His name was William Dorsey Swann, but to his friends he was known as “the Queen.” Both of those names had been forgotten for nearly a century before I rediscovered them while researching at Columbia University. Born in Maryland around 1858, Swann endured slavery, the Civil War, racism, police surveillance, torture behind bars, and many other injustices. But beginning in the 1880s, he not only became the first American activist to lead a queer resistance group; he also became, in the same decade, the first known person to dub himself a “queen of drag”—or, more familiarly, a drag queen.

In 1896, after being convicted and sentenced to 10 months in jail on the false charge of “keeping a disorderly house”—a euphemism for running a brothel—Swann demanded (and was denied) a pardon from President Grover Cleveland for holding a drag ball. This, too, was a historic act: It made Swann the earliest recorded American to take specific legal and political steps to defend the queer community’s right to gather without the threat of criminalization, suppression, or police violence.

When I tell people that I’m writing a book about the life of a former slave who reigned over a secret world of drag balls in Washington, DC, in the 1880s, the looks of shock, delight, and even confusion on their faces tell me all I need to know.

My research on Swann began 15 years ago, when I stumbled upon a Washington Post article from April 13, 1888. The headline leaped off the page: “Negro Dive Raided. Thirteen Black Men Dressed as Women Surprised at Supper and Arrested.” According to another news account, more than a dozen escaped as the officers barged in and Swann tried to stop them, boldly telling the police lieutenant in charge, “You is no gentleman.” In the ensuing brawl, the Queen’s “gorgeous dress of cream-colored satin” was torn to shreds. (The fight was also one of the first known instances of violent resistance in the name of LGBTQ rights.)

To 19th century observers, Swann’s dance party was a shocking and immoral fiasco perpetrated by a vanishingly tiny minority of “freaks.” The National Republican, another Washington daily, said of the men arrested in the raid, “It is safe to assert that the number living as do those who were taken into custody last night must be exceedingly small.” Yet, despite their minuscule numbers, they made quite an impression: Hundreds of onlookers followed the men to the station to steal a glimpse of silk and skin.


John Scagliotti

That spring night in 1888 wasn’t the first time the DC police had broken up one of Swann’s dances (nor would it be the last). A similar raid occurred on the night of January 14, 1887. The Washington Critic dutifully reported, “Six colored men, dressed in elegant female attire, were arraigned in the dock at the Police Court this morning on a charge of being suspicious persons…. They nearly all had on low neck and short sleeve silk dresses, several of them with trains,” as well as “corsets, bustles, long hose and slippers, and everything that goes to make a female’s dress complete.”

Drag balls had been going on in secret for years. Invitations to the dances, for instance, were often whispered to young men at the YMCA, and newspapers described the arrests of several black men wearing “bewitching” fascinators, silk sacques, or cashmere dresses while en route to balls. In 1882, Swann served a jail term for stealing plates, silverware, and other party supplies. But the 1887 raid was the first time the wider world learned

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