“I’ll just say thank you Miss.
Unless youse girls like to be called Ms.” “Why don’t you call me… mister.”
Beverly LaSalle wasn’t the first female impersonator on television.
But after years of TV treating drag performers as deranged psychopaths and literal punchlines,
she was probably the first to be afforded dignity, love, and respect.
Beverly was a recurring character on the show “All in the Family,” and she might embody
the most remarkable drag transformation ever seen on TV.
All aboard and welcome to Matt Baume’s Culture Cruise.
This time we’re taking a deep dive on Beverly LaSalle, the groundbreaking female impersonator
played by Lori Shannon, at a time when television didn’t exactly give gender nonconformity
a sympathetic treatment.
“How dare you judge me?”
All in the Family was a sitcom that ran for almost all of the 70s, focusing on the tension
between the conservative parents, Edith and Archie Bunker, and the liberal youngsters,
Gloria and Mike.
And just a heads up -- the show used some pretty frank language, and you’re going
to hear some homophobic slurs from the characters.
Beverly first enters the Bunkers’ lives in the episode “Archie the Hero,” which
aired on September 29, 1975.
Archie’s been working nights as a cabbie, and he arrives home one morning to boast about
having just saved someone’s life.
You see, that night he picked up a passenger who made quite an impression:
“This big tall beautiful looking classy dame hops into the cab.”
After driving for about fifteen minutes, Archie says, he realized that the woman had passed
out.
So he stopped the cab, jumped in the back, and…
“Thinking quick, I start giving her mouth to mouth restitution there.”
He gets the woman to a hospital, leaves his name and address (expecting her to look him
up so she can pay her cab fare) and at the end of his shift, drives home to brag.
Edith, his wife, is beside herself.
“Archie you saved a human life, you are a hero.”
Archie basks in Edith’s admiration for a bit, and mentions that the owner of the cab
company wants to call the local newspaper to tell them about what happened -- that’s
a detail to remember for later.
He steps upstairs, and while he’s away, guess who shows up?
“Oh I’m Beverly LaSalle, is your husband home?”
This is our first meeting with Beverly, the person Archie gave mouth-to-mouth to in the
cab.
She explains that she just passed out from exhaustion -- which probably means she didn’t
even need the mouth-to-mouth, but whatever -- and she wants to thank Archie personally.
She mentions that she was exhausted because she’d been working a lot of shows lately...
“Oh, are in show business?”
“Yes.
I’m a female impersonator.”
“That’s smart, too.
I mean, who can imitate a female better than a lady?”
Edith’s misunderstanding leads even more misunderstandings.
When Archie comes downstairs, Beverly offers to pay her cab fare with a fifty…
“Okay, I never say no to a lady.”
Beverly tries to gently clear things up...
“I’m no lady.”
“How you earned this fifty is no business of mine.”
It’s clear that the time for subtlety is over.
“I’ll just say thank you Miss.
Unless youse girls like to be called Ms.” “Why don’t you call me… mister.”
Now that’s how you do an act break.
When we come back from commercial, Edith’s recounting the story to her son in law Mike:
“I would never have guessed she was a man until she took his hair off.”
Okay, sidenote: How should we talk about Beverly?
The etiquette today is to identify someone however they identify themselves.
And Beverly identifies in a couple of ways right off the bat:
“I’m no lady.”
“I’m a female impersonator.”
“How about you call me mister.”
“I’m a transvestite.”
“Well you sure fooled me.
I mean you ain’t got no accent at all.”
Female impersonator, transvestite, call me mister -- these give us some clues to who
Beverly is, because it’s how she refers to herself, and she ought to know.
But what does she actually mean when she uses these words?
It sometimes hard to talk about gender-nonconforming people from decades past, because the terms
we use today are different from the terms they would have used back then.
And on top of that, the definitions may vary from person to person, and can even overlap.
Not a lot of people use the phrase “female impersonator” today, but it generally refers
to an entertainer -- a performer who presents as a man in day to day life, but portrays
women on stage.
That’s why the word “impersonation” is there -- the point is that they’re creating
the illusion of being female, usually doing an impression of a famous female star.
The impersonation is the point.
In later episodes, we see Beverly do a Mae West impression, and changing into a suit
and tie before going out.
So, “female impersonator” seems to fit.
But she also calls herself a “transvestite.”
That’s a term coined over a hundred years ago by sex researcher Magnus Hischfeld, and
it was used to refer to a person who wears clothing associated with a different gender
in their day to day life, or in private just for themselves.
“Transvestite” doesn’t carry the same suggestion of being an entertainer as “female
impersonator” -- it’s something more personal.
In fact, one reason Magnus Hirschfeld created the term was so that he could issue official
“transvestite certificates” to people who were getting hassled by the police.
The cards were considered official permits for people who wanted to change their gender
presentation -- according to Hirschfeld, not because they were trying to create an illusion,
but because those clothes affirmed their actual identity.
But the word “transvestite” came to carry a lot of negative baggage as well, in part
because it was often mis-used to refer to any kind of cross-dressing.
Over time, we gained a better understanding of gender identity and gender presentation,
and the word “transgender” was coined around the 1960s to more accurately refer
to someone whose gender identity doesn’t match the gender assigned to them at birth.
Someone who’s a transvestite puts on the clothing of a different gender, whereas someone
who’s transgender actually identifies as a different gender.
But because these words were wrongly interchanged for so long, “transvestite” has fallen
out of common usage can be seen as pejorative.
Beverly is at least invested enough in presenting as female that she never provides any name
other than Beverly, never corrects anyone who uses the pronoun “she,” and even serves
full flawless face straight from the hospital -- did she touch up her makeup in the ambulance?
Her use of the word “transvestite” suggests that her feminine presentation might extend
beyond the stage.
At the time this episode aired, you might have heard the word “transsexual,” or
today “transgender” because we have a better understanding of the difference between
sex and gender.
But because “transgender” was a relatively new term, and didn’t come into common usage
until the 1990s, it’s unlikely people watching All in the Family would have known what it
meant.
Fortunately, we have a much wider vocabulary today, and are able to talk about gender in
more specific terms.
Someone can describe themselves as agender, or gender nonconfirming, or transgender -- but
these terms were almost totally unknown in the 1970s, so even if someone WANTED to refer
to themselves with more nuance, they wouldn’t have had the language to do so.
Not to mention, the definitions of all those terms have changed over time -- both in public
consciousness and on a personal level.
For example, Eddie Izzard called himself a transvestite on stage in the 90s:
“I’m much more in the executive transvestite area.”
But in private, he’d been openly transgender since the mid-80s:
“I am a transgender guy, I did come out 31 years ago.”
And he acknowledges that his own labels have shifted over the years:
“Well transvestite was a bad word, what a negative word.
So I was TV, I am TV, and people said you’re a television?
... The word moved to transgender and then trans so I said ok I’m transgender.”
And we haven’t even talked about the term “drag queen,” in part because it too would
have been unfamiliar to most audiences at the time.
It was common to use the word “drag” to refer to cross-dressing, and “queen” to
refer to gay men, but the two were seldom combined until the 1950s, and even then it
was mostly confined queer subcultures.
The term didn’t really come into mainstream use until the late 80s.
When this episode aired, “drag queen” would have elicited more confusion than the
more familiar “female impersonator.”
Edith struggles a bit with pronouns at first:
“Well anyway his hair came off, and there she was, a man.”
But Edith’s also totally fine with the whole situation.
Not troubled, not judgmental, bemused but not disturbed.
But Archie’s agitated:
“This freak took my breath under an assumed sex.”
Oof.
And it gets worse when Mike asks if Archie would have done anything different if he’d
have known the truth about Beverly.
“I suppose I would have got a fag fireman.”
Ugh.
Not good.
Archie’s not exactly coming off as a hero.
Edith tries to reassure Mike that Archie wouldn’t have let a gay person die.
“Archie wouldn’t have done that because Archie is a good Christian.”
Edith’s faith tells her what’s right and wrong, and she’s clear in her belief that
people like Beverly deserve to live.
Archie’s not so sure the Bible would agree...
“It also says in the Bible that a witness shall not bear falsies against thy neighbor.”
But eventually, after enough badgering, Archie admits that he’d still have saved Beverly
if he knew she was, well, whatever term he wants to use for her.
“Yes, yes, I’d have saved the man.
Even if I’d have known he was a transvoison.”
Uh … thanks?
Archie and Edith are essentially in agreement here -- Edith’s faith tells her that Beverly’s
life has value, and Archie begrudgingly says he would have saved her.
His language is a problem, but they both recognize, in their own ways, that Beverly is a human
being whose life was worth saving.
Archie’s still feeling conflicted though.
He knows he did something good.
But he also feels ashamed about who he did it for, and down at the bar he doesn’t want
anyone to know the true details.
“Them people got as much a right to life as anybody else.”
“What people?”
“Dying people.”
Archie’s discomfort here is in line with most mainstream attitudes on TV at the time.
Drag was rarely seen on TV and film, and when it was, it was generally pretty awkward.
There were plenty of female impersonators working in live venues throughout the 20th
century, but censors were really good at keeping those performances off screens.
When drag did appear, it was usually in the context of it being a trick rather than artistry
-- a character would be trying to fool someone.
On film, Charlie Chaplin set the template in 1914’s The Masquerader; a few decades
later, you see two men dressing as women to hide from the mob in Some Like it Hot; and
then in the 1970s, Freebie and the Bean featured a SUPER PROBLEMATIC gender-bending killer,
just a year before audiences met Beverly LaSalle.
On television, things weren’t much better.
One of the first TV shows to regularly depict female impersonation was a 1968 series called
The Ugliest Girl in Town, in which a man masqueraded as a female model in order to be close to
his girlfriend.
Jack dressed as a woman a few times on Three’s Company for various schemes, and trickery
was the whole premise of the show Bosom Buddies.
It’s a trope you could call “deceitful drag” -- the idea being that a man who dresses
as a woman is trying to pull off a scheme, either because they’re running a con or
because they’re desperate.
It makes drag seem like a particularly unsavory practice, and that stands in total contrast
to Beverly LaSalle’s approach.
She’s not deceitful at all -- she’s completely straightforward about who she is, introducing
herself as a female impersonator, taking off her wig, and in a later episode objecting
to a prank that involves her posing as a cis woman.
That’s not to say that deceit was the ONLY reason you’d see drag on screen.
It was also common for comedians to put on dresses for comedy skits -- Milton Berle did
it, as did Jonathan Winters, Harvey Korman, Danny Kaye, and Flip Wilson.
There’s Monty Python too of course, but drag in the UK is so different from the US
that that’s a topic for a whole different video.
In contrast to drag-as-deceit, these characters were clearly men in dresses -- despite the
ruffles and frocks, they’re still clearly men.
And on one hand, at least they’re not reinforcing the idea that dressing in drag is some kind
of fraud or desperate act.
They’re in on the joke, having fun, not trying to pull a fast one.
Their mood is often quite upbeat -- Milton Berle is confident and laughing and running
circles around everyone, as is Flip Wilson as Geraldine.
“What you see is what you get.”
These bits are often funny because these are great comedians, but one source of the laughs
is seeing a man in what the audience would have perceived as a humiliating costume.
Part of the joke is how ridiculous they look, how obvious it is that they’re men, how
silly it is for a man to put on a dress.
Beverly embodies a different kind of drag, one that was far more rare at the time on
TV, and that’s an empowered drag character.
Beverly isn’t playing a trick, or desperate, or an obvious frumpy man.
She’s in drag because she likes it, she’s good at it, and she looks great.
She’s practicing drag as a craft, instead of as a joke.
Although that was common in live venues at the time, it was pretty new to television.
Over the next few years audiences would see more characters like her in mainstream entertainment
-- Charles Pierce as a nightclub performer on Starsky and Hutch, Jim Bailey in the opening
ceremonies of the 1984 Olympics, and Divine breaking out of midnight movies with Hairspray.
The term “drag queen” was catching on, and it perfectly fit these more powerful,
extravagant, larger-than-life performers.
But as fabulous as she is, Archie isn’t keen to be associated with Beverly.
He tries to keep the whole thing under wraps -- which gets complicated when the owner of
the cab company shows up with a reporter who wants to write an article about what happened.
Archie’s mortified, and then because this is a sitcom, you’ll never guess who else
drops by.
“Oh there you are Mr. Bunker!”
Before she can say anything, Archie takes Beverly aside with a warning.
“These guys in here, they ain’t liberal thinkers like you and me.
You know what I mean?”
“Yes, I think I do.”
There’s a lot of meaning in that warning.
A person in Beverly’s position would probably have understood the subtext -- this is a place
where she’s probably not welcome.
In fact, we get confirmation of that in an earlier episode, when the bartender states
pretty clearly that he doesn’t want any queer people in his bar --
“I just don’t want my place place to become no hangout.
Know what I mean?”
Archie does his best to hurry her out the door, but she needs to make a pitstop.
“Which way is the men’s room?”
Archie points her in the right direction, then looks for the reporter…
“Now where is he?”
“In the men’s room.”
Looks like Beverly’s secret is out.
“I just saw your lady friend in the men’s room”
“She must’ve made a mistake.”
“No way, I was a medic in the army, there’s no mistake.”
And then Beverly emerges to a legitimately chilling moment.
That look.
That stare.
A bunch of straight men, in a bar, who just sniffed out a queer person in their midst.
The first time I saw this I honestly thought something terrible was about to happen.
In this moment, Beverly seems to realize what’s happened -- that her safety is in danger,
as well as Archie’s reputation.
She thinks fast and explains what happened:
“When I came to, I was being given mouth to mouth resuscitation by a truck driver.”
“A truck driver?
You mean a cab driver.”
“No no, it wasn’t Mr. Bunker.
It was a truck driver.”
That little lie shifts everyone’s attention, and the reporter runs off to look for the
non-existent truck driver.
It’s an amazing moment -- her quick thinking creates a clever diversion that takes the
attention off of her, and also pays Archie back for having saved her.
Everyone quickly forgets about Beverly -- bizarrely fast, to be honest, but that’s life in the
last 60 seconds of a sitcom -- and we end the episode with Archie getting a few moments
alone with Beverly to express his thanks.
This experience has changed them both: Beverly from an object of Archie’s scorn to his
savior, and Archie from a thoughtless bigot to something ever so slightly more respectful.
“For a dame, you’re one hell of a guy.”
And that’s that for the episode -- but not for Beverly.
She appears twice more on the show over the next two years, and in that time everyone’s
relationship with her deepens.
Archie grows more comfortable around her, and she becomes particularly close with Edith.
“You’re like a sister to me.”
“To me you’re like a sister, no I mean brother, well both rolled into one.”
That’s another thing that sets Beverly apart -- unlike most queer guest stars, who show
up for one very special episode and then disappear, never to be seen again, Beverly actually comes
back.
Her relationship with the Bunkers changes, and she actually gets an arc -- albeit one
that’s ultimately, well, troubling.
While Archie’s eager to boast about being the one who saved Beverly’s life, her intervention
saves them both, all while blazing a path for future drag performers AND winning the
respect of TV’s most iconic bigot.
The episode may be called “Archie the Hero,” but as far as I’m concerned, all hail the
queen.
Land ho!
We’re pulling into port.
Thanks for cruising along with us!
And thanks to everyone who makes the Culture Cruise possible with a pledge of support on
Patreon, folks like Mayma Wilson.
Head over to patreon.com/mattbaume or click the link in the description to check out the
perks available to backers.
And now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go see if Archie’s been changed by his
experience with Beverly.
“She stripped me of my manhood.”