Sermon 6.14.26 William Dorsey Swann: The First Drag Queen
- standrewcin
- Jul 14
- 7 min read
Before there was the Stonewall,
Before there was a Pink Pony Club, where boys and girls could both be queens every single day,
There was a “disorderly house” at 12th and F streets in Washington DC, a legal euphemism usually associated with brothels, where – according to the Washington Post – a man dressed in “a gorgeous dress of cream-colored satin” yelled at an arresting officer, “you is no gentleman.”
According to research by Channing Gerard Joseph, during the massive cultural shifts of the 19th century in the United States,
Though our nation was founded on the principle of electing our government officials rather than royal households,
The idea of having a queen, especially for things like town parades, became popular in the late 19th century.
There would be pomp and circumstance, there would be the dignity of a grand marshal, and the beauty of a queen, who embodied the ideals of 19th century femininity.
And so, before we had “Yass Queen,” in the 21st century, we had the queens of the 19th.
The era of parade queens also saw the advent of a new type of music called ragtime.
Getting its name from the syncopated “ragged” rhythms of the music, ragtime was a joyful expression of freedom during the reconstruction era, when the progress of African Americans in society, though halting, seemed to be on an upward trajectory.
This coming week, we will celebrate the day of liberty and emancipation that occurred on the first Juneteenth of 1865.
20 years after word of emancipation finally reached the folks of Galveston, Texas, there was a pre-Jim Crow hope in the possibilities of what freedom could mean.
Ragtime was one of the expressions of that hope and freedom.
In Washington D.C., these two ideas: the idea of queens, and the liberating sounds of ragtime came together in the house of William Dorsey Swann, who had been born into slavery in Maryland and became the Belle Extraordinaire of 12th street in our nation’s capital.
In the 1880’s and 90’s, Swann would hold parties at his home, which came to be known as “Grand Rags:” ebullient, flamboyant expressions of black joy and black culture.
What was very different about Swann’s “Grand Rags,” or “Drags” as they came to known, was that they became not only an expression of hard-won freedom in the physical sense of being freed from enslavement,
They also offered a second type of freedom, the freedom to express identity in non-conforming ways, where boys and girls could both be queens every single day.
William Dorsey Swann became known, probably because he coined the term, as the first “Queen of the Drags,” at his “disorderly house” in DC.
Now, I don’t know what William Dorsey Swann’s personal piety was like, and I do not know if he had grand plans for a liberation movement for queer folks 90 years before the Stonewall rebellion.
What I do know is that Swann stood his ground for human dignity, and he did it in a gorgeous cream-colored dress.
I also know that Swann was a finder of lost sheep.
In our Gospel lesson today, Jesus commissions his 12 disciples to go out for a time to spread the Good News.
And, although the Apostle Paul will take the word of Jesus to the Gentiles of Greece, and many of the disciples would go out after Pentecost to far off places like India and Ethiopia, maybe even as far as Spain and the British Isles,
We notice today that Jesus says not to go far away.
Jesus does not send his disciples at this moment to the Samaritans or to any of the “nations,” which is what he means when he says Gentiles, the others, the non-Judeans.
Jesus says go to the “Lost Sheep of Israel,” meaning “go to our own people for a time.”
To my mind, there are a few applications of this idea to our lives right here and right now.
The first is to consider God’s care for those who are “lost.”
The second is to think about what it means to bring the Good News for a time to those who are near rather than far.
There are generally two ways to be a “Lost Sheep” in the Bible.
The first is synonymous with being a “sinner of God’s own redeeming,” that is to say that you have gone astray.
You have wandered off from the rest of the fold, from the safety of the shepherd and gone your own way.
The Prophet Isaiah gives us a good example of this type of “lost sheep” in his 53rd chapter, “All we like lost sheep have gone astray, we have each turned to our own way,” which is why the suffering servant of this chapter has the “iniquities of us all laid upon him.”
Following our own way of doing things, in this conception of the lost sheep motif, we get lost, because of an error that we make,
In choosing our own way rather than staying with the flock and listening to the shepherd of souls.
A second way for a sheep to get lost, however, is for something to drive the sheep away from the fold, for the sheep to be scattered.
The Prophet Ezekiel lays the conceptual framework for this type of understanding.
Living around the time of the exile of Judah, Ezekiel understands that sometimes there are outside forces that drive the flock apart, especially if there are shepherds who are not equipped or not willing to take care of their flock, a reference to the kings of Judah and Israel.
He contrasts God’s seeking of those driven away saying, “I will seek that which was lost, and bring again that which was driven away, and will bind up that which was broken, and will strengthen that which was sick: but I will destroy the fat and the strong; I will feed them with judgment.”
So, what we see is that when Jesus is sending his disciples to the “lost sheep of Israel,”
He sends them both to people who have gone astray, but also to people who have been driven away.
During this Pride month, where we call special attention to the belovedness of our LGBTQ+ neighbors, I wonder how often what looks like “going astray” is a result of being “driven away.”
When I think of the story of William Dorsey Swann and all of his companions at the drag balls of Washington DC, and the other unmentioned, undocumented, and unknown men and women like them in other places and other times,
I wonder how lost people would be, if they had had shepherds that embraced them rather than driving them away, as must surely have been their experience.
For certain, there is always the risk that, “drunk with the wine of the world we forget thee,” and go astray like lost sheep.
But, nevertheless, I wonder what acceptance and celebration could accomplish.
Clearly, Swann’s drag balls became a place where Good News created a new flock, a new family of folks who found acceptance, companionship, and dignity.
We could very well disagree with the way that they lived, as many moral, family-focused Christians are wont to do.
This type of dignity doesn’t fit their paradigm of righteousness.
For my part, I’ll not have the dust from their feet on my doorstep, when a fabulous celebration of God’s love is the other alternative.
The second piece of the Gospel that I want us to think about today is the fact that before Jesus sent his disciples far off, he sent them to what was near;
The lost sheep are their own people.
Far from a kind of ethno-centric, I only take care of my own, type of mentality,
Jesus, here, realizes the importance of brining the Good News to those who are near to you.
In a few weeks, my family and I will go to the Navajo Reservation in Bluff, Utah as we have done for the past three decades.
It is a place that has a special place in my heart, a place where God has sent us not just to teach and to bring love, but to be taught and to be loved.
That is mission work that we hold dear.
God does indeed call us to other places to participate in Jesus’ mission.
But, we cannot forget that Jesus also calls us to our own neighborhood, to our own people as well.
I received a reminder of this as we talked about the ongoing work of the Commission for Reparative Justice in our diocese at the joint vestry meeting of the 4 historically black parishes yesterday.
We talked about the work of reparations.
We talked about the fact that this work begins with repairing the ways that black folk in this country and this diocese have been those who were “driven away” from their flocks and brought to this country for the economic benefit of European colonizers and their descendants.
For the purposes of repair, we begin with the black community.
For my own personal reckoning as one of those descended from both European aristocratic colonizers as well as impoverished white immigrants,
I am reminded that part of my work is not just to be an ally of reparations, but to talk to my own people and continue to set the framework for our white brothers and sisters in the diocese to find meaning and mission in the work of reparations.
We are blessed by the diversity of this congregation, and our social and cultural heritage as a historically black church that we are in a position to bring Good News to many communities of our people.
This week as we look to the celebration of our Juneteenth Block Party, we have the opportunity to bring that type of Good News by our presence with those who are near to us.
In your own week, you have the opportunity to tell your own people, the people that inhabit your life, you can tell them of this diverse flock of sheep who have been found and restored through Jesus Christ.
A place where you can find embrace, no matter who you are.
Whether you show up in a gorgeous cream-colored dress, a fabulous hat, jeans and a t-shirt, whether you are a king or a queen, white, black, or the beautiful spectrum in between.
If each of us went to the “lost sheep” of our own people, we’re one of the few places on a Sunday morning that would be sending people out to the grand kaleidoscope of God’s love for diversity;
One of the few places that can say, “whether you went astray or were driven away, there is a place for you here.”
The witness of people like William Dorsey Swann, the witness of the sufferings of all people marginalized people through time is that we stand in God’s Grace when the endurance that comes from our suffering allows us to go and speak the Good News.
And when we have that really Good News, that undeniable Good News, that God is with us and that our faith remains standing in spite of the onslaughts of life,
Then we can participate in the ebullient, the joyful, and the fabulous dignity that God has dreamed for each of us.
And, I think that’s worth sharing.
Amen.
Comments