Meanwhile, Princess Diandra is an entertaining drag queen who has paid homage to Diana Ross for many years. But Flo has long gotten it together and is just plain funny again. A high-heel shoe was treacherously involved. In 2006, New York drag star Flotilla DeBarge got busted as a result of a scuffle at an NYC nightclub. Jack Mitchell/Getty Images Jackie Curits. Woodlawn, the star of the show, was hilarious as she updated the classical musical with all sorts of drug and sex references. Five years after that, I appeared in a nutty version of The Sound of Music called The Sound of Muzak at an atmospheric East Village dive called Club 57. In fact, in 1976, they roomed together in P-Town-I wonder if they had any furniture left-and co-starred in a campy play there called Women Behind Bars, aptly enough. I guess when Divine ate dog excrement in Pink Flamingos, it wasn’t all that outrageous.Īndy Warhol “superstar” Holly Woodlawn was a good friend of Divine’s. There was also the time he was so high that he drove a car through a P-Town storefront. The landlady put out a warrant for his arrest, so Divine promptly fled to the other coast. Now that’s acting!Īnother time, Divine made the gaffe of selling furniture from the furnished Provincetown apartment he was living in just to pay some bills. Director John Waters relates how Divine had been busted for writing bad checks and got away with it only because Divvy managed to pass a lie detector test. Harris Glenn Milstead), the plus-sized Baltimore drag goddess, exuded punky glamour and wicked wit, but also a law-breaking edge in his early days. Here is a brief history of some of the other queens who have messed up the most egregiously.ĭivine (A.K.A. After she got called out and admitted to wrongdoing, Drag Race did the right thing by disqualifying Sherry from the finals, while also completing some careful editing.īut that’s hardly all. New York-based Joey Gugliemelli-Sherry’s legal name-was caught falsely telling various guys that he was a casting agent and getting them to do all sorts of naughty things for the camera, while pretending this could help them land a role. Sherry Pie (from this season’s RuPaul’s Drag Race) is only the most recent example of this phenomenon. Or, maybe, it’s simply that they’re people, and like, all people, most of them are very decent, but a few bad apples threaten to spoil the whole makeup palette. Perhaps they are in desperate need of cash because a lot of them only get paid in tips and bar nuts. Or because they’re regularly called upon to throw shade in their acts, so maybe that spills into their offstage lives and they crazily forget to turn off the sass. Why are some drag queens so damn shady? Well, maybe because they’re generally gay men-and flamboyant ones at that-who suffer the brunt of oppression and might end up slithering around the rules to get noticed and survive.