Celebrating a Forgotten Icon of Hell’s Kitchen, Lee G Brewster — Queer Trailblazer and Drag Pioneer

Few may know that an unremarkable five-story apartment building on W48th Street, across the street from Clinton Community Garden, holds a key place in New York City’s LGBTQ history. Once the home of a queer trailblazer and outspoken advocate for trans and gender nonconforming people, between at least 1972 to 1975 the halls of one apartment were filled with queer joy and laughter.

Described by writer Abby Saypen in a magazine article as “part social worker, part rebel, part martyr and part business person,” Lee G Brewster (1943-2000) may not be a name on the tip of most people’s tongues when they think about 20th century queer activism.

But this activist and entrepreneur, who lived at 445 W48th Street (bw 9/10th Ave) during the early to mid 1970s, founded and edited Drag magazine, one of the first queer publications catering to gender non conforming people. For nearly three decades, he also owned Mardi Gras, a clothing boutique for drag queens and gender variant people that styled the likes of movies Tootsie , The Birdcage and To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything , Julie Newmar .

Brewster identified at various times in his life as a “drag queen” and “female impersonator.” He is referred to as a gay man in interviews and publications, and used he/him pronouns.

Born in Honaker, Virginia, to a father who was a coal miner, and raised in West Virginia, Brewster (the G stood for Greer) left home at 17 to work for the FBI in Washington, DC. Just a year later he was arrested and fired from his job after being outed as gay, he recalled in a 1994 interview with magazine The TV-TS Tapestry . He then left for New York, soon joining the Mattachine Society , an early homophile organization.

Brewster, who frequently dressed in drag at the time, raised funds for the Mattachine Society by throwing drag balls. Ironically, the relatively conservative group he worked for disapproved of drag or any sort of transgender expression.

“They were about presenting themselves as being more gender normative, to be accepted by straight society,” explained historian Jeffrey Iovannone, who researched Brewster’s life and legacy for the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project . One of the society’s primary goals was for employment of gay people in workplaces such as the federal government.

Brewster’s balls were so successful that The New York Times wrote upon his passing that “the real Jacqueline Susann, Carol Channing and Shirley MacLaine attended the last one” in 1973.

The society’s views ultimately led Brewster to leave and start his own group, the Queens Liberation Front, along with drag queens including Bunny Eisenhower, Bebe Scarpe, Chris Moore and Vicky West. The initial goal was to allow gender variant people, as well as anyone who decided to wear drag, to gather in public. By 1971, the group led a legal campaign that successfully overturned a city ordinance banning cross-dressing. The group ran an office during the 1970s out of a now-demolished building at 445 10th Avenue (bw W34/35th St).

Members of the Queens Liberation Front, including Brewster, participated in the 1970 Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade, a year after the Stonewall riots. In 1971, QLF participated in a protest in Albany to legalize female impersonation. Brewster is seen in images standing next to trans activists Sylvia Rivera, founder of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR).

The first issue of Brewster’s Drag magazine was released in 1971, according to the Digital Transgender Archive which has conserved and digitized copies of the publication. Throughout its life, the magazine, originally conceived of as an “art magazine,” published photographs of drag balls, interviews with prominent drag queens, news about the queer community and practical information about taking hormones and transitioning.

Iovannone said Brewster’s view, as expressed through the magazine, “is looking at gender more expansively and in a more fluid fashion, I think in a way that prefigures the way that we would understand trans or non-binary identities today.”

An anonymous editorial in the first edition reads: “Now, heterosexual, homosexual, part-time or full-time drag queen, it’s time for us to come down off our ‘queenly’ throne and go out amongst the ‘common’ people and let them know that we’re really people, with very REAL feelings.”

Brewster was hard at work during these early years: beginning in 1969, he started a mail-order business for people dressing in drag. Originally he sold products out of his apartment, and by the mid-70s opened Lee’s Mardi Gras Boutique, which operated until his death. Its first two locations were in Hell’s Kitchen at 565 10th Avenue (now the site of luxury apartment building The Victory) and 400 W42st Street (now the Pod Times Square hotel), before it moved to 400 W14th Street in 1989 (in a modern-day Meatpacking District, that would be above the Gucci store). The boutique was always located in a second-floor location to keep its clientele safe — you had to ring to be buzzed upstairs.

Pretty early on, Brewster left the gay liberation movement due to exclusion at the time against drag queens and gender non-conforming individuals. At the last march he attended, he held a sign reading “I’m just a stereotype, but I’m also proud,” echoing a comment he made in a 1995 interview that was published across the world.

“I sat there that year and watched them go to the press, the gay movement people, requesting that they not interview me for drag,” he said. “And you know it hurt? So I left the movement basically because it did hurt me. I had the gays saying I wasn’t good enough for them. I had transvestites, straight transvestites excluding me. … it was like pounding my head, and I couldn’t take it any more. It hurts to be constantly fighting.”

Brewster was fascinated by Mardi Gras , the one day of the year when prior to the 70s, in New Orleans, people perceived by society as men were allowed to cross-dress as women. He led annual week-long excursions to the southern city, during which time he would dress in drag.

“We would go down en masse for Mardi Gras which was always a Tuesday, but we’d arrive on the Thursday before and go out dressed all week,” Bebe Scarpe described in a 2007 interview with Transgender Tapestry . “That was a pretty bold thing to do in those days, because until 1970 drag was illegal except for Mardi Gras day, Fat Tuesday. But we didn’t let that stop us. We’d walk into a restaurant on a Thursday night, Lee, all glamorous and well put together, at the head of the group. The other diners would gasp with their forks in mid air at the sight of people in drag prior to official Mardi Gras.”

Scarpe, who met Brewster in 1971 and took over as editor of Drag , described that rather than official meetings, the Queens Liberation Front held parties at Brewster’s apartment, because “Lee, without thinking and without guile registered everything at his apartment, so his address became public.”

“Lee’s parties were different,” she recalled. “They were really about having a place where we could talk and socialize in make-up and heels just like you and I are doing now. One of the strengths of the magazine was the photos that were chosen depicted the parties as the fun, social places they were, not overtly sexy or scary.”

In an interview with the NYC Trans Oral History Project , nurse Sandra Mesics who visited Brewster’s boutique recalls: “Lee was quite a southern gentleman, and I use the word gentleman because Lee presented as a man most of the time. Lee liked high drag, where you know, you pulled out all the stops … the gowns and the sequins and everything.”

Shannon Harrington, a “wig master, hair chaser and makeup artist” who worked at Mardi Gras Boutique from the 1980s until its closing, recalls that Brewster would take her and other employees out to dinner at a “fancy-ass restaurant, places that we normally couldn’t afford.”

She enjoyed hearing stories from Brewster’s past. “He was a very generous guy at the same time,” she said. “That’s kind of what made Lee very special.” He was, for instance, the first employer to offer her full health insurance.

Brewster died of cancer on May 24, 2000. At that time, Harrington recalls, the boutique’s rent had rapidly increased. “It went from $5,000 a month to $10,000 to $15,000 and then they wanted $20,000,” she said. “I mean, they wanted the rates that they are charging probably now, back then.” She suspects the stress related to the diagnosis is part of what led to his sudden death.

Brewster’s story may not be so well known today, Iovannone said, because, “I think when we think about LGBTQ history, the default is to look at activism.

“Activism is sexy, it’s visual,” he said, “in a way that being an entrepreneur and having a boutique isn’t quite as visible, but [it] existed for decades and clearly served a really important function for the trans community in New York City and beyond.”

This is only a brief foray into Lee G Brewster’s life and legacy, and the LGBTQ history of Hell’s Kitchen.

If you have personal memories of Brewster, Brewster’s boutique, or queer life in the neighborhood during the 1970s, 80s or 90s, we would love to hear from you! Please reach out to dashiell@w42st.com

The post Celebrating a Forgotten Icon of Hell’s Kitchen, Lee G Brewster — Queer Trailblazer and Drag Pioneer appeared first on W42ST .