Before Pose, before Drag Race, and even before Stonewall, there was The Queen
Image: Photo: Kino Lorber
In the season two premiere of FX’s Pose, Elektra Abundance (Dominique Jackson) gives her chosen family the briefest of history lessons when she explains that the ballroom scene was born when “Crystal LaBeija lost one too many titles to white girls.” The inaugural House of LaBeija Ball, the spark that lit the explosion of Black and Latinx LGBTQ creativity now known as New York City ball culture, was unfortunately not captured on camera. But the event that pushed Crystal LaBeija away from white-dominated drag pageants and inspired her to create her own space was.
When The Queen was released in 1968, police officers still routinely raided gay bars in cities across America, using an informal standard known in the community as the “three-article rule” as a pretense to harass, arrest, and assault people whose gender expression defied societal norms. A riot at the Stonewall Inn would finally stem the tide of cross-dressing and homosexuality arrests in NYC on June 28, 1969. But until Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera threw that first brick, underground drag pageants were held in semi-secrecy at gay-friendly venues in lower Manhattan.
The Queen documents one of these, the 1967 Miss All-America Camp Pageant. And “camp” is right, as the contestants who travel from all around the country to sashay across the stage are mostly classic Hollywood glamour girls whose outsized impressions of 1930s and ’40s movie stars are exactly what Susan Sontag had in mind when she wrote “Notes On Camp” in 1964. Told in the fly-on-the-wall cinema verité style that was in vogue (no pun intended) at the time, most of The Queen consists of footage of drag queens candidly discussing their lives—both love and otherwise—backstage as they’re getting ready for the pageant. Save for the stories of being rejected by the Army for being gay at the height of the Vietnam War, it’s remarkable how similar their conversations are to those had by RuPaul’s Drag Race contestants putting on their makeup in the workroom.
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