2/29/2024 0 Comments Divine drag queen height“He was a pioneer, and we would not have the landscape of drag the way we know it today without Divine,” Schwarz says. In a sea of queens who “wanted to be Miss America,” glamorous and feminine, Divine, with his fierce refusal to abide by beauty standards, stood out. Four decades before RuPaul’s Drag Race, drag was “the opposite of hip,” Waters says. Back then, drag balls differed drastically from those of today. He started making films with Waters in the 1960s, in Baltimore. But in Ursula, audiences find otherworldly beauty-and now, a clear recognition of her roots.ĭivine, who also went by the name Harris Glenn Milstead, was born in 1945 and died of heart failure in 1988. It has toed a similar line with its practice of queer coding villains: Disney has been soundly criticized both for not making them overtly out and for assigning an evil connotation to being queer. Disney seemed to want to walk a tightrope between appeasing queer fans-many of whom have long seen themselves reflected in its characters-and not alienating those who oppose gay rights. Last year, then-CEO Bob Chapek defended the company’s reported $250,000 in donations to backers of Florida’s controversial “Don’t Say Gay” bill. ![]() ![]() Disney has a long, fraught relationship with the LGBTQ+ community. In 1989, Disney would have never openly acknowledged Divine’s influence, says Jeffrey Schwarz, who chronicled the longtime collaboration between Waters and Divine on Waters’ avant-garde “midnight movies,” like Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, and Desperate Living, in the 2013 documentary I Am Divine. A minor character in Hans Christian Andersen’s original fairy tale, Ursula came to animated life through the work of Howard Ashman, a writer and lyricist from Baltimore well-positioned to fuse the drag culture of his hometown with a Disney tale.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |