‘Mama Gloria’ ran a charm school for transgender youths and inspired hit play
Long before the Stonewall rebellion launched the modern LGBTQI+ rights movement in the United States in 1969, Gloria Allen was out and proud, immersing herself in ballroom culture while attending weekend drag events in Chicago.
‘‘When I came out of my mother’s womb I was out,’’ she liked to say. ‘‘The only time I entered a closet was to get me an outfit and a pair of pumps.’’
Allen, a black transgender woman, grew to become a beloved elder of Chicago’s LGBTQI+ community, offering guidance and support to younger trans people, many of whom were African American or Hispanic.
By 2012, she had started running a charm school for transgender youths, providing lessons in etiquette and comportment while instilling confidence and strength. Her pupils – many of whom were homeless or at-risk – called her ‘‘Mama Gloria’’ or simply ‘‘Mama’’.
‘‘I cooked for them, listened to them and taught them etiquette. I thought of them as my chosen children,’’ she told People magazine.
The school, at the Center on Halsted, in Lakeview, Chicago, lasted only a few years – she was not paid, and often used her own money to prepare students’ meals – but inspired a hit play, Charm, by Philip Dawkins. It was also chronicled in a 2020 documentary, Mama Gloria.
‘‘It was hard to go places with Gloria, because she was a celebrity,’’ Dawkins said. ‘‘Everyone actually felt like they knew her . . . She was the mother of queer Chicago.’’
Allen was 76 when she died of respiratory failure at her home in Lakeview, where she lived in an apartment complex for LGBTQI+ seniors.
The idea for a transgender charm school emerged from her meeting LGBTQI+ teenagers who were loud and, as she told it, a little rude, with an approach to fashion and etiquette that was far different from someone who had been taught to wear gloves and a fancy hat for formal occasions.
‘‘I may be sounding old-fashioned, but I would see these young people wearing negligee-type clothes on the street and I would say, ‘How could they leave the house looking like that?’ ’’
Friend Luchina Fisher, writer and director of Mama Gloria, said Allen’s pupils ‘‘heard her in a way that didn’t sound critical. It sounded like, ‘Oh, here’s somebody who actually cares about us, who sees us and wants to help’.
‘‘At that point in time, there was some trans visibility, but there was still a lot of misinformation, a lot of hate. And here was Gloria, first of all an elder, which many young trans people hadn’t seen or experienced before, reaching out to them and offering her time and her experience and her heart. She heard what was on their minds. She heard
‘‘I may be sounding oldfashioned, but I would see these young people wearing negligee-type clothes on the street and I would say, ‘How could they leave the house looking like that?’ ’’
what had happened to them. And she said, ‘You’re important, and I see you and I love you, and I want you to succeed.’ ’’
Meeting with her students once or twice a week, Allen would teach them how to apply makeup and artfully hold a conversation. She also spoke about safe sex practices and domestic abuse, drawing on her own experiences, and checked in on those who were preparing to undergo gender-affirming surgery, as she had in her 30s.
Charm and the subsequent documentary helped bring wider attention to Allen, who was cited by President Joe Biden at a White House ceremony two days after her death.
‘‘I feel so blessed because I never thought I would make it to the age of 30,’’ Allen told the Chicago Tribune last year. ‘‘I never thought that, because I had been in so many bad relationships where I was beaten up. It was rough.
‘‘I’m not going to go through life hating people for what they did to me,’’ she added. ‘‘I’m not gonna let that happen, and I overcame it. Besides, all I want to do is put on a beautiful dress and a pair of hot pumps and go on about my business and travel.’’
The oldest of eight siblings, Allen was born in Bowling Green, Kentucky, and grew up in the Bronzeville section of Chicago. Her parents were not married, and she had little relationship to her biological father. Her mother was a showgirl and a model.
Decades before institutions like the Center on Halsted started offering resources for transgender youths, Allen found support from her mother, who instructed Allen’s siblings to call her ‘‘sister’’, not ‘‘brother’’.
‘‘The men in my family, they were sort of apprehensive about me, but the women were strong,’’ she said in a 2016 interview. ‘‘They wore the pants in my family. My mother would tell them, ‘This is your child, this is our baby, and you’re going to love my baby because you love me.’ And that’s the way it was.’’
She was also backed by her great-aunt, who introduced her to the fundamentals of etiquette, and her maternal grandmother, a seamstress who made gowns for drag queens and dancers. Together, the three women gave her fashion tips and makeup advice. ‘‘Before I left the house, I had to model my outfit for these women,’’ she told the Tribune. ‘‘If I didn’t look right, they’d stop me. They’d say, ‘Sister, you can’t wear that.’ ’’
Before she discovered the city’s ballroom community, Allen found far less support outside the home. ‘‘People looked at me like I was just nothing,’’ she recalled, ‘‘and they treated me like I was nothing.’’
She was sexually assaulted while in high school and took a year off before returning to earn her diploma. She later had a 10-year relationship with a partner who was abusive, according to Fisher. In a phone interview, she said Allen pulled a .22-calibre handgun from her purse one day and shot her partner on the Dan Ryan Expressway. He survived – they broke up – and never told the authorities how he had been wounded.
Survivors include four brothers and a sister.
One of her lessons to students was straightforward, if not always easy: Be yourself. ‘‘If you’re yourself,’’ she said in a TV docuseries, ‘‘people will learn how to love you.’’