look-at-your-eyes, look-at-your-fingers.' They'd bring up news bulletins. They would hit a line just to build to the next line. And you'd be laughin' cause they'd be making it rhyme." In such situations, Miss Louella was the most dangerous. When she read you, the half-hidden truths she spat out came so fast and hard your own retorts seemed to flutter away. "She was like a machine gun," Diane says. "She would get you off of her with just her mouth."

Some, like Miss LaLa, might use other means of offense. LaLa, as Duchess remembers her, was "this big old horrible queen, nine feet tall, light-skinned with green eyes, with minidresses on and high heels and feet like garbage trucks, real dumb, and a mean Motorola." LaLa lived with her family in Watts. "The whole family, they were just terrible," says Duchess, hyperbolically. "They were not bad-looking people. They just had little tiny brains, and they were all violent. Even the grandma carried a shotgun." Some of the Disquotays called LaLa the Menace of Society, and balked at letting her into the club. She loved fighting as much as she loved blond wigs and minidresses, and when she was around, someone was going to get their ass whupped. You didn't necessarily want her at your events, since her family had been reported to shoot up people's festivities just for sport, sending people running and jumping out of windows. She often traveled Los Angeles with Cleola Balls, who at six two was a few inches shorter than she.

"They were both jailhouse queens," says Jackie Hoyle, who referred to the two as Red China and Russia, "and they could tear a house up." LaLa, in order to expand her own hair options, would sometimes bring a pillowcase and demand the wig right off everyone's head — she was partial to blond human-hair wigs, in particular — leaving behind a roomful of boys in makeup and stocking caps. "Pin your wigs up," the Disquotays would call, "LaLa's comin'."

* * *

LaLa eventually bullied her way into the Disquotays, aided by the fact that she could deliver clothing or wigs from a store she'd hit. But though she was tough, she was not invincible. One time, for instance, when Miss Larry Hines and LaLa were fighting over a boyfriend, Cleola held down Miss Hines while LaLa cut off Miss Hines's hair. Queens jumped in cars and buses to console Miss Hines, who was known for growing her own dark, blond-frosted hair and brushing it in people's faces. They found her sitting on some stairs with her hair in her hands, crying. Most were sympathetic, although Miss Louella, upon seeing Miss Hines's big, hairless head atop her tiny body, privately called her "the Screaming Skull." Next weekend, next party: Miss Hines arrived in a wig the same exact color, with the same exact blond frost, and the same exact length, as the tresses that LaLa had chopped off. It was a solid, fuck-you victory for Miss Larry Hines and his adherents, further proof, if any were ever needed, that there is no weapon more powerful than the right hair.

In peaceful times, though, the Disquotays were about the look, the entrance, and the scene. Tammi and Dooni were always flipping through Vogue and Harper's Bazaar for new ideas. They could recite the names of all the major models: Verushka, Twiggy, Penelope Tree. "We used to name Vogue models like they were our relatives," Diane says. "Like it was part of our duty. "They patterned their makeup and fashions after them, too, and then "would just sit around and glorify each other just for being beautiful."

Without much money, this could be a challenge. Once, when she was still a penniless schoolboy, Tiki dyed her hair with red food coloring, which melted down her face that day in the school-yard sun. Social events brought in some funds. As with Harlem "rent parties" in the 1920s and 1930s, whoever threw a do would charge people fifty cents or a dollar to get in, which helped pay for the apartments. Some of the queens, like Diane Moorehead and Jackie Hoyle, had jobs to get "pennies for our fashions," using their pay to buy material, beads, wigs. Some were too effeminate to be employable; as Jackie puts it, "Ain't nobody going to hire you with no eyebrows." Many lived with mothers or grandmothers who would slip them some money once in a while. Several worked at the airport, a different girl in each terminal. Shoplifting was a useful and oft-used craft. One queen, for instance, known for her fur fetish, would dress up in a moving man's uniform and simply wheel a whole rack of minks from a store. Other entrepreneurs made money on the street. "If you couldn't steal the dress," says Marapasa (who had joined the scene as a freckly fourteen-year-old named Cherisse), "then maybe you would turn a trick." You had to be resourceful.

When most of the girls, Disquotay club members or not, grew dissatisfied with water-balloon bosoms and towel hips, a lot of them took hormones, since, as Duchess tells it, "everyone wanted titties and the soft hip flow." But many took to cutting up store-bought foam or furniture or car seats — from Cadillacs, of course — to make themselves a body. Dooni, the future Sylvester, taught them how to whittle foam pieces with a razor blade, tapering them down the thigh and up toward the waist. They would cut the rear out of a girdle and insert a foam ass and hips, and sometimes getting ready for a party would be not unlike suiting up for a football game.

"If somebody would've slammed us up against the wall we would have just bounced off," says Jackie Hoyle. Miss Dakota, once a Houston high school star quarterback named Harold Johnson, was famous not only for her Diana Ross and Tina Turner impersonations but also for wearing a big, obviously padded bottom. "Everybody knew that booty was somebody's chair," Diane says. "This one guy stuck a hatpin in her ass, and she was walkin' around all night shakin' her ass with this pin in it. And she ain't said ouch yet."

* * *

"In those days, we knew that if you got caught in the wrong place you got your ass whupped, or we whupped your ass, however it was to happen," says Jackie Hoyle. "But it was our own little world. We just had fun, living our lives. It was the secret of getting over."

The Disquotays knew it was illegal to drag, in their hometown as everywhere else in the country. The police still called such behaviors "harboring a disguise," or "masquerading," and could send you to jail for wearing an item of female clothing or lining your eyebrows. A city law, Rule No. 9, made impersonating the opposite sex illegal, and under its aegis the LAPD routinely raided drag parties and drag bars. Toward the end of the Disquotay days, the ACLU took on the case of Lady Java to challenge Rule No. 9. Lady Java was a married hermaphrodite with large breasts who made her living as a female impersonator in black L.A. clubs. She was, according to Diane Moorehead, "a high-yellow, Creole, green-eyed, long-black-hair beauty wonder." Java portrayed Josephine Baker in feathers and bananas, and a crawling Sheena the Jungle Queen in leopard skins. Her 1967 case, triggered by a performance at the Redd Foxx Club, would help legalize drag in the city of Los Angeles. Until then, and for a while afterward just in case, many Disquotays carried a rag for emergency makeup removal.

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Excerpted from The Fabulous Sylvester by Joshua Gamson. Copyright © 2005 Joshua Gamson. Excerpted by permission of Picador.
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