Early in director Lee Cooper’s appropriately fabulous documentary Maisie, the title star, who at 84 (during filming) is Britain’s oldest drag queen, expresses dismay when introduced – via video chat – to Darcelle XV, official holder of the Guinness World record for the oldest working drag queen.
Darcelle XV, aka Walter W Cole, is the owner and operator of Darcelle XV Showplace in Portland, Oregon, a venue that hosts the US western seaboard’s longest running – 50 years and counting – drag show. Walter is hoping to pay tribute to his similarly-aged British peer, Maisie Trollette, aka David Raven, ahead of the latter’s 85th birthday celebrations.
“All that’s wrong, you see,” says Raven, immediately. “He’s a drag queen and I’m a drag artiste.”
Maisie Trollette has certainly earned the say-so. David Raven began performing on the London drag scene as part of a duo with former collaborator James Court during the 1960s. After Court and Raven were cast as the ugly sisters in a Brighton pantomime during the 1970s, Raven and his life partner, Don Coull, relocated to the seaside city where Raven has remained a fixture of Brighton Pride ever since the inaugural 1973 event.
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Cooper had initially hoped to fashion a historical chronicle, but found that the supporting materials simply didn’t exist.
“Maisie Trollette has been on the scene for over 50 years,” says the filmmaker. “A living legend, especially in Brighton. So everybody knows who she is. Someone introduced me to David and he was just absolutely fascinating, a really funny guy, and has obviously seen so much in the 50 years that he’s been performing. So I just started to spend a little time with him, thinking that I’d maybe do a one-off interview and it just sort of grew from there, really.
“I thought originally this was going to be the life of David Raven aka Maisie Trollette. But sadly, there’s not very much LGBT archive footage around because everything was so underground back then. And when David was originally performing, it was still illegal to be homosexual in the UK. But then I became fascinated by the details of the day job. My other hat is that of a creative director, and I just became fascinated with David applying his make-up with the used Brillo pad and watching him struggle to get into these high heels. And I suddenly realised that it was much more powerful to tell that story and it became a day in the life of David rather than his entire life.”
David Raven’s hometown is a vital component of Cooper’s compelling, and frequently hilarious documentary. A beacon for gay men since the Napoleonic wars brought garrisons of soldiers, the UK’s LGBTQ capital boasts a population where 11-15 per cent are lesbian, gay or bisexual, according to one 2014 estimate.
“There are so many of us living here,” says Miss Jason, a supporting player in the Maisie documentary and one of Brighton’s best loved drag stars. “And we’ve got quite a lot of drag queens, so there’s a big support network in Brighton. And actually around the country, we all know each other anyway because our paths cross. But in Brighton, there’s such a strong gay community and in many ways drag shows are the glue that keep us together. That’s the way people meet. That’s the way people raise money for the charities in the city. Like any family, make no mistake about it, you know, we have our ups and downs and spats around here. But if anyone else from outside tries to cause a problem, we’re all there.”
The cross-community and intergenerational aspect of Maisie makes for many of the film’s most moving scenes. Maisie and her cohorts’ school of drag is very old-school and vaudevillian. Even her American contemporary is considerably less Widow Twanky than either Maisie herself or many of the Brighton performers she has influenced. For Walter Cole, make-up is stylised, applied to perfection, and very post-Divine. The Brighton veteran, meanwhile, maintains that he throws his make-up in the air and stands underneath.
“David has been a big mentor,” says Miss Jason. “And it’s lovely to think that the film will bring David to a new audience. It’s quite nice to know, I suppose, as a young person that you can still be as camp as tits and misbehave when you’re old. David has always been there and supported me as my act evolved. And as he’s started to slow down a little bit because he’s getting older and physically can’t do as much as he was, I’ve been starting to do a few of the bookings that he would have done. In less of a friendship, that would have been a problem. But in all the years I’ve known David, we’ve never fallen out. He’s a very precious part of my life. She can be a nuisance though, you know; a real pain in the ass when she wants to be; very stubborn, very awkward. She’s aware of the fact that she’s 80 odd and uses it. But then I guess we all would at that age.”
A great deal has been written of late concerning the mainstreaming of drag, a formerly clandestine art form that is currently platformed everywhere from RuPaul’s blockbuster series to local bottomless brunches. A recent paper in the journal Sociology authored by academics Mark McCormack and Liam Wignall ponders tensions between “drag… as a viable career opportunity where performers receive fame rather than social stigma in a more inclusive social zeitgeist” and the “push away from other creative and performing arts because heteronormative perspectives persist through typecasting and a continued professional stigma associated with drag”.
“I mean, it’s brilliant that drag has had such an explosion,” says Cooper. “I think part of why I wanted to make this film was to preserve the drag that is born from that end-of-the-pier panto tradition. Brighton is a seaside town. I sometimes liken it to when the grey squirrels came over and killed off all the red squirrels. And now they’re trying to put contraceptives into the grey squirrel feed. But really, there’s still enough nuts to go around.
“Even the RuPaul community challenge themselves and the meaning of drag. Now we have cisgender performers, trans performers, we’ve got drag kings. There’s lots of different styles and forms and that can only be a good thing, even if a few people are: we’re here, we’re queer, we’re underground and this is softening the edges. But underground drag is thriving. And you can’t look at Freddie Krueger on RuPaul and not think she was absolutely fabulous.”
Miss Jason adds: “It’s just different packaging. The present is still the same. More people will watch this film because they will have seen RuPaul on the television. So it’s opening up communication about a drag community which is what we are: a drag community whether we’re old school or RuPaul. But I have had an experience with a booking. You’ve seen the film. You see what I look like? And the bookers thought that I was going to be some lovely leggy thing. And here comes everybody’s grandmother. But once you get performing and once you build that exchange between yourself and an audience, it doesn’t matter whether you are leggy and blonde, or whether you’re short, fat and dumpy like me, it’s all about the exchange.”
Screening the final cut of Maisie for the title star was, according to Miss Jason, an emotional experience: “He’s been through a lot. He has lost his partner. And he has had to hide so much in his life. So suddenly to see his raw emotion when being open about it on a big screen, is going to be overwhelming. When David was working, if he was lost in the car, he wouldn’t dream of asking for directions to the Two Brewers in Clapham. Because he knows that people would know it was a gay bar. What he would say is, where’s Clapham High Street? So he’s conditioned to that. And it might be a generational thing as well. But he won’t ever speak about death. He always refers to death as eventuality.”
Director Lee Cooper, meanwhile, recalls Raven’s initial review. “Well,” he said. “You’ve made an SOS movie: same old shit.”
David Raven, now aged 88, may not be as sprightly as he once was, but the UK’s still-oldest drag artiste continues to surprise and amuse.
“David doesn’t feel old,” explains Cooper. “I went to see him a couple of weeks back and he said, ‘Oh just one minute: can you hold this for me,’ and he put a bloody fake snake in my hand. He sent me out for a newspaper and I must have been gone for 25 minutes. And he’s only hidden in the cupboard for 25 minutes so he can jump out the cupboard and scare the living daylights out of me.”
Maisie opens on August 5th
