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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He found out the only time of year that Washington club owners would allow men to dress in drag was Halloween (called the High Holy Days), so, once again, he started planning his outfit. He heard about a Capitol Hill bridal shop and a woman there who knew the score. She showed him a blue gown. He tried it on in the store, and she told him how good he looked. "I was in heaven." Rizzi says. He put the dress on layaway.

Halloween night, the piano man played, his friends started clapping, and it was Mame Dennis, not Carl Rizzi, who started to sing.

Some men wear women's clothes as part of a sexual fantasy. Rizzi says it's not like that for him. "Oh, my God, no, all bound up in a girdle and pantyhose. It's strictly theatrical." A way to walk through the world and say look at me: I'm beautiful, I'm strong, I'm sexy. I'm somebody.

Power takes many forms. Money is power, but so is cleavage. Each can elicit a strong reaction. It is that reaction to beauty that drag queens covet.

"A lot of boys can be very shy and be nothing, but they can put the dress on, and the wig and the hair, and they can be something. Somebody is going to notice me. I'm not sitting in the background. I'm onstage. I'm getting the applause," says Rizzi. "It's not something I would get as Carl."

All Halloween night, they bar-hopped; then they went to Georgetown for breakfast. Rizzi was triumphant. His back was to the door, so he didn't see the guy who walked up on him suddenly, snatched off his wig and threw it to the floor. Neither Rizzi nor his friends said a word. Rizzi leaned down, picked up his wig and put it back on.

The following Saint Patrick's Day, Rizzi went to a party and met the drag queens who would become among the most important people in his life. There were Phyllis Diller, Lanie Kazan, Patty Duke. One of the most compelling called herself Liz Taylor. In 1961, Taylor had started "The Academy," where gay men who wanted to dress as women, a subculture even frowned upon by the larger gay community, could dress up and socialize at house parties.

Liz was very overpowering, says Rizzi. "Her favorite expression was: 'My dear, you must do this. My dear, you will do that.' "

Everything at Liz's house was formal, Rizzi says. It was all "gowns, gloves, big hair." They dressed up to perform, they dressed up to socialize. Everything revolved around drag, and in the social hierarchy, Liz was at the top. She established behavior and wardrobe protocols, and defiance could get a drag queen ostracized and disinvited to parties. She established "Oscar" awards honoring the most beautiful, the most talented, the most beloved drag queens in her circle -- powerful recognition for people so unseen in their everyday lives, and the closest they'd ever get to the Hollywood ideal. But she closely controlled who would get them. She drank heavily, and drag nights would often end in fights, with Liz snatching the wigs off drag queens who displeased her. "If she looked in the mirror and started talking to herself, started telling herself how beautiful she was, we knew it was time to leave," Rizzi says.

After one party, Rizzi says, a drunken Liz declared that if he wanted an "Oscar," then Rizzi had to arrange for Liz to sleep with his friend Bill. While Rizzi sat in the kitchen crying over his fading hopes for an award, his friends plied Liz with drinks. She passed out, they put her in Bill's bed, and when she woke up, Bill told her, "Liz, last night you gave me the best [sex] I've ever had in my life," Rizzi recalls. "And that's how I got my first Oscar, for Gayest Person," an honor that Rizzi, who always wanted to be the gayest boy at the party, coveted in 1967.

Those early drag days were a whirl. "Patty Duke and Lanie would come to my house to get ready," Rizzi says. "Lanie could sew. We exchanged clothes. One would wear it one week, and one would wear it the other week. Purple feathers one day, pink overlay the next week. All of a sudden, it became this weekly thing."

Mame started performing on stage at the awards shows. Other drag queens would call her to find out what was happening and where everyone was going. She began to organize their social logistics, and Liz asked her to become one of the Academy's executive board members, helping plan events, recruit people and run the organization, which all revolved around dressing in drag.