RuPaul’s Drag Race has made drag more popular than ever — but as much as we love the queens on screen, it’s important to know the drag legends who paved their way, making the art form what it is today. “Drag Herstory” will focus on iconic drag performers throughout history, providing essential knowledge about the world beyond Drag Race*.*
There are several well-known photographs of Stormé DeLarverie (pronounced, as she puts it in the documentary short Stormé: The Lady of the Jewel Box, “Storm De-Lah-vee-yay”), but perhaps the most famous was shot by none other than legendary portraitist Diane Arbus. In the image, DeLarverie sits elegantly on a park bench in a slim-cut suit, one leg crossed over the other, with shiny black ankle boots on her feet and a hand bearing both a glimmering pinky ring and the very end of a cigarette. The image, titled Miss Stormé de Larverie, the Lady Who Appears to be a Gentleman, N.Y.C., was taken in 1961. At the time, DeLarverie was the emcee, musical director, and occasional stage manager of the Jewel Box Revue, a touring drag cabaret known for its slogan “25 Men and One Girl”; they performed three or four shows a day at famous nightclubs and venues in New York City and across the country.
Jewel Box audiences, which were made up of queer and straight patrons as well as families who loved the show, knew who the 25 men were. The “female impersonators,” as they were called back then, graced the stage in lush gowns and lashes. But audiences often spent much of the show trying to figure out who the “one girl” was — until the very end, when their emcee, DeLarverie (who would begin performances in a perfectly tailored suit and occasionally a mustache), revealed her true identity during a number called “A Surprise With a Song.” DeLarverie performed as a drag king, or “male impersonator,” as it was known in the past, with the Jewel Box Revue from 1955 to 1969. Prior to that, she had been a singer with big bands — as swing and jazz orchestras were known — since 1939.
DeLarverie was born in New Orleans in 1920. Having a white father and a black mother, she was never issued a birth certificate because interracial marriage was against the law, but she celebrated her birthday on December 24. While growing up, she was so often bullied, attacked, and beaten by peers for being biracial — one incident left her with a leg brace, another resulted in a scar from being left hanging on a fence — that her father ultimately sent her away to private school for her own safety. She also spent some time as a teenager in Ringling Bros. Circus, riding jumping horses side-saddle. At around 18, she realized she was gay and decided to move to Chicago: She said she feared she’d be murdered if she stayed in the South.
In the 1940s, DeLarverie sang as “Stormy Dale,” dressed as a woman. But in 1946, she was in Miami visiting Danny Brown and Doc Brenner of the venue Danny’s Jewel Box, from which the Jewel Box Revue would later spring, and they needed some help with the show. People said she couldn’t do drag for the show, she mentioned in an interview, and that it would ruin her reputation, she said in another one. But she didn’t care. She said she had planned to stay for six months but that those six months turned into 14 years. “It was very easy. All I had to do was just be me and let people use their imaginations,” she said in Stormé: The Lady of the Jewel Box. “It never changed me. I was still a woman.”
“Men’s jackets were loose, but the pants were skintight. And if I ever took my jacket off onstage, the dirt was out,” she said in the aforementioned documentary. “But you know the strange thing is, I never moved any different than I had when I was wearing women’s clothes. [The audience] only saw what they wanted to see and they believed what they wanted to believe.”
DeLarverie became so celebrated that she began circulating in highly respected crowds, among the likes of Dinah Washington and Billie Holiday. Dressing in traditionally masculine attire, she may have inspired other lesbians of the era in New York to do the same.
Then, in summer 1969, the historic Stonewall uprising happened. And DeLarverie was there. There’s still some debate about whether she was the “cross-dressing lesbian” who threw the first punch that initiated the event (ostensibly at a cop who told her to “Move along, faggot,” because he apparently thought she was a man). But her presence there turned her into an icon in LGBTQ+ history after the riots — which she felt were not so much riots but an act of disobedience and rebellion, she would say later. Nonetheless, these events gave greater momentum to the gay rights movement in the U.S., and DeLarverie is today revered for her monumental contributions to the gay rights movement.
Shortly after Stonewall, DeLarverie’s girlfriend of 25 years, a dancer named Diana, passed away, and DeLarverie left entertaining almost entirely. Instead, she became a bodyguard for wealthy families during the day and a bouncer (though she didn’t like the term and much preferred “babysitter of my people, all the boys and girls”) at several lesbian bars in the West Village at night. DeLarverie was also known at the time for roaming the West Village vigilante-style — she had no tolerance for what she called “ugly,” meaning rudeness, bullying, or behavior that was otherwise intolerant of her “baby girls” at the bars she was protecting.
DeLarverie started at the Cubbyhole’s original location, at 438 Hudson Street, and then became the security guard when it changed hands and became Henrietta Hudson, in 1990. She was on staff there until 2005, when she was 85. DeLarverie also became a board member of the Stonewall Veterans’ Association and was an annual fixture at New York’s annual Gay Pride Parade. “She literally walked the streets of downtown Manhattan like a gay superhero,” longtime friend Lisa Cannistraci told The New York Times upon DeLarverie’s death, in 2014. “She was not to be messed with by any stretch of the imagination.” DeLarverie would continue to sing at charity events and fundraisers around New York, too, specifically for victims of violence and domestic abuse.
Having experienced a difficult upbringing herself, DeLarverie always sought to provide protection for others, whether it was at the Jewel Box or Henrietta Hudson. As she said in a 2001 documentary short called “A Stormé Life,” “I’m a human being that survived. I helped other people survive.”
Elyssa Goodman is a New York-based writer and photographer. Her work has appeared in Vice, Billboard, Vogue, Vanity Fair, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and Elle. If you’re in New York, feel free to visit her monthly Miss Manhattan Non-Fiction Reading Series.