Video footage of The Lady Chablis performing at Savannah Pride in 2000. Copyright to this item is owned by Mike Maloney. Courtesy of Georgia State University. Special Collections, LGBTQ Institute's Mike Maloney Collection of OutTV.

Interview with famous drag queen Diamond Lil in 2005 discussing being dismissed from the Georgia Air National Guard after being reported as a female impersonator. Courtesy of the Atlanta History Center, Atlanta's Unspoken Past Oral History Project.

In the 1970s and 1980s, performing in drag could be risky business. Macon’s Tangerine Summers, who describes herself as the city’s “oldest living female impersonator,” recalls the threat of arrest for being spotted in drag outside of clubs. Both drag queens and transgender people were arrested in Macon due to an ordinance prohibiting citizens from “masking their identity in public.” The 1980s and 1990s, however, saw the rise of local legends in drag. The Lady Chablis, a transgender performer featured in John Berendt’s novel Midnight in the Garden of Evil (1994) and its film adaptation (1997), performed on the night that Savannah’s Club One opened in 1988 and continued to perform there until her death in 2016. She was a sharp comedienne whose charismatic voice was captured in her 1996 autobiography Hiding My Candy. Atlanta’s drag scene has also been home to legendary performers: Diamond Lil, Charlie Brown, Lily White, and Lena Lust in the 1970s; RuPaul and Lady Bunny in the 1980s, Ashley Kruiz in the 1990s, and many more. In Athens, the annual drag event the Boybutante Ball has, since 1989, raised over one million dollars for agencies like Live Forward that support HIV/AIDS research and services. Drag has been a critical form of artistic expression, social commentary, financial support, and community creation for LGBTQ+ Georgians, and Georgia cities continue to foster innovation in the art form.

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