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Before there was ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race,’ there was ‘The Queen’
08.02.2011
08:33 pm
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The Queen is a fascinating document of a drag beauty contest held in 1967, the lead-up to the pageant and the backstage goings on. It’s a little-known film that is still hard to find on torrent trackers and has been out of print for many years.

The “Miss All-American Camp Beauty Pageant” was shot with hand-held cameras by director Frank Simon (who later produced the Marc Bolan concert film Born to Boogie). The year was 1967. Before the Stonewall riots. A time when cross-dressing could have gotten you arrested for vice, even in New York City. The film provides an interesting look at an event which was simultaneously rather risqué and underground, and at the same time served as a fundraiser for Muscular Dystrophy, co-chaired by Jerry Lewis and Lady Bird Johnson!

Artists Jim Dine and Larry Rivers, writers Bruce Jay Friedman, Terry Southern and George Plimpton, photographer Mary Ellen Mark, Warhol superstars Mario Montez and Edie Sedgwick, and Andy Warhol himself were among the judges of the event, although they are glimpsed very fleetingly in the film (Bobby Kennedy dropped out when he realized what he’d been signed up for).

But these luminaries of that era aren’t the main attraction here, that distinction would go to the hostess, “Flawless Sabrina” (Jack Doroshaw), contestant “Rachel Harlow” (aka Richard Finnochio, who Larry Rivers and allegedly also Warren Beatty hit on) and the film’s equivalent to Snookie, snarling, pissed-off Crystal LaBeija who reads everyone within earshot to filth when she suspects the contest has been fixed in favor of the Caucasian Harlow. As LaBeija went on to be the first “house mother” of the voguing clan House of LaBeija, this scene might well have captured a pivotal moment that led—not indirectly, either—to the Harlem voguing balls celebrated in Paris is Burning a few years later (In other words, the Harlem balls were a reaction to the perceived white-bias of the 1967 contest).

There’s not a lot I could find about The Queen to point you towards except for quite a few information rich pages from Trippin’ with Terry Southern: What I Think I Remember, Gail Gerber’s memoirs. Read from pages 81 to 84.
 
Below, Crystal LaBeija’s legendary “reading” session from The Queen:
 

 
A video montage from The Queen set to the sounds of “What Makes a Man a Man?” by Charles Aznavour.
 

 
Via Lady Bunny Blog

Posted by Richard Metzger
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08.02.2011
08:33 pm
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