How a shocking drag queen became a mainstream icon

The late muse of director John Waters, Divine delighted in inspiring outrage and disgust on and off screen. However from The Little Mermaid to Chappell Roan, he has left a big impression on popular culture

Divine was a drag queen like no other. In the 1970s and 1980s, long before RuPaul’s Drag Race brought the art form into the mainstream, this outrageous actor, singer and cultural disruptor was blazing a trail that remains highly influential today. “We’ve seen Divine’s work bleed into fashion, music and film, particularly through the trashy aesthetic he pioneered with director John Waters,” says Jake Hall, author of Shoulder to Shoulder: A Queer History of Solidarity, Coalition and Chaos. This year, Divine’s signature drag makeup – pencil-thin eyebrows painted in a wickedly high arch – has been referenced by Rihanna and breakout pop star Chappell Roan. Sharing photos of her Divine-inspired look, Roan quoted a famous line from the star’s 1972 film Pink Flamingos: “Filth is my politics! Filth is my life!”

When Divine and Waters met as teenagers in suburban Baltimore, the fledgling director embraced him as a muse. Divine, who was born Harris Glenn Milstead, was already dabbling in drag – on one occasion, he arrived at his girlfriend’s house for a date dressed as Elizabeth Taylor, his idol. But Waters gave him the drag name Divine, and encouraged his friend to become braver and more provocative in how he presented himself. They went on to make six cult films together, including 1974’s wickedly entertaining Female Trouble, which was released 50 years ago today.

In this hilarious and transgressive romp, Divine gives what many fans consider to be his finest performance as the morally bankrupt and utterly horrifying Dawn Davenport. She begins the film as a teenage tearaway and ends it as a low-rent celebrity who acquires notoriety by killing several audience members during a nightclub performance. It’s a bold swing pulled off with aplomb by Divine, who referred to himself as “he” even when he was in drag – a pronoun choice that would be deemed unusual on the queer scene today.

At the movie’s denouement, Davenport tells us from her electric chair: “I’d like to thank all those wonderful people who were kind enough to read about me in the newspaper and watch me on the television news shows. Without all of you, my career would have never gotten this far.” Waters was satirising the public’s growing appetite for true crime stories and, in a way, anticipating the tawdry debasement of celebrity that would follow in the reality TV era. Waters had a deliciously twisted mind from the start, but Divine was the perfect co-conspirator: a genuine acting talent who was game for anything. In their previous movie, 1972’s Pink Flamingos, Divine made each of them notorious for life by eating actual dog faeces on camera. It’s one of the most shocking and nauseating scenes in cinema history.

Waters often wryly described Divine as “the most beautiful woman in the world… almost”. Nothing about his aggressive drag persona and outlandish image was supposed to be pretty or palatable. “Divine always delighted in disgusting his audience, and he was truly unafraid of ugliness,” says Hall, who points to the shocking “shaved back hairline” he wore in Pink Flamingos as a prime example of the way he flouted the rules of “polished, high-femme drag”. Hall also notes that Divine was “one of the first drag superstars to not just embrace their fatness, but really wear it as a badge of honour with a snarl on their face”.

Juanita MORE!, a drag queen who has been performing in San Francisco for three decades, says Divine was a “trailblazer” in the 1970s because he offered a raucous alternative to the more staid “female impersonators” – as they were then known – who appeared on network television. “Divine stood out because he [personified] loud, trashy glamour and did things his way,” MORE says. Jacob Broomfield, author of Drag: A British History, argues that “Divine’s style of drag would still be considered fresh today [because] it’s a bargain-bin riposte” to the more “polished” looks presented by many, though not all, contestants on RuPaul’s Drag Race.

This enduring relevance is especially remarkable given that Divine died of heart failure in March 1988, aged just 42. In an obituary, People magazine hailed him as “the drag queen of the century”, but it would have been impossible then to predict some of the surprising ways in which Divine would continue to permeate the mainstream. A year after his death, Disney released an animated film adaptation of The Little Mermaid that featured a voluptuous, garishly glamorous sea witch called Ursula. Animator Rob Minkoff confirmed that Divine was a direct influence on the character when he told Vogue last year that he disregarded a script note that described Ursula as a slim, Joan Collins-like figure.

Minkoff explained that because “Divine seemed like such a great, larger-than-life character”, it seemed “like a funny and quirky idea” to draw Ursula “more like a drag queen”. When Disney remade The Little Mermaid as a 2023 live-action movie Ursula was portrayed by Melissa McCarthy, who said she “totally brought” Divine’s “humour” to the role – as well as his statement eye makeup.

Sadly, Divine’s first real taste of mainstream film success came just three weeks before his death. Released in February 1988, John Waters’ breakout hit Hairspray was his most accessible film yet at this point: a sweetly subversive comedy about a 1960s teenager, Tracy Turnblad (Ricki Lake), who rallies against racial segregation. Writing in The Spectator magazine at the time, Hilary Mantel praised Divine’s “very funny” performance as Tracy’s supportive mother Edna. Divine’s witty but empathetic turn is such an integral part of Hairspray’s daffy alchemy that subsequent adaptations have invariably cast a male actor in the role. In 2003, Harvey Fierstein won a Tony Award for portraying Edna in the original Broadway production of Hairspray the stage musical, while John Travolta played her in 2007’s movie version of that show.

Divine also influenced another hit Broadway musical, 2013’s Kinky Boots, which was adapted by Fierstein and Cyndi Lauper from a 2005 British film of the same name. Both follow Charlie, the owner of a struggling English shoe factory who recruits Lola, a sharp-tongued drag queen, to help him reach a niche market – male drag performers in need of outsize high-heeled footwear. The film’s script was co-written by Geoff Deane, a screenwriter and musician whose previous credits included penning Divine’s 1984 single You Think You’re a Man. 

Deane tells the BBC that “no one has really spotted this connection before”, but says one “undoubtedly” informed the other. “The producers wanted a film about a factory, but I knew it also needed a character from that [drag] world,” Deane recalls. “I suddenly thought of Divine and other people I’d met on the scene, and tried to invent a character that rolled it all into one – you know, sassy with a smart mouth. That became Lola.”

Though Divine made his biggest splash as an actor, he also carved out a noteworthy music career. He wasn’t exactly a natural singer, but his sassy sprechgesang (speak singing) vocal style proved a good fit for Hi-NRG music, an uptempo offshoot of disco that became popular on the gay scene in the early 1980s.

After Divine came to international prominence thanks to his John Waters films and an acclaimed stage role in 1976’s Women Behind Bars, a camp prison comedy that filled theatres in New York and London, he began moonlighting as a nightclub act. His deliberately combative act involved hurling insults at an adoring, mainly gay audience, but Divine’s friend and manager Bernard Jay realised this could be fleshed out with disco numbers. In 1982, Divine released two Hi-NRG singles that made the US Dance Club Songs chart, Native Love (Step by Step) and Shoot Your Shot, both produced by one of the genre’s innovators, Bobby Orlando.

Two years later, he scored an even greater success with You Think You’re a Man, a Hi-NRG stomper written by Deane and produced by Stock Aitken Waterman. At the time, this ambitious songwriting and production trio – Mike Stock, Matt Aitken and Pete Waterman – were relatively unknown, but they went on to become the UK’s foremost hitmakers of the late 1980s and early 1990s, crafting smashes for Bananarama, Donna Summer, Kylie Minogue and many more.

Deane says he wrote the song “with someone like Gloria Gaynor in mind” but Divine’s rambunctious vocal turned it into something “far more original” that became a UK Top-20 hit. When Divine performed it on the country’s leading music show, Top of the Pops, Deane says it sparked “the most public outrage since the Sex Pistols were around” in the late 1970s. Even 40 years on, Hall says “it’s such a wild viewing experience to see a ballsy, fat drag queen in a skintight dress on one of the country’s most popular shows”.

It is often reported that Divine was subsequently “banned” from Top of the Pops after the BBC received “thousands” of complaints alleging obscenity, something the star alluded to in an interview, though no one connected with the show has ever publicly confirmed this. Deane says he “never really understood” why some viewers were offended by Divine’s performance because his shtick wasn’t far removed from “pantomime”, a British theatrical form that involves male actors playing outré female characters. Still, he also notes that the mainstream audience of the time were probably unaccustomed to seeing a man in drag on a primetime show, especially one who was “so unashamed about being overweight”.

Ian Wade, author of 1984: The Year Pop Went Queer, believes that Divine’s collaboration with Stock Aitken Waterman was musically significant because it was “the perfect advert” for them. You Think You’re a Man was the first UK Top-75 hit produced by the trio, and along with Hazell Dean’s Whatever I Do (Wherever I Go), a concurrent Hi-NRG single which they also produced, it “directly inspired” fast-rising pop band Dead or Alive to seek them out. In 1985, Stock Aitken Waterman produced a Dead or Alive offering, You Spin Me Round (Like a Record), that became the first of the team’s 13 UK number ones.

In Broomfield’s eyes, Divine’s Hi-NRG success also helped to pave the way for “subsequent club hits by drag artists including RuPaul’s Supermodel”, which became a Billboard Hot 100 hit in 1993. All the while, You Think You’re a Man has remained a brilliantly kitsch queer anthem. Last year, it was covered in suitably club-ready fashion by Lady Jezzika, a London-based singer-songwriter who hails Divine as a “major influence” because he was “always so outrageous and out there”.

Still, at the time of his death, Divine was focusing on his acting career with a particular view to playing more male characters. Sadly, he died the day before he was due to tape a guest spot as Uncle Otto on the popular US sitcom Married… with Children. Because Divine’s life was so cruelly cut short, we’ll never know how much further he could have pushed himself into the mainstream. When I interviewed John Waters for AnOther magazine in 2022, he opined that if Divine were alive today, he would be a regular judge on RuPaul’s Drag Race dressed “as a man”.

In the same interview, Waters argued that “every drag queen now has been influenced by Divine” because “they all have an attitude” and “a certain rage in them”. In a way, this could be the key to Divine’s continued appeal. In 2024, 36 years after his death, he is still reminding us that drag is an art form rooted in radical protest. “His drag was inherently political and the ‘filth is my politics’ slogan definitely informs some of the underground drag scene today,” Hall says.

At the same time, Divine is capable of inspiring everything from mainstream cinema and pop to high-end fashion from beyond the grave. In 2020, luxury fashion house Loewe collaborated with the star’s estate on an exhibition and capsule collection that paid “homage to Milstead’s life and artistry as Divine”. It all adds up to a fascinating, multifaceted legacy that spreads, a bit like Ursula’s tentacles, into many different areas of pop culture. Even now, whenever life feels beige or boring, we can all be roused by a little Divine intervention.