William Dorsey Swann’s Drag Balls and Fashioning Black Respectability in late 19th Century Washington D.C
Jacquin Cunningham
May 8th, 2025
On January 15th, 1887, The Washington Critic reported a story which would introduce Washington D.C. to the drag ball and its recognized originator, William Dorsey Swann: Placed on page three above an article detailing the clothing purchases of unsuccessful presidential hopeful Samuel L. Tilden and his wife, “Raiding a ‘Drag:’ A Pall Where all the Ladies Were Imitations” details how, “Six colored men, dressed in elegant female attire, were arraigned in the dock at the Police Court this morning on a charge of being suspicious persons. They were arrested last night at a ‘drag’ held at the house of Pierce Lafayette, a colored messenger in the Pension Office, No, 1716 Fifth street. The names of the defendants are Benjamin, Daniel and [William] Dorsey Swan, Ed. Willams, William Johnson and Charles Meyers.”[1] Followed by a crowd of some 400 spectators who left their homes to follow the spectacle, police marched one “stylishly-dressed” man on each arm to the station house where they were convicted on the charge of being “suspicious persons” for wearing women’s clothing to the ball which was “in full swing” in Lafayette’s “nicely furnished” home by the time of the 10:30pm bust.[2] The Evening Star adds also reporting on the 15th that two of the men present at the drag ball were naked and that when “the officers entered the house the [dancers] made a rush for the outside and a number of them escaped.”[3]
But straying from the usual hits on the 19th century crime beat—bloody murder, theft, and fraud—the story in The Washington Critic illustrates the sartorial transgression of these men with an almost awe-inspired tone. Luxuriating over the lavish dresses of the six arrested that night, the reporter spares no detail from wig to toe, recalling the color, cut, and passementerie adorning the gowns of both high and low quality:[4]
“They nearly all had on low neck and short sleeve silk dresses, several of them with trains. They all wore corsets, bustles, long hose and slippers, and everything that goes to make a female's dress complete. One of them had on a pink satin Mother Hubbard, trimmed with fur, a long wig, and bangs and pink hose, and old gold slippers, bogus diamond earrings and breastpins, and pearl necklace. The lace on their skirts was very heavy, and apparently of good material.”[5]
Of the dozen or so reports on Swann’s drag parties and the arrests which follow them found in Washington’s daily newspapers from the mid-1880s through the 1890s, this example stands out in its complete description of the clothing of the men in attendance. Wearing both the evening fashions of the day and a souped-up Mother Hubbard day dress, the men not only defied expectations of their gender, but those of race, class, and comportment under Swann’s supervision until 1896 when he was arrested for the final time and sent down for ten months for “keeping a disorderly house.”[6] So who was William Dorsey Swann, how did he come to be known as the “queen” of drag, and how did these drags and the clothes of their attendees invest in a practice of using style to transgress the respectability politics of Black identity after the Civil War?
William Dorsey Swann was baptised in 1860 and born to Andrew Jackson Swann, an enslaved wheat farmer and musician, and Mary Jane Younker, an enslaved housekeeper, who along with her 13 children was the legal property of one Ann Murray, who insisted that despite their Protestant parents each child should be confirmed Catholic.[7] It was during outset of the Civil War in 1861 that Swann grew up in a town called Hancock which sat on the Mason-Dixon Line, where food was scarce in part due to soldiers wreaking havoc as they passed through town stealing crops and damaging buildings; but amidst the chaos, Swann’s mother insisted that the family celebrate Christmas with song and dance, and through this example he learned to embody the matriarchal characteristics of self-sacrifice and creating joy against oppression that would come to underpin his drag balls.[8] By the early 1880s, Swann, like many young Black men from the region, flocked to Washington D.C. in search of work and for community with other men who held much taboo same-sex attractions.[9] The men who attended Swann’s drags came from a class of Black men in Washington D.C. working for the Federal Government and other institutions, like universities, where Swann himself was himself a janitor at a local business school sending what money he could spare from his salary back to his family in Maryland.[10] Pierce Lafayette, the man whose home played host to the 1887 ball, was formerly enslaved in Georgia to the vice president of the Confederacy and worked in the Patent Office, which Swann’s employer—who would later post bond for the queen in April of 1888—formerly headed.[11]
By the last quarter of the 19th century, Washington D.C. was home to a vibrant yet underground queer scene with a particularly robust cruising culture centered on Lafayette Park, located directly across from the White House.[12] Swann lived at its beating heart, steps away from both the White House and Lafayette Park on “the south side of F Street near twelfth” (figure 1).[13]Yet disenfranchised from public, though discreet, queer spaces like the white YMCA, clubs, theaters, and restaurants through racist exclusion, Swann, like other known drag queens in Washington D.C. like Miss Maud, set up his own drag balls to support his friends interested in more than cruising, but wearing women’s clothes—while some appeared in suits to complement the “ladies”— and operating away from the white gaze.[14]
When people think of William Dorsey Swann today, the photograph of two Black male performers dressed as a heterosexual couple in a 1903 film by Louis Lumière is the image that is most used across contemporary media as a stand-in for their more radical predecessor, Swann.[15] The image, Charles Gregory and Jack Brown Dancing the Cake-Walk in Paris (figure 2), held by the Wellcome Collection presents Brown crossdressing in a white day dress with black stripes and minimal corsetry, wearing a large hat with a feather, and holding a parasol as he dances a cakewalk with Gregory who wears a three piece suit with striped pants.[16]However, these images and the 5 minute silent film that captured the performance of these two men and several other Black dancers, including two children, were created for and mediated by the white gaze and as a literal performance of blackness, wherein the cakewalk was enacted for a rapid European audience for whom the exciting and quick movement of the dance was exotically titillating.[17] But Swann’s Washington D.C. drag balls did not exist for an outside audience, and were rather a queer synthesis of the cakewalk, crossdressing, and 19th century Black pageantry.
For the 20th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, the Emancipation Day Parade held in Washington D.C. in April of 1883 represented an image of Black freedom and possibility through the ceremonial crowning of the, “Queen of Freedom, Goddess of Liberty, and other imaginary deities.”[18] Having been in the city for three years, Swann witnessed the annual pageant which deified Black bodies, and was perhaps in attendance when Frederick Douglass said in his speech at Congressional Church, “In whatever else the Negro may have been a failure, he has, in one respect, been a marked and brilliant success. He has managed by one means or another to make himself one of the most prominent and interesting figures that now attract and hold the attention of the world.”[19] Bucking Douglass’s sentiment of assimilation, William Dorsey Swann did just that by combining Black traditions of performance in new ways.[20] At his drag balls, Swann and his invitees danced the cakewalk, a coupled Black dance with origins in the enslaved South and a history rooted in mocking the enslavers of its dancers, with and without their knowledge.[21] Donning fancy dress, at times provided by their enslavers, Black couples would emulate the stuffy European waltzes performed by their white subjugators with often ridiculous exaggeration replacing the shuffled steps of these dances with struts critiquing the airs of superiority performed by white people, who awarded “winners” with cake.[22] The cakewalk existed in a state of dual meaning of critique but also a means of attaining status within the crushing domination of the plantation through pageantry, a sentiment which William Dorsey Swann appropriated and mixed with the revelatory celebration of Black freedom he witnessed at the parades, creating the title “drag queen” from these disparate contexts and dancing the cakewalk.[23] Despite the opportunity of enslaved individuals to mock their enslavers, those white people judging the contests still retained physical control over the bodies of the performers, whose dance form was acceptable only in the context of white enjoyment, and later co-opted into racist minstrel shows which allowed “[p]ostbellum white caricaturists [to substitute] denial and denigration of black culture for their race's lost license to control it.[24] But removed from the context of enslavement and by dressing themselves in women’s clothes, Swann’s dancers added a layer of criticism against the Black body politic to the already layered critique of power structures nested in the performance of the cakewalk itself.
Swann’s drag balls toyed with expectations of both Black male and female identity in the post-Civil War period through gender performance when debate about the parameters of how the newly freed Black population of the United States should go about achieving respect and betterment was more urgent than ever. In 1879, the Evening Star reported on a visit by Frederick Douglass to a Sunday school in Washington D.C. where he espoused the belief that, “with a full complement of manly qualities the negro could and would make himself respected in every part of the republic.”[25] Couched in what we now identify as heteronormative rhetoric, the assertion that only through masculine presentation could Black men achieve respect beyond what little they had yet to achieve was complicated by Swann’s own propagation of an alternative society, or drag family, for queer Black men in Washington D.C.[26]
Monica Miller, historian and co-curator of Superfine: Tailoring Black Style at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, writes on the appearance of the dandy in the fiction of W.E.B. Du Bois that, “Du Bois's own phrase, ‘But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent,’ provides a context for investigating the relationship between politics and art by intimating a connection between propaganda and a seemingly unimportant, sometimes aesthetic object—clothing.”[27]For Black women, and more specifically those Black women of an upper class status whose bodies, style, and manners existed in proximity to the ideals of white gentility, adhering to the letter of spoken and unspoken social laws of presentation was not only a means of attaining safety, but aggrandizement in a system where conformity was the only path offered to tolerance through style.[28]With the added layer of tension between the ideals of masculinity as challenged by the Dandy— who was still working within the context of manhood—and Swann’s physical embodiment of the feminine through crossdressing, the same low level of tolerance was not afforded the Black drag queen as was afforded the Black dandy and women of a certain class and comportment in white society, whose queer, clothed bodies were even more aligned against the propaganda of white heteronormativity.
Within his home, Swann and his drag family threw expectations about their racial and gender presentations out the same window they used to escape the police[A1], leaving their silk satin dresses inside as the men fled into the night.[29] On April 13th, 1888, the Washington dailies reported on the arrest of eleven men who “began to drop their gaudy costumes of silk and satin and several of them jumped through the back window and escaped.”[30] Unlike previous arrests, this raid became a violent struggle between the lady of the house, Swann, and the police with a headline in the Washington Post reading, “‘Negro Dive Raided. Thirteen Black Men Dressed as Women Surprised at Supper and Arrested.’”[31] In extensive coverage by the National Republican on the same day, the drama of this raid is played out across a full-length, front page column which details a policeman watching “three individuals, supposed to be colored ladies” descended from a carriage in front of 1114 F Street wearing evening gowns, and the door was said to fastened behind them.[32] Potentially sensationalized for the benefit of the readers, officers entered Swann’s home after peering into its third floor from a hospital across the street, breaking the door latch to enter the hallway filled with the sounds of music and “heavy with perfume.”[33] When they entered the room where revelers were celebrating Swann’s “30th birthday” complete with a “throne with the necessary panoply,” those who jumped out the window onto an adjacent building did so quickly, but Swann was unperturbed by the disruption and ready to fight if necessary:
This was the case with the “Queen,” which character was impersonated by Mr. William Dorsey. The Queen stood in an attitude of royal defiance. Her arms hung by her side. The long white buttoned kid gloves reached up almost to the shoulders and the (he) queen seemed bursting with rage. The ten foot trail to her low-cut and short-sleeved white silk dress, with lace overdress, stood out its full length and appeared spread for a full reception, but different from that met with. At length ‘her majesty’ recovered speech, and, advancing her right foot, which was encased in a gold-embroidered black slipper, she said [to the police], with a haughty air, ‘You is no gentleman.’[34]
When the struggle between Swann and the officers subsided, his “gorgeous dress of cream-colored satin” was ripped to pieces and hundreds of men again followed the prisoners down the street to the station house, hurling the most insults at those still wearing dresses.[35] The next day a packed courtroom watched on as officers held up “several silk and satin dresses” in front of the men who faced the dock away from the crowd and were arraigned on the charge of “vagrancy” and sentenced to post bonds or spend 30 days in jail.[36] In the following days, newspapers assured the public that such “freaks” were surely not numerous in the city, at once delighting in and reviling the spectacle.[37]
Crossdressing in public may have been a rare sight, but there had been a level of permission given to white men using crossdressing in protest to uphold the status quo in the 19th century. One such example of this is in 1884 when protests across American cities, including Mystic, Connecticut, featured hundreds of men dressed in Mother Hubbard gowns purposefully looking “ridiculous” in women’s clothing to draw attention to the so-called absurdity of Belva Lockwood’s presidential campaign.[38] A cartoon held by Indiana University Bloomington (figure 3) shows the parade of men clad in what appear to be silk satin Mother Hubbards in floral stripes with matching hats processing down a street to the amusement of both men and women as they picketed Lockwood’s campaign. But queered on the Black male body, the 1887 Mother Hubbard dress presented a complicated self-fashioning that was at odds with not only gender expectations, but also the ways in which the group in power, white people, allowed social minorities to express themselves outside of replicating white behavior.[39] Indeed, crossdressing was frequent at racist minstrel shows where the cakewalk was performed by white men in blackface, but this, like the donning of the Mother Hubbard by white men protesting Lockwood’s campaign reinforced white cultural dominance by pointing out the “othered” nature of Black bodies.[40] What this alludes to is that the presentation of Swann as a Black man in female attire posed more of a challenge to the social order than those white men in attendance of his drag balls who were “young men of good parentage” and unnamed in newspaper coverage.[41] A Black man wearing a silk Mother Hubbard was transgressive enough, but to wear one “trimmed with fur” and other embellishment was a denial of its understood communication of white domesticity.[42] Reinterpreting the dress as a tool of queer self-expression transgresses through disidentification, which:
“‘is about recycling and rethinking encoded meaning…in a fashion that both exposes the encoded message’s universalizing and exclusionary machinations and recircuits its workings to account for, include, and empower minority identities and identifications.’ Dress and undress, putting it on and taking off, is a two-dimensional act that disrupts meaning.”[43]
Newspaper accounts sensationalizing Swann’s arrests acted as a tool to counter the private empowerment felt by the queen in donning women's dress in a reinterpretation of Black gender through dress through caricature, but also prompted pathologization of this behavior as a means of delegitimizing it as a medical absurdity.[44]
It was in 1896 when Swann’s reign as the public “Queen” of drag was ended by his harshest arrest and sentencing to date, but also prompted his more fearsome act of resistance; convicted of “keeping a disorderly house,” a judge sentenced Swann to 10 months for running what he called a “Hell of iniquity,” after a trial in which white guests of the balls insinuated they were tricked by Swann into crossdressing and homosexual acts to save their own skin.[45] From prison after his conviction, Swann filed P-532, William D. Swan (figure 4) with the Office of the Pardon Attorney, requesting a pardon from then President Grover Cleveland, citing his diagnosis of heart disease and promising to “live a proper and law abiding life,” which was signed by more than 30 community members.[46] Unsuccessful, with the attorney noting that this was “not the first time that the prisoner has been convicted of this crime, and his evil example in the community must have been most corrupting,” upon his release, Swann continued his drag balls up to the turn of the century despite the risks of another conviction.[47]
When William Dorsey Swann died in 1925 after leaving Washington D.C., Hancock town officials burned his house in Maryland to the ground, perhaps fearful of what silk satin dresses, photographs, and letters lay within.[48] But Swann left more behind than just a trunk of old dresses he hadn’t worn in nearly 30 years; he left behind a brother, Daniel, a tailor and part of his drag family who would continue to create dresses for D.C. queens through the rise and fall of drag “houses” and star queens like Alden Garrison and “Mother” Louis Diggs until his own death in 1954.[49] But perhaps most importantly, William Dorsey Swann left behind a legacy of resistance clothed in silk.
[1] “Raiding a ‘Drag.’” The Washington Critic (Washington, D.C.) 1885-1888, January 15, 1887. info:lccn/sn82000205.
[2] “Raiding a ‘Drag.’” For this first violation, Dorsey Swann and his co-defendants received three month’s hard labor “on the farm,” which alludes to their imprisonment at a prison farm facility in which prisoners were forced to work via convict leasing, a practice which supplemented a loss of free labor after the abolition of slavery. For further reading: Jaron Browne, “Rooted in Slavery: Prison Labor Exploitation,” Race, Poverty & the Environment 14, no. 1 (2007): 42–44, https://doi.org/10.2307/41555136; Channing Joseph, “The Black Drag Queens Who Fought before Stonewall,” Truthdig: Expert Reporting, Current News, Provocative Columnists, September 25, 2015, https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-black-drag-queens-who-fought-before-stonewall/. Channing Joseph is the author for the forthcoming text on William Dorsey Swann, titled House of Swann: Where Slaves Became Queens — and Changed the World. This piece draws on Joseph’s early research into Swann’s life and contributes the approximate figure of spectators in this instance. .
[3] “Police Raid on a Dance House,” Evening Star, January 15, 1887, 8, info:lccn/sn83045462. It’s also noted that those men who were arrested gave “feminine” names at the station house which might allude to these individuals as possessing the first known drag names as we call them now. However, discussions about gender as such are limited in the remit of this paper and will no doubt be explored by Channing Joseph in his forthcoming book.
[4] Steve Chibnall, “Chronicles of the Gallows: The Social History of Crime Reporting,” The Sociological Review 29, no. 1 (May 1981): 179–217, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954x.1981.tb03275.x.A fascination with crime was nothing new in the papers or in the public forum of 19th century American life, with the true crime genre gaining hold across the transatlantic exchange between Britain and the United States. But as Chibnall notes of this inherited fascination with crime, by the late 19th century, the press became firmly established as a means of social control.
[5] “Raiding a ‘Drag.’” The Washington Critic (Washington, D.C.), January 15, 1887. info:lccn/sn82000205. It’s at this point that it’s also worth mentioning that these papers would perhaps today be considered tabloids, with a fascination into the lives of anyone and anything interesting. To the left on the same page as the 1887 report on the drag ball The Washington Critic ran a poem emblematic of this obsession for true crime called “Scandal-Mongers,” which contains the exceedingly ironic line: “Did you watch the scandal-monger at the ball; through the music, rhythm, beauty, light, and all?”
[6] “Kept a ‘Hell of Iniquity.’” Evening Star (Washington, D.C.) , January 13, 1896, 2. info:lccn/sn83045462. “Keeping a disorderly house” is a euphemism for running a brothel.
[7] Channing Joseph, “William Dorsey Swann - Oxford African American Studies Center,” African American National Biography, (January 1, 2021): 1. Joseph also suggests that Swann’s true father may have actually been a white man.
[8] Joseph, “William Dorsey Swann - Oxford African American Studies Center,” 1.
[9] Joseph, “William Dorsey Swann - Oxford African American Studies Center,” 1. It is my hope that Joseph will expand on his research into Swann’s early life in his upcoming book such that a more complete picture of his personal life outside of hostile arrest coverage can enliven his mythology with fact.
[10] Joseph, “William Dorsey Swann - Oxford African American Studies Center,” 1.
[11] Channing Gerard Joseph, “The First Drag Queen Was a Former Slave,” The Nation, January 31, 2020,https://www.thenation.com/article/society/drag-queen-slave-ball/; "A 'Drag Party' Raided" The Washington Critic (Washington, D.C.), April 13, 1888. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn82000205/1888-04-13/ed-1/seq-1/. This report provides the surname of Swann’s employer as “Dudley,” who was the ex-commissioner of pensions.
[12] Brett Beemyn, “The Geography of Same-Sex Desire: Cruising Men in Washington, DC in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” Left History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Historical Inquiry and Debate 9, no. 2 (June 1, 2004): 144, https://doi.org/10.25071/1913-9632.5610. It’s worth mentioning that Swann’s balls were not explicitly intended for cruising like other such events in Washington D.C. and resisted the sexualzing gaze of white people so often levied against the black body. For more about this see Rooks.
[13] "A 'Drag Party' Raided" The Washington Critic (Washington, D.C.), April 13, 1888. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn82000205/1888-04-13/ed-1/seq-1/ Swann lived three blocks east of the White House until 1896 when he moved north to L street.
[14] Brett Beemyn, “The Geography of Same-Sex Desire: Cruising Men in Washington, DC in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” 149-50. Miss Maud was a drag queen arrested on New Year’s Eve, 1885, whose sentencing to serve at the workhouse was recorded in the Evening Star on New Year’s Day, 1886. Though the judge remarked favorably on Maud’s “stylish appearance,” he still handed down a sentence not unlike those faced by Swann and others for wearing a “pink dress trimmed in white lace, with stockings and undergarments to match.” For this see: "In Female Attire: A Man Caught Masquerading in Woman's Garb Sent to the Workhouse," Evening Star, 1 January 1886. Joseph notes it is likely that invitations to Swann’s balls were given secretly at the Black Y founded in 1853 and owned and operated separately from the organization at large by Reverend Anthony Bowen, which was located conveniently on 12th street before locating north to U Street along with the black population of Washington D.C. into the latter quarter of the 19th century. For additional information see: National Park Service, “Twelfth Street YMCA (U.S. National Park Service),” Nps.gov, 2017, https://www.nps.gov/places/twelfth-street-ymca.htm.
[15] This image has been used by almost every publication which included imagery for pieces about Swann from the Smithsonian to The Nation.
[16] Gardiner, James. Charles Gregory and Jack Brown Dancing the Cake-Walk in Paris. 1903. Photographic print. The James Gardiner Collection. 2008789i. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/auv69te9. This photograph produced in Paris by an unknown photographer was owned by James Gardener, who maintinted a collection of homoerotic pornographic and sexual postcards. Gardener’s account of the history of the photo is an example of amatuer history, but he gets right that these men performed at the Nouveau Cirque in Paris and that the cakewalk, the dance performed by the Gregory and Brown, had become a fad for European audiences who were hooked on its swift and free movement.
[17] “The Origins of the Cake Walk,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education , no. 35 (2002): 134. By the 20th century the cakewalk was also a mainstay of racist minstrel shows which grew out of performances like this such that white audiences could consume racial stereotypes without ever seeing a black person in any context.
[18] “Emancipation Day: The Preparations for the Celebration next Monday—the Order of Procession and Program of the Evening Ceremonies,” Evening Star, April 14, 1883, https://www.newspapers.com/article/evening-star-mm-holland/39048432/.
[19] Frederick Douglass, “Address by Hon. Frederick Douglass, Delivered in the Congregational Church, Washington, D.C., April 16, 1883, on the Twenty-First Anniversary of Emancipation in the District of Columbia” (Emancipation Day Parade, 1883), https://www.loc.gov/item/90898291/.
[20] Shane, Cari. “The First Self-Proclaimed Drag Queen Was a Formerly Enslaved Man.” Smithsonian Magazine. Smithsonian Institution, June 9, 2023. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-first-self-proclaimed-drag-queen-was-a-formerly-enslaved-man-180982311/.
[21] Shane, Cari. “The First Self-Proclaimed Drag Queen Was a Formerly Enslaved Man.”
[22] Brooke Baldwin, “The Cakewalk: A Study in Stereotype and Reality,” Journal of Social History 15, no. 2 (1981): 208–10, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3787107. Balwin writes: Dance was a prominent cultural strength of blacks, the cakewalk a particularly distinctive example of it, whose purpose was, after all, to satirize the competing
culture of supposedly ‘superior’ whites.”
[23] Shane, Cari. “The First Self-Proclaimed Drag Queen Was a Formerly Enslaved Man.” Here Joseph is quoted about combing black performance in new ways by mixing drag with emancipation pageantry, but I suggest that the cakewalk added an additional layer to this mixing of styles which made his drag balls more unique.
[24] Brooke Baldwin, “The Cakewalk: A Study in Stereotype and Reality,” 211. Minstrel shows reflect both a need by white people to control black self-expression before and after the end of slavery and support the “fantasties” whites had about the Black body.
[25] “The Future of the Colored Race.,” Evening Star, May 16, 1879, https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ndnp/dlc/batch_dlc_newfoundland_ver04/data/sn83045462/00280654516/1879051601/0266.pdf. This article mentions that the talk took place at “Benning’s” but doesn’t provide detail on what that is, though it may refer to the historically Black neighborhood of Benning, though I cannot confirm this detail and have thus not included it in the main text.
[26] Here, I use “drag family” because it most accurately elicits the relationship between Swann and the men who
[27] Monica L. Miller, “W.E.B. Du Bois and the Dandy as Diasporic Race Man,” Callaloo 26, no. 3 (2003): 743, https://doi.org/10.1353/cal.2003.0099.
[28] Rooks, Noliwe. “To Make a Lady Black and Bid Her Sing,” in Ladies' Pages: African American Women's Magazines and the Culture That Made Them, Rutgers University Press, (2004): 48. While the time period of Rooks’ writing lies at the tail end of Swann’s drag practice, the interplay of race, class and respectability in this piece is certainly relevant to the decade prior.
[29] “Colored Men in Female Attire.” Evening Star (Washington, D.C.) , April 13, 1888, info:lccn/sn83045462.
[30] “Colored Men in Female Attire.” Evening Star.
[31] Joseph, “The First Drag Queen Was a Former Slave.” The Washington Post headline disagrees with the record in the National Republican, but that article has been inaccessible due to a present inability to access microfilm of the piece, so a cross referencing of sources to determine greatest accuracy has not been possible at this time. However the exact number of men arrested is not germain to this piece.
[32] “‘The Queen’ Raided: Unexpected Interruption to Her Banquet and Ball; Her Majesty Shows Fight with a Policeman—in the Contest Her Handsome Dress Was Torn Off—All Landed in the Station House.,” National Republican, April 13, 1888, info:lccn/sn86053573. This account is by far one of the most sensational and tabloid-like of the arrests of William Dorsey Swann, complete with semi-apocryphal dialogue recounted to the journalist by the police. In no other account in Washington dailies is this much space given to such an account, nor is there such a complete recollection of the scene and prompting incident. The article is riddled with caricature, such as when one attendee is attempting to finish his beer while shouting “police.”
[33] “‘The Queen’ Raided: Unexpected Interruption to Her Banquet and Ball; Her Majesty Shows Fight with a Policeman—in the Contest Her Handsome Dress Was Torn Off—All Landed in the Station House.,” National Republican.
[34] “‘The Queen’ Raided: Unexpected Interruption to Her Banquet and Ball; Her Majesty Shows Fight with a Policeman—in the Contest Her Handsome Dress Was Torn Off—All Landed in the Station House.,” National Republican. Something remarkable about this account and others is the way that it simultaneously buys into the gender transgressive fantasy of crossdressing by referring to Swann as “her” and “the Queen,” while also making the reveal of his manhood the butt of the joke.
[35] Joseph, “The First Drag Queen Was a Former Slave.” The color of Swann’s dress seems to have been up for debate by local journalists, though it was universally thought to be made in silk. This detail is retrieved from Joseph’s summation of the events, and is perhaps from the Washington Post account of the incident on April 13th, 1888, as other dailies do not record the quotation given; “‘The Queen’ Raided,” National Republican.
[36] “Colored Men in Female Attire.” Evening Star. Aside from Swann’s white or cream colored silk dress, this account also provides that the array or colors worn by the participants was “many;”
[37] Joseph, “The First Drag Queen Was a Former Slave.”
[38] Sally Helvenston Gray, “Searching for Mother Hubbard,” Winterthur Portfolio 48, no. 1 (March 2014): 52, https://doi.org/10.1086/676031. In Mystic, about 100 men dressed up and pushed strollers down the street in a similar fashion to figure 3. Belva Lockwood is often regarded as the first female presidential candidate and ran in both 1884 and 1888 and was one of America’s first female lawyers.
[39] Powell, Annette Harris. “(Un)Dressing the Black Male Body.” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 4, no. 3 (2017): 185.https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.4.3.0185. Powell opens her paper with a questioning of how Black identity is mediated and by whom, and in this case applied to the Black queer body, the same structures underpin Swann’s transgressions against racial and gender norms as applied to the dandy.
[40] Jim Comer, “Rite, Reversal, and the End of Blackface Minstrelsy,” Jim Crow Museum, https://jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/links/essays/comer.htm.
[41] “Kept a ‘Hell of Iniquity.’” Evening Star (Washington, D.C.) , January 13, 1896, 2. info:lccn/sn83045462.
[42] “Raiding a ‘Drag.’” The Washington Critic; Sally Helvenston Gray, “Searching for Mother Hubbard,” 29-34.
[43] Powell, Annette Harris. “(Un)Dressing the Black Male Body,” 187. Here Powell quotes Muñoz’s definition of disidentification
[44] Charles Hamilton Hughes, “Postscript to Paper on ‘Erotopathia,’” The Alienist and Neurologist 14, no. 1 (January 1893): 731–32, https://tinyurl.com/4dumjn8r. “Erotopathia” is one of many 19th century medical terms for the idea that homosexuality is a treatable medical condition. In 1893, Dr. Charles Hamilton Hughes wrote in The Alienist and Neurologist about Swann’s group of D.C. Black drag participants noting as a symptom of so-called “erotopathia” that the men were: “lasciviously dressed in womanly attire, short sleeves, low-necked dresses and the usual ball-room decorations and ornaments of women, feathered and ribboned head-dresses, garters, frills, flowers, ruffles, etc., and deport themselves as women. Standing or seated on a pedestal, but accessible to all the rest, is the naked queen (a male), whose phallic member, decorated with a ribbon, is subject to the gaze and osculations in turn, of all the members of this lecherous gang of sexual perverts and phallic fornicators.”
[45] “Kept a ‘Hell of Iniquity.’” Evening Star.
[46] Currie, Netisha . “William Dorsey Swann, the Queen of Drag.” Rediscovering Black History. National Archives, June 29, 2020.
[47] Currie, Netisha . “William Dorsey Swann, the Queen of Drag.”
[48] Channing Joseph, “William Dorsey Swann - Oxford African American Studies Center,” 3.
[49] Channing Joseph, “William Dorsey Swann - Oxford African American Studies Center,” 4.
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