![]() ![]() I Am Divine shares memories with Glenn’s high school girlfriend Diana Evans (“He was attentive and loving, he watched out for you,” she says, and he also had particular ideas of what she should wear and how she might look her best), his still devoted assistants (because Divine was extravagant when buying gifts for friends, Jay Bennett remembers, “It was a bumpy ride with money, but we always made it work”), and his costars, including Tab Hunter (who appeared with Divine in Polyester and also Lust in the Dust, both brilliant satires of the Hollywood norms the very pretty Hunter embodied as a young actor). But Edna Turnblad wore flouncy housedresses and curlers, outfits a drag queen would not, as she mothered Tracy (Ricki Lake) in Hairspray. In part, this shift was indicated by costume and makeup changes: Female Trouble‘s Dawn Davenport made her way from dirty dance clubs to electric chair, proclaiming her defiance at every step, and Babs Johnson, competing for the title “filthiest person alive”, notoriously eats dog shit in Pink Flamingos. In later films, like Hairspray, Waters had Divine play a more sympathetic and vulnerable figure. Waters notes that at first - in Multiple Maniacs or Pink Flamingos, for instance - Divine was cast as the “monster”m the embodiment of a social underbelly that made viewers squirm and laugh and seek release. This performance was famously multifaceted and evolving, made increasingly complex throughout Divine’s many collaborations with Waters’ troupe, including Mink Stole. As Mink Stole puts it, “People couldn’t see past the man in drag to the commitment to the performance,” that is, the performance that determinedly revealed the lie of the norm. ![]() Having fun and making fun were simultaneously central to Divine’s persona, even as that persona was sometimes a burden. Now, I encouraged this heavily, because he was making fun of drag.” Divine “wore clothes that you would never wear when you’re overweight,” says Waters, “And that’s when he realized the attention was so much more. Waters observes that even when Divine was making his first forays into drag, he saw his work as resistance, exposing the process by which even the most outrageous notion might be consumed and made ordinary, predictable, or too “serious”. This perpetual challenge to the very concept of norms, of fitting in, shapes the story of Divine, born Harris Glenn Milstead. Speaking with director Jeffrey Schwarz and Divine’s frequent costar Mink Stole on the meandering and wholly delightful commentary track for the recently released DVD, producer Lotti Pharris Knowles elaborates: being a fan of Divine is like being part of a club or special community, sharing in a “sense of Divine’s outsiderness”, celebrating what it means to be “outside the mainstream”, even when Divine and John Waters made movies that were - against all expectations - favorably reviewed by the New York Times. As friends, colleagues, and his mother Frances Milstead recall the actor’s too short life, they come back repeatedly to this idea, that he was the “queen of misfits”. ![]() These early moments in I Am Divine make clear the genius of Divine, his understanding of how even the most apparently nonconformist activity can become conformist. And I thought, I might as well just have fun, you know.” ![]() I really couldn’t get into it like they did. “After a while,” he says over grainy amateur footage of just such a scene, “I saw that they were so serious, it made it ridiculous. Going to drag parties in DC during the ’60s, Divine saw the performers hard at work, their makeup just so, their dresses glamorous. Instead, Divine was large and loud, an actor who challenged expectations, even among drag queens. “Drag was pretty,” remembers drag performer Jackie Beat. ![]()
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