![]() ![]() McCarthy, who corroborated this on the Little Mermaid blue carpet in May, said that she is a “huge fan of drag.” “It’s just so fun, it’s irreverent, you can poke fun and pay homage to someone at the same time,” she said. Composer Alan Menken, who co-wrote the music with Ashman for the original animated Little Mermaid, also worked on the live-action movie and confirmed in April that Divine was the inspiration behind Ursula. ![]() “And I think Divine was somebody who really opened up the possibilities of what drag could be.” How Melissa McCarthy’s Ursula recognizes Divine and drag cultureĭisney can no longer avoid saying that Ursula and Divine are inextricable. “He was a pioneer, and we would not have the landscape of drag the way we know it today without Divine,” Schwarz says. In a sea of queens who “wanted to be Miss America,” glamorous and feminine, Divine, with his fierce refusal to abide by beauty standards, stood out. Four decades before RuPaul’s Drag Race, drag was “the opposite of hip,” Waters says. Back then, drag balls differed drastically from those of today. He started making films with Waters in the 1960s, in Baltimore. But in Ursula, audiences find otherworldly beauty-and now, a clear recognition of her roots.ĭivine, who also went by the name Harris Glenn Milstead, was born in 1945 and died of heart failure in 1988. It has toed a similar line with its practice of queer coding villains: Disney has been soundly criticized both for not making them overtly out and for assigning an evil connotation to being queer. Disney seemed to want to walk a tightrope between appeasing queer fans-many of whom have long seen themselves reflected in its characters-and not alienating those who oppose gay rights. ![]() Last year, then-CEO Bob Chapek defended the company’s reported $250,000 in donations to backers of Florida’s controversial “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Disney has a long, fraught relationship with the LGBTQ+ community. Having struggled with obesity throughout his life, he died from cardiomegaly, shortly after the release of Hairspray.ĭescribed by People magazine as the "Drag Queen of the Century", Divine has remained a cult figure, particularly within the LGBT community, and has provided the inspiration for fictional characters, artworks and songs.Ī worthwhile documentary film devoted to his life is I Am Divine (2013).In 1989, Disney would have never openly acknowledged Divine’s influence, says Jeffrey Schwarz, who chronicled the longtime collaboration between Waters and Divine on Waters’ avant-garde “midnight movies,” like Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, and Desperate Living, in the 2013 documentary I Am Divine. He achieved international chart success with hits like ’Shoot Your Shot’ (1981), ‘You Think You're a Man’ (1984) and ‘Walk Like a Man’ (1985), all of which were performed in drag. ![]() Meanwhile, in 1981, Divine embarked on a career in the disco industry by producing a number of Hi-NRG tracks, most of which were written by Bobby Orlando. He starred in two more of Waters' films, Polyester (1981) and Hairspray (1988), the latter of which represented his breakthrough into mainstream cinema. Then Divine moved to theater, appearing in several avant-garde performances alongside San Francisco drag collective The Cockettes. Divine next starred in Waters' Pink Flamingos (1972), which became a cult classic and established Divine's fame within the American counterculture. By the mid-1960s he had embraced the city's countercultural scene and befriended Waters, who gave him the name "Divine" and the tagline "the most beautiful woman in the world, almost."ĭivine joined Waters' acting troupe and adopted female roles for their experimental short films. Milstead developed an early interest in drag while working as a women's hairdresser. Divine was an American actor, singer, and drag queen, born as Harris Glenn Milstead.Ĭlosely associated with the independent filmmaker John Waters, Divine was a character actor, usually performing female roles in cinematic and theatrical productions and adopted a female drag persona for his music career. On this day, 35 years ago, Divine died at the age of 42 ( - ). ![]()
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