Photographs: the transvestites who rule the world
Secrets I was not so fat
Head shaved halfway up the skull, lowered eyebrows, a blue eyeshadow plaster, a blonde wig, a size 56 bra filled with bird food for filler, and a cheap dress.
In this way,
Glenn Milstead
landed at the San Francisco airport - to the amazement of the small group of fans who were waiting for her and of every traveler who passed by -
Glenn Milstead
the last time he used that name.
From that moment on, she would be Divine, the queen of 'trash' who managed to make the filth glamorous.
In that same vein she shot the scene that made her a superstar of bad taste: the end of the John Waters film
'Pink Flamingos' (1972), in which she ate a recently deposited dog poop.
In the 16 years that passed between that and his death, just after the premiere of another of Waters' productions ('Hairspray', 1988), Divine had time to shine as a stand-up artist, 'disco' singer and entertainer of worldwide fandom, since Ibiza to Australia.
An incident that the Almeria journalist
Álex Ander compiles in the book 'Divine.
The story of the most beautiful woman in the world (almost) '
, published by Egales Editorial.
Divine was the first really popular 'drag queen', as well as a homosexual icon.
But above all, he was someone who managed to turn the negative around.
Beaten and humiliated in high school shouting "fag" and "fat"
during his adolescence in Baltimore, Milstead made Divine an ordinary creature, coarse, obese and very funny, exaggerating until the grotesque the features that until then were tried to hide .
John Waters
, who was the one who baptized her, defined her thus:
"He did not want to be a woman; he wanted to pass for Godzilla, not Marilyn Monroe."
Born to impact
Ander's book follows Divine from her origins as the only child of a religious middle-class family on the American East Coast.
Manirroto and with a fondness for the scam, he found his salvation in the 'dreamlanders', the troop of misfits with whom Waters created his films.
Before succeeding, he worked as a hairdresser and in thrift stores.
But he was born to shock.
And by God he did it with 'Pink Flamingos'.
In the film he gave life to Babs, designated by the press as "the filthiest person in the world", whose neighbors want to take the title from him and, to this end, they are dedicated to dealing drugs at the doors of schools and
raping girls they have kidnapped to get them pregnant and then sell their babies to lesbian couples
.
In addition to scenes that are best left unrelated here, Waters conceived the ending as an Eisenstein-style punch at the viewer.
"If it works, you will be a new star; if it does not work, you will go back to your hair or work in another junk shop and you will never be heard from again," he told Divine before filming the scene.
The film was banned for years in countries like Australia or Switzerland.
The Maryland State Censor Board ordered the censoring of several scenes in the film, such as a fellatio by Divine, but not the final scene of the dog poop.
Critics from
'Variety'
magazine
called it "one of the most vile, stupid and repulsive movies ever made."
Divine was the first person to play Jackie Kennedy on film, and dreamlander George Figgs said that "she was like Liz Taylor, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford stuck in a pile of dynamite."
Divine himself explained it like this: "If I play a totally feminine woman, I will play her as feminine as I know how. That is the job of an actor. If you play a grizzly bear, you don't act like Zsa Zsa Gabor, unless you're a Hungarian brown bear ".
Working with Waters, who in another film had forced her to eat the guts of a boyfriend (actually, a calf's heart that she swallowed between undisguised gags in front of the camera) or to
be raped by a giant lobster
, was a good school of challenges .
With Trump on the disco
The success of his films in the 'underground' circuit of the United States (first) and Europe (shortly after) discovered a unique 'entertainer'.
He threw dead mackerel, sausage, and raw meat to audiences
before his movie screenings.
Which opened the doors of theaters and discos such as Studio 54, whose inauguration coincided with Donald Trump.
During a performance in Germany, he asked an attendee how much he had paid for admission, and he said 20 marks.
"So that's
five to get in and fifteen to fuck me,"
he told her.
On another occasion, at a show in London, a skinhead in the audience took to the stage to ask him if he had actually eaten a dog poop.
He threw it into the stalls with one belly while yelling, "Yeah, I ate the shit out of my balls! And that's why I'm up here and you are down there."
Shortly before he died, he told his Chicago audience: "Do you want to fuck me? I know I don't blame you. If I were all of you, I would want to fuck. But with a condom! Or with five. Safe sex is the only sex." .
His partner in the 'dreamlanders' Pat Moran described his political concerns: "While we were all politically very leftist, he was looking at 'Vogue' magazine and trying to pick flowers for the weekend."
A reporter asked him if he felt oppressed by the Reagan administration.
"I don't get into politics and Mr. Reagan doesn't get into my drag art.
Entertainment is entertainment, so it doesn't really affect us."
His singing career (his voice was not especially 'divine') brought him to Spain on several occasions, especially to Ibiza, one of his favorite destinations.
But not to eat pills: he hardly took alcohol and drugs.
He did smoke a lot of marijuana, which caused him a voracious appetite (his friends remember in the book how he brought his chair closer to the refrigerator and began to eat directly what he found in there) that contributed to
his obesity was on the increase, which had a lot to do with his death at age 42
from a heart condition.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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