Its name was William Dorsey Swann, but to his friends he was known as “the Queen.”
In 1896, after being convicted and sentenced to 10 months in jail on the charge of “keeping a disorderly house”—a euphemism for running a brothel with catamites for homosexual African-Americans—Swann demanded (and was denied) a pardon from President Grover Cleveland for holding a drag ball. This, too, was a historic act: It made Swann the earliest recorded American to take specific legal and political steps to defend the queer community’s right to gather without the threat of criminalization, suppression, or police violence.
To 19th century observers, Swann’s downlow party was a shocking and immoral fiasco perpetrated by a vanishingly tiny minority of “freaks.” The National Republican, another Washington daily, said of the men arrested in the raid, “It is safe to assert that the number living as do those who were taken into custody last night must be exceedingly small.” Yet, despite their minuscule numbers, they made quite an impression: Hundreds of onlookers followed the men to the station to steal a glimpse of silk and skin.
Drag balls had been going on in secret for years. Invitations to the dances, for instance, were often whispered to young men at the YMCA, and newspapers described the arrests of several black men wearing “bewitching” fascinators, silk sacques, or cashmere dresses while en route to balls. In 1882, Swann served a jail term for stealing plates, silverware, and other party supplies. But the 1887 raid was the first time the wider world learned of him and the motley group of messengers, butlers, coachmen, and cooks.
Swann’s gatherings continued, featuring folk songs and dances, including the wildly popular cakewalk (so named because the best dancer was awarded a hoecake or other confection). Many guests dressed in women’s clothes, though some wore men’s suits. Harlem’s famous Hamilton Lodge masquerade balls, which began in 1883, were traditional masked dances and would not be “taken over by the gentry from fairyland,” as one Baltimore Afro-American reporter colorfully put it, until 1925 at the very earliest.
Today, more than a century after William Swann’s last known ball, the houses of the contemporary ballroom scene maintain the same basic format as the House of Swann’s. The balls feature competitive walking dances with exaggerated pantomime gestures, and they are organized around family-like groups led by “mothers” and “queens.” Strikingly, descriptions of balls from the 1930s are sprinkled with phrases like “strike a pose,” “sashay across the floor,” and “vogue.” Such expressions, now part of mainstream popular culture, are regularly heard on FX’s Pose and VH1’s RuPaul’s Drag Race.
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Originally Posted by CreepyAssNigger
