Long Live the Queen

A new documentary profiles Houston drag queen Wendy Chicago

by Tim Brookover • Wendy Chicago photos by Mark Johnson

Wendy Chicago is nothing if not candid. As she prepares for a drag show, she glances into the camera and admits with a smile and disarming clarity: “Mama has a little drinking problem.”

This startling moment of honesty amid the artifice is just one remarkable scene from a new documentary about Chicago, the 70-year-old Houston drag queen, directed by Walt Zipprian. The film will premiere during a June 18 show at the Axiom, home of the innovative theater company Infernal Bridegroom Productions, where Zipprian is an actor.

Zipprian began working on the documentary five years ago. He first saw Wendy perform in 1988 at the Lazy J, the now-closed, down-at-heel Montrose bar.

“I was at the old Pot Pie restaurant, having breakfast,” Zipprian remembers. The waiter mentioned to him and a friend that he was appearing in a show that night for drag queens over 50. “We knew we had to go.”

The waiter failed to impress. “But Wendy just bowled me over. She was by far the most creative one. While the other drag queens were trying to be somebody else, she was just Wendy. And she did all these songs by black women—Sarah Vaughn, Dinah Washington.”

Zipprian, who had never made a movie, filmed Chicago at her cluttered one-bedroom Hyde Park apartment and backstage and onstage at EJ’s and Mary’s. He and editor (and co-producer) Mark Johnson then faced the task of whittling down 20 hours of footage into a compact, yet rich, 20 minutes. At less than half an hour (the length of a typical network sitcom sans commercials), the film may seem unexpectedly short. Viewers may find themselves wanting more Wendy. But Zipprian packs a tremendous amount of material into the short format: a well-off Midwest childhood, strained family relationships, love, loss, and, of course, a few drag queen tips.

In fact, the brevity of the film adheres to the hoary show-business adage “Always leave ’em wanting more.”

“We wanted to tell a short story,” Zipprian says. “I also thought that Wendy was interesting for 20 minutes, but she might not be so interesting for an hour.”

The film opens with Chicago preparing for a show and concludes with an uncertain yet riveting performance at Mary’s. This final scene (actually the first filmed) sums up the particular strength of Zipprian’s work: the gaze that is frank, though not unkind or ugly, and the eye for detail. He reveals that Chicago is a survivor, not a high-gloss, Vegas-style queen. Sometimes she forgets the words, and her lip-synching is generally an approximation, at best. She is rangy with a care-worn face. As she totters across the stage, the camera catches the sparse, indifferent crowd familiar to anyone who has attended a bar show.

Zipprian, who works by day in the medical center, has submitted the documentary to the Houston Gay & Lesbian Film Festival and plans to enter the film in the next round of nationwide festivals for 2005. (In these efforts he gets help from his partner Rob Baker, who handles publicity-type duties. Baker is also an Infernal Bridegroom hand and a talented artist.)

Wendy Chicago will perform after the premiere of the documentary. By the way, she only uses her drag name, Zipprian points out. Even he does not know her birth name. “I thought,” the filmmaker says, “she was just too fabulous to go to memory.”

Tim Brookover is OutSmart’s editor.

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