4/15/2023 0 Comments Divine drag queen![]() In a 1973 quote Divine confirmed that he liked the name John gave him and that no one called him Glenn anymore. Waters borrowed the name “Divine” from a character in the book. At the time, Waters was reading Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet which was a controversial book about homosexuals living on the outskirts of Parisian society. The nickname “Divine” was given to Glenn by John Waters, himself. Glenn and his friends easily embraced the counterculture and underground elements of Baltimore, frequenting the beatnik bars and clubs of the time. He later quit hairdressing in 1970.Ī couple of the friends Glenn began collecting throughout the years were filmmaker John Waters and David Lochary who would appear in several movies with Glenn/Divine later. After graduating he worked at several different salons and in time his parents helped him buy his own salon in Townson hoping he would learn responsibility. He describes that experience as a “rude awakening at a very young age.”Īfter graduating high school in 1963, Glenn began attending the Marinella Beauty School where he learned hair styling which would benefit him in his career in show business. He learned how superficial the world can be when, in his junior year, he finally went on a diet and lost eighty pounds and suddenly the people who wouldn’t speak to him before started talking to him and he was able to make friends. Glenn was a very introverted and artistic teenager who loved painting and took an interest in horticulture who suffered so much from being self-conscious about his weight that, in the same interview mentioned above, he speaks of how he never went out until he was about sixteen years old - around the time he met and became friends with future filmmaker John Waters - and even then he always wore a rain coat to cover himself. Sadly this only made Glenn more unpopular in his school. After breaking down and speaking up about the abuse he was going through at school, his parents called the authorities and the vicious kids were expelled. He kept this to himself for fear that things would only get worse until one day, when he had to go to the doctor for a physical, his bruises were noticed after he disrobed. In a 1988 interview he recounts how the bullies in his school beat him badly on a daily basis. He attended Towson High School where he was bullied for being overweight and his perceived effeminacy. Glenn would later describe his family as “your upper middle-class American family.”īy the age of 12, Glenn and his parents moved to Lutherville, Maryland, a suburb of Baltimore. By 1945, his family was relatively well-off within their community and were socially conservative Baptists. Glenn was an only child, his mother having suffered two miscarriages prior to his birth. Harris Glenn Milstead, (who preferred being called by his middle name to distinguish him from his father) was born on October 19, 1945, in Baltimore, Maryland to Harris Bernard and Frances Milstead. His body was flown to his hometown, Towson, Maryland, where it is buried in Hillpark Cemetery. Weighing in at more than three-hundred pounds, he passed away in his sleep from cardiac arrest due to an enlarged heart. His body was found at the Regency Plaza Suites Hotel in Los Angeles, California on the morning of March 7, 1988. ![]() Many who knew him described him as soft-spoken, kind, and generous.ĭivine was only 42 at the time of his death. Those who got to work with him saw past the outlandishness he exhibited on stage and in front of the camera and actually saw what the raw talent and natural sense of comic timing he possessed. His ultimate goal was to be taken seriously as a male character actor and in later years would prove himself to be just that talented. Although he came to embrace his homosexuality openly, he did not consider himself a drag queen, transgender nor transsexual. In fact, he was quoted as saying that his favorite part of drag was getting out of it and he only wore it to get paid. While Divine was famous for his drag persona, over-the-top, and at times gross antics, in real life this was not him. He even landed a guest role on the hit TV series Married…With Childrenbut passed away from an enlarged heart the night before filming. The critics praised his performance as the character, Edna Turnblad, and his agent, Bernard Jay, claimed he had never seen Divine happier. ![]() One month before his death in 1988, the film Hairspray was released and his dream of becoming a well-respected actor was finally coming to fruition. Divine became famous for his starring roles in many of John Waters’ films, most notably Hairspray and Pink Flamingos. Harris Glenn Milstead, also known as the performer “Divine,” has been described as “one of the few truly radical and essential artists” of the 20th century. ![]()
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