The Scene was Mean

The Drag Scene in Sydney in the 1980's

Harper Collins Publishers Ltd. 1983, I.S.B.N. 086861047X by Roberta Perkins

(The Gender Centre advise that this article may not be current and as such certain content, including but not limited to persons, contact details and dates may not apply. Where legal authority or medical related matters are cited, responsibility lies with the reader to obtain the most current relevant legal authority and/or medical publication.)

What was the subculture of Sydney's transgender people like a decade ago? Well, for a start, we were still influenced by the medical terminologies of "transsexual", "gender dysphoria", "transvestism", and "sex reassignment" which was the process of surgically reconstructing the genitals to simulate those of the opposite sex. This operation was considered the ultimate transition in changing gender by most transgender people and for many it represented a magical cure to all our social problems.

... we had to pretend we were really men who simply dressed in drag to make a quid.

The common folk, the press and the police persisted in their ignorance by labelling all of us "drag queens" regardless of how our private psychological or socio-sexual motives or physical reconstruction. Then, we were victims of this ignorance: as showgirls we had to pretend that we were really men who simply dressed in drag to make a quid, as prostitutes, we copped the double stigma of "whore" and "queer", and those of us going completely straight lived in mortal fear of being "sprung". To today's much more candid transgender people it must seem like the dark ages. But, one only needs to consider what the situation was like just ten years before that, when public ridicule, arrest and psychiatric treatment were our common lot. Just walking down the street in a dress could mean instant arrest for "offensive behaviour" and public exposure by the press, whose response to us couldn't have been more sensational had we arrived from Mars. It could bring us a bashing by the good people of Sydney, who would have considered broken bones or even death just deserts for our outrageous behaviour. With a past such as that, in 1983 we thought we had progressed a long way in coming out as "trannies". But, as I mentioned the term "drag queens" was in such common usage that I called this era in the early 1980's "the drag queen scene" when I wrote my book of the same title about the transgender subculture which had emerged from the oppressive period of the 1970's and beyond. It was a true subculture, with the norms and values unique to the people involved in it and a structure that was easily identified by the participants. It was also easily identified by many outsiders and therefore was an open subculture, in contrast to the earlier clandestine subculture existing within the framework of the then much oppressed gay milieu.

The "Drag Queen" Scene

So, let's take a closer look at this "drag queen" scene of the early 1980's. I began my investigation of it in 1981 as a significant part of my Honours degree. The scene was then centered in Kings Cross and adjacent Darlinghurst, so I used the Wayside Chapel (where I worked as a crisis counsellor) as my base from which I wandered into the bars and streets to seek material for my research. I found four distinctive social environments within the subculture, each derived from an economic or survival pursuit. The four groups living, socialising and working within these environments I referred to as "showgirls", "strippers", "bar girls" and "prostitutes". There was some mobility between the different environments especially between the domains of the bar girls and prostitutes, although least often the realm of the showgirls and the others. There was also a perceived hierarchy by the participants in the subculture, but there was not a unanimous consensus on this. Most seemed to agree that the showgirls were at the top of the hierarchy, based on the relative respectability of their work in front of an assumed straight audience, followed by the strippers, due to the undisclosed nature of their work, then the bar girls, who were young and yet to prove themselves, while the prostitutes were on the bottom because their job was considered the most distasteful of all. However, as the prostitutes pointed out, were the hierarchy measured according to earning power, then they would be on top. Most of the subculture participants expressed the highest admiration for those transgender people who had ultra-straight jobs in their preferred gender. I will now deal with each of these social environments in turn.

The Show's The Thing.

... women in the audience dash to the toilet to touch up their make-up and faces immediately after seeing the girls in the show.

The showgirls worked in four so-called "drag shows" in Kings Cross and Darlinghurst. The best known of these was the glittery Les Girls in the heart of the Cross. Its audience was very straight and, since the venue was advertised widely, it was included on the tourist circuit with many patrons arriving in such tour groups as "Sydney By Night". The showgirls nearly all lived permanently as women and a few had undergone genital realignment surgery. Even fewer conformed to the stereotypical image of the drag artist, or man who simply does a show in drag. Most of the girls thought their audience naive. "It's an extra-suburban trip for them", said one girl, while another remarked "They think to themselves aren't we a lovely lot, but they're glad their son's not one of us". The reactions of the men in the audience were generally ambivalent. Some felt threatened or embarrassed by the presence of the showgirls, particularly after the show when the performers visited patrons at their tables. Most agreed that the girls were attractive enough to date, but would not ask them out once they knew about them. The women were much less threatened or embarrassed by the showgirls, but as one woman remarked "I've noticed how women in the audience dash to the toilet to touch up their make-up and faces immediately after seeing the girls in the show".

The drag shows in Oxford Street in Darlinghurst catered for gay audiences. Some showgirls preferred performing for a gay crowd because it was more appreciative and more vocal in appreciation. It was also more critical. The drag shows in the gay clubs were generally more sophisticated, more satirical, more risqué, and more political than Les Girls. They also offered shows with a contemporary topical content, for straight drag was not appreciated by gay audiences who wanted their entertainment to carry subtle (and not so subtle) social messages. In general, the gay drag shows would have been too offensive or incomprehensible to the typical Les Girls patrons, although straight people did attend these shows. These, though, tended to be younger and more trendy than Les Girls' patrons, who, one girl thought, was "living back in the 1950's ... what they think of as today's stuff is actually 15 years old ... they couldn't handle today's stuff.

Getting Ya Gear Off.

While the showgirls were known to be the transgender people, or "drag queens" in the popular parlance, the strippers performed before a mainly male audience indistinguishable from the genetic female performers on stage. More of the strippers had undergone (genital realignment) surgery, and none of them dressed as women simply for the occasion, but all lived permanently in a female role. Those who had not been operated on went to extreme and often uncomfortable lengths to disguise their male genitals, and generally they were so skillful that few in the audience could identify them as transgender people. Most of the strippers agreed that the transgender women made better strip-tease artists than the genetic females. They prepared their acts more diligently, made more stunning costumes and acted more sensually on stage. As for the rivalry between the strippers and showgirls, one girl put it succinctly: "The (drag) queens don't like us (transgender) strippers. They think we are fooling people, while they are more respectable". There was little inter-mixture between both groups, each being more integrated into their own social and economic spheres. Thus, the transgender strippers tended to socially mix with other strippers than with other transgender women. Besides, the strippers tended to stay away from places and associations that were likely to lead to a disclosure of their transgender status.

I could not obtain interviews with patrons attending the six strip clubs then operating in Kings Cross as this would have revealed the fact that at least some of the strippers they were gazing upon were transgender people. However, my observations of the men in the audience indicated that they were unable to tell which of the performers were biologically male. In fact, the transgender strippers generally received the largest applause due to the greater eroticism and animation, as well as their more dazzling costuming. Where men suspected that the strip clubs employed transgender women they often played guessing games based on supposed tell-tale physical attributes that distinguished all men from all women. Invariably, they guessed incorrectly.

At The Watering Hole.

All of the men I interviewed claimed to be strictly heterosexual and "happily married", and many spoke of transgender women most disparagingly.

A number of bars and hotels in Kings Cross were favourite social centres for many transgender people. Here they could meet and chat about their experiences, exchange views on life in the Cross, or their latest date, buy drugs, show off their latest outfits, and, of course, pick up men. As a group the bar girls who made the pub and club the centre of their social life were younger than either the showgirls or strippers. In fact, many of them were new gender crossers, coming out publicly for the first time. These venues were ideal places to meet other transgender people of both sexes, since some transgender men also frequented them in their efforts to establish themselves in a masculine role. Attracting men was a chief objective for most of the bar-girls, as acquiring a boyfriend was seen as the most positive claim to a feminine role. Competition was fierce not only between the regular bar-girls, but also between them and the showgirls who might drop into the place for a drink after a show. These latter in their glamorous make-up and costumes invariably created a sensation and nothing was more damaging to a young bar-girl's ego than to sit all night in a bar chatting up a prospective boyfriend only to see him whisked away by a statuesque showgirl who just called in for a moment. Love the reinforcement of ego, however, were not the only bar-girls motivations for attracting male bar patrons. Some of the girls had an eye on the gentlemen's wallets and developed amazing skills at lifting them, or "rolling", to use the colloquialism for this form of pick-pocketing. This crime was justified by the girls who participated in it as balancing the economic inequality between themselves as unemployable transgender people and the men who seemed to have everything.

The guys who inhabited the bars in the Cross were generally not interested in a relationship. Most were married and motivated by sexual gratification without payment or at most the price of a drink. Bar-girls aware of this at least tried to get a dinner or a few hours of drinking paid for before taking the guy back to their apartment. Most of the men were well aware that many of the girls on the premises were transgender, so I was not ethically restrained from asking them questions about the women in the bar. All of the men I interviewed claimed to be strictly heterosexual and "happily married", and many spoke of transgender women most disparagingly. Yet, when I asked why they came to the bars in which most of the female patrons were transgender, the usual reply was that they were more sexy than other women and were definitely "easier". When the question of genitals was raised one gent seemed to sum it up for all the male patrons by stating that "one hole's as good as another".

The two most popular bars in the Cross were the Bottoms Up bar in the Crest Hotel, and the Venus Room, a dive situated on Hughes Street. The former appearing to be the venue most favoured for meeting and girl-talk and less concerned with pick-ups. It had a wholesome heterogeneous flavour in that it catered for every kind of colour, creed and sexual orientation, and the diverse crowd seemed to mix well without the usual racial and sexual discrimination that was found in the rest of society. It was a place where bigotry was left at the front door. The Venus Room was a place for pick-ups and little else. The place oozed sex and libidinous pursuits, and you could smell it. Girls jumped onto tables to strip on a whim, the decor was a sizzling red, and rooms were provided upstairs for unholy practices. Although most sex in the place was granted freely, much of it was also bought. It was also a prime place for the rollers. I think more wallets were lifted from inebriated gentlemen there than at any other place in Sydney. When a wallet was lifted a girl would immediately make for the toilet, where she could extract the money and could deposit the empty wallet into a hole in the prefabricated wall. One night a girl was sitting on the toilet, counting her loot, when she tossed the lightened wallet into the hole and the whole wall came tumbling down, burying her beneath hundreds of wallets. To use a common paraphrase. it was the straw that broke the camel's back.

On The Street

Many transgender prostitutes came from the other three groups, as well as the much more clandestine transgender people from the other suburbs. But, the majority were also bar-girls and most of these possessed large heroin habits. Some surgically transformed women worked in brothels around Sydney, but most of the transgender women in prostitution worked the streets, the most popular part of which was Darley Street and adjacent streets in Darlinghurst. These were the days of pre-AIDS sex and legal laissez faire. In 1979, the New South Wales Government, in a reformist frame of mind, repealed the law on street soliciting, along with many other prostitution laws. Without fear of arrest transgender, female and male sex workers moved onto the residential streets of Darlinghurst and began operating in front of resident's front yards and apartment buildings. Within a short span of time these quiet little back streets became choked with motoring and pedestrian clients and business was booming for the girls. Clients with cars were taken to dark spots not far from the area, or if on foot, then to nearby apartments rented by the girls. It wasn't long before residents began complaining, lobbying their local members and forming vocal activist organisations which held public meetings. The residents received sympathy from the press, who published whatever fabrication was uttered by residential spokespersons, and from the police, who used whatever street offence laws they could lay their hands on, from "serious alarm and affront" to "obstructing traffic". The transgender workers received most of the attention, due, no doubt, to a greater police bias against them than other workers. Many of the transgender prostitutes complained of police bashings, harassment after hours and using degrading terminology. All of this public attention brought more traffic to the area from curious voyeurs and tourists, which eventually turned the place into bedlam. The girls complained that business had declined dramatically as a result of this and they were continually having to deal with "yobbos", "westies" and moral maniacs. Finally, the Government put an end to it by bringing back a law on street soliciting on ANZAC Day 1983 (appropriately enough, since the area sometimes took on the semblance of a battlefield). It was inconceivable that the government that it would try to see the situation from the girls' perspective.

Working the streets was a dangerous occupation and nearly every girl had a story to tell on physical assault, including knife attacks, vicious beatings and pack rapes. At the height of the resident's anti-prostitution campaign the girls had more to fear from the locals than from misogynists and homophobics posing as clients. On one night a resident in a high rise apartment block overlooking Darley Street flung a molotov cocktail out of a top storey window, resulting in one girl being carted off to hospital. Why, you might ask, would anyone want to work under such conditions? Well, some girls had uncontrollable drug habits and prostitution was the most lucrative means of acquiring the kind of cash needed to feed the habit. Others made small fortunes out of the business, for $3,000 to $5,000 for a weeks work was not unusual then. Many considered it was certainly worth taking a risk for, especially since most of the transgender women involved in sex work were unemployed before they went onto the streets and had very little prospects of obtaining any other sort of employment. The human tragedy in this scenario is that the only work available to most transgender people is that which is unhealthy, dangerous, illegal and, for many, degrading.

The Changing Face of a Subculture.

What this article illuminates is that subcultures are never static. They change, sometimes quite dramatically, from time to time. In the case of the transgender subculture, for centuries it remained hidden and clandestine, although social reactions to it went from fear and superstition in the Middle Ages, when transgender people were burnt as associates of the devil, to the kinds of public ridicule witnessed in the 18th and 19th centuries when a day in the stocks being pelted with rotten vegetables and dung was the usual punishment for sexual aberration, to the present legal minefield of sexual identity and the medico-social identification of transgender. The "drag queen" scene offered transgender people an identity, their own social environment and a public profile for the first time in the history of gender crossing.

Polare is published in Australia by The Gender Centre Inc. which is funded by the Department of Community Services under the S.A.A.P. Program and supported by the N.S.W. Health Department through the AIDS and Infectious Diseases Branch. Polare provides a forum for discussion and debate on gender issues. Advertisers are advised that all advertising is their responsibility under the Trade Practices Act. Unsolicited contributions are welcome, though no guarantee is made by the Editor that they will be published, nor any discussion entered into. The editor reserves the right to edit such contributions without notification. Any submission which appears in Polare may be published on our internet site. Opinions expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect those of the Editor, The Gender Centre Inc.I, the Department of Community Services or the N.S.W. Department of Health.