Friday, January 31, 2020
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Iconic 1968 drag documentary ‘The Queen’ finally released on Netflix
The documentary gave an unprecedented look into 1960s drag culture.
A somewhat lost but never forgotten pivotal piece of historical drag queen media has been restored and made available on Netflix.
The Queen is a 1968 documentary about the previous year’s Miss All-America Camp Beauty Pageant, a competition for drag queens. The film was groundbreaking for its honest depiction of drag queens in the moments between the pageantry. Even in the far less accepting America of the late ‘60s, it received some positive reviews from outlets like the New York Times after premiering at the Cannes Film Festival.
But like many niche films from decades ago, it hasn’t been readily available for the masses. So while it likely paved the way for so much of future drag culture, from RuPaul to ballroom houses, its gone unseen by many.
Netflix tweeted on Thursday that the iconic documentary had finally been restored, color corrected, and released on the streaming platform.
The announcement came alongside a series of tweets sharing the fascinating history of The Queen, with a short dive into why it holds such an important place in LGBTQ history.
“Before RuPaul launched the careers of over 100 drag queens and Elektra Wintour read the ballroom houses of POSE to ashes, THE QUEEN, a 1968 documentary about a 1967 drag pageant, debuted at the Cannes Film Festival providing an almost unprecedented look at queer culture,” the Netflix thread began.
Directed by Frank Simon, the film came to be largely thanks to Jack Doroshow, aka Miss Flawless Sabrina. It showed the performer at the height of her power, a queen amongst queens, who ran an operation of about 100 people that put on as many as 50 pageants per year across America
Netflix’s Twitter account points out that one of the big reasons The Queen is so important is because it shows people living their truth in a time when they were more ostracized for it than most of us can remember.
“This was a time before the pivotal Stonewall Uprising, a time where drag was often still criminalized–Sabrina was reportedly arrested over 100 times for crossdressing,” one tweet reads, referencing the pageant’s mistress of ceremonies, Miss Flawless Sabrina.
This was a time before the pivotal Stonewall Uprising, a time where drag was often still criminalized — Sabrina was reportedly arrested over 100 times for crossdressing.
Still, “One grows fond of all of them,” the New York Times wrote of the queens in its initial film review.
In a particularly heartbreaking look into the discrimination that these men faced in their time, the tweets feature a video in which the contestants, outside of drag makeup and costume, share stories about the army turning away either them or their friends for being visibly gay.
Like DRAG RACE after it, in multiple scenes contestants appear chatting about their lives and issues that impact them directly; Acceptance from family and friends, the conflation between drag and trans identities, as well as the presence of queer people in the military.
But what The Queen is most known for is, as Netflix writes, the “epic reading session by Crystal LaBeija” captured on film. When LaBeija failed to win the crown, which she, likely accurately, perceived to be due to racism and favoritism, she left the stage and later gave a verbal lashing to the camera and then to Miss Flawless Sabrina for the choices the pageant made.
But the moment from the film that has become the most memorable, referenced on shows like TRANSPARENT and by celebrities like Frank Ocean, is an epic reading session by Crystal LaBeija. Aja, infamously recreated the moment in a DRAG RACE Snatch Game challenge.
“She walks offstage, in the middle of the awards, never to walk another pageant in the white-centric circuit again,” Netflix writes.
So, when Crystal was called as third runner-up for the title of the 1967 Miss All-America Camp Beauty Pageant, it seemed a repeating of a history she knew too well. She walks offstage, in the middle of the awards, never to walk another pageant in the white-centric circuit again.
This moment has been referenced by current LGBTQ media again and again. It also ultimately led to LaBeija breaking off and doing her own thing, which in turn led to the creation of “houses” in ballroom, as well as voguing.
“I’m beautiful and I know I’m beautiful” she yells at one point.
With that chapter of her life LaBeija began to get involved with a series of Black-centered balls. In a bit of marketing genius credited to her friend Lottie, she hosted one of her own under the "House of LaBeija."
Today the House of LaBeija still lives on. After Crystal LaBeija, the house was run by Pepper LaBeija — who some believe was the first runner-up in the now infamous 1967 pageant. Pepper received her kudos in another landmark film, PARIS IS BURNING, which gave a look into ballroom
So it is on the shoulders of THE QUEEN that all of these projects stand, and arguably a large part of RuPaul’s legacy — in a 2019 Vogue profile Ru revealed that a 1976 lip sync by Crystal LaBeija was the first drag performance he saw.vogue.com/article/rupaul…
The Queen is now available to stream on Netflix in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, and Australia after being restored by Kino Lorber and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas.
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