Long Live The Queens

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The Show Must Go On

Carl Rizzi (who performs as Mame Dennis) and a community of Washington drag queens struggle to stay in the spotlight after being displaced by Nationals Park.

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Rizzi was raised in Milford, N.H. His mother was 20 years younger than his strict Italian father, who worked as a butcher and wouldn't allow his wife to wear pants. Rizzi says he never saw them kiss. His father didn't show Rizzi affection, either. Rizzi spent his childhood at school, church, Boy Scouts and glee club, and as the constant object of his mother's and grandmother's attention. He had few friends and played with paper dolls, sewing outfits for them to wear. He was creative, and as far back as he can remember, was drawn to the lace and frills of girlhood. As a boy, Rizzi couldn't wait for Halloween. He always knew just what he was going to be.

Each spring, Rizzi's aunt organized the American Legion rummage sale, and he was free to rifle through the leftovers in her attic for his Halloween costume. He'd go through one box, then another, trying on all the dresses, stretching his decision over hours and days into the long weeks of summertime. Once he found the right dress, he would look for "hats, gloves, shoes, purse. Oh, yes, I had to have a purse." It was in those rummage sale boxes that he found his first eye shadow, which he stored in a small box on his dresser.

"It didn't take much for a little kid to fantasize with a little, tiny bit of makeup, and a dress and shoes," Rizzi says. He didn't examine his motives at the time and doesn't remember what he was thinking. "All I know is, it was a release."

No one said anything to him about his yearly transformation. Looking back, some in that small town had to have known he was gay, Rizzi thinks, even if he himself didn't. It was post-World War II America. Many townsmen had traveled and fought in Europe. They understood that the world was much bigger than the things they would speak of.

In high school, when Rizzi discovered he was drawn to his male teachers, he thought he was the only one. He didn't think of sex -- he did not even know that men had sex with men. He just felt happier being around them. After high school, he enlisted in the Navy, crying the first time he was away from home. Early in his training, he took a class where the instructor talked about homosexuality. That's when he realized what he was, that there were others, and that he would be kicked out of the Navy if he didn't bury his secret deep.

The next day, the company commander sent for him. Oh, my God, he knows, thought Rizzi, petrified. He sees it on my face. Instead, the commander sent Rizzi to the battalion officer, who needed a typist. Rizzi didn't know it at the time, but the battalion officer was gay. "He never made any overtures," says Rizzi. "He just took me under his wing." It was a caretaking pattern Rizzi was to see repeatedly in the gay community, and one that made a lasting impression. After training, he was assigned to the Pentagon as a mail clerk.

Rizzi was 21 before he had sex, with a former high school art teacher who had kept in touch and invited him to New York. After that, he went back into the closet. He'd left the military and was working as an administrative assistant for the Postal Service when some Navy friends took him to a club called the Hideaway near the FBI building on Ninth and Pennsylvania Avenue NW -- an old gay bar and cruising area. They were all gay, they said, and it was time Carl owned up to the fact that he was, too.

"It was such a relief!" says Rizzi. "Such a validation."

"Have you ever heard the expression flaming queen?" Rizzi asks quietly. "I became a flaming queen. I had kept it inside so long." From then on, they couldn't keep him out of the bars. He was out two or three nights a week, and on Saturdays, when the bars closed at midnight, he and his friends would drive to Baltimore, where the bars closed at 2 in the morning.

He had a good soprano voice, and friends started calling him Auntie Mame, the Rosalind Russell character from the 1958 movie of the same name, who carried a long black cigarette holder and threw lavish Manhattan parties. (Later, when the piano man at his favorite Washington bar would see him, he'd start playing, and Rizzi would sing: "You coax the blues right out of the horn, Mame/You charm the husk right off the corn, Mame.") Drag names are aspirational; they are all about whom you want to internalize and present to the world. "I came out of my shell," says Rizzi. "I was young, I was cute, and I went out and bought a long cigarette holder. I would go out Saturday night, and we thought nothing of putting a little blue eye shadow on and a couple of bangles. I was such a camp." It was 1962. Rizzi was not yet in drag, but he was on his way.

A couple years later, friends took him to a club in North Beach, Md. There were slot machines, and on Sunday afternoons, high above the bar, a drag show with all its beautiful "girls." Rizzi was transfixed. He didn't want to be in the crowd. He wanted to be onstage, in a dress, performing, feeling the love.

His first time in drag was at someone's home, very private. He had gone to Woodward & Lothrop, where he had a charge account. He guessed his size and bought a granny dress. He dared not try it on in the store. He picked up a synthetic wig. At a house with four or five others, he put on his black-and-white checkered dress with the lace collar. The top of his long white gloves met the bottom of his three-quarter length sleeves, and a gold hairpin helped secure his brown wig. His cheeks were rouged; his lips were painted a dark reddish pink; and just a faint bit of his 5 o'clock shadow showed through his foundation. He stuffed baggies with birdseed, for a natural-looking shape, and wore them in a bra. He gazed in the mirror at his transformation. Yes, he thought. Again there was a release, but this time it was so much sweeter. Like becoming the person you'd always longed to be. He didn't think he was pretty, "but I wanted to be," he says.