Long before Rupaul, Doris Fish wore the wig. Fiercely.
From wee- hours cabaret to prime- time reality TV to fiercely contended children’s story hour at the local library, the American drag queen’s journey has been a long and bumpy one.
For Doris Fish, alter ego of Philip Clargo Mills, it began not in America but Manly Vale, an apt- sounding suburb of Sydney, and ended in AIDS- ravaged San Francisco, 1991 — with resurrection, one source maintains, as a ghost composed variously of golden sparks and Evian water.
I had not known of Fish before reading journalist Craig Seligman’s minutely observed new biography of him ( although some friends used the female pronoun, “he never wanted to be a woman — he never even wanted to seem like a woman,” the author writes). I finished it convinced that this was a life well worth examining, if only because his peers are so often celebrated, or excoriated, in aggregate.
Most of Fish’s performances are unrecoverable, but those that can be scratched up are indelible. Best known, in a limited way, is probably “Vegas in Space,” a posthumously released and deeply weird 1991 sci- fi comedy about male earthlings who undergo gender- affirming operations so they can travel to a female- only planet.
Promoting the movie during its production period on a Pittsburgh morning show in 1986, Fish gamely endures being treated like a talking zoo animal by the gawking hosts and awkwardly grinning housewives. There’s also a choppy video out there of his swan song, “This Is My Life,” fervidly performed at the benefit from which the book takes its name. He was months from death.
Born in 1952, Mills was a middle child of six in a tolerant Catholic family that permitted a marijuana plant on the premises. He played a high- kicking chorus girl under a priest’s tutelage at his all- boy school’s year- end musical with more enthusiasm than most of his classmates. Remarkably indifferent to the prospect of arrest or social censure, he joined a local troupe called Sylvia and the Syn th etics whose outre antics had me scrawling ex cl am ation points in the margins.
One female impersonator’s considerable male member was tucked through his legs to simulate a tail. Another pinned back her hair with swastikas. Another bit into a dripping sheep’s heart to punctuate a lovelorn ballad, blood dripping onto her ballgown like one of the less tasteful Valentine’s Day bitmoji. There were flash mobs of Marilyn Monroe impersonators. “Everything was permitted,” Seligman writes dryly, “including ineptitude.”
Eventually, Mills/ Fish moved to San Francisco, money sewn into his pockets by his loving mother, Mildred, and found his true calling. Mostly this was what was then called prostitution, although in Fish’s hands it seems more like a kind of sexual nursing. He specialized in relations with those society often rejected, the obese or infirm. ( There was a green card marriage to a lesbian, one of the few survivors of his circle who declined to be interviewed here.)
He acted as “comedy model” for a greeting card company called West Graphic, portraits that Seligman compares to the work of Cindy Sherman. He wrote a popular column for The San Francisco Sentinel, then an essential gay weekly. And he performed in a group called Sluts a- GoGo, emulating faded stars of the ’ 30s and ’ 40s while occasionally brushing up against rising ones ( Robin Williams, Lynda Carter). The Sluts and their associates were equalopportunity offenders, doing racial as well as gender impressions, spewing double entendre and sometimes seeming to positively assault their audiences with sensory overload, exaggerated glamour and flagrant disregard for safety codes.
Although revolutionary in his in- your- faceness, Fish was not particularly political; the sincerity such activity requires was anathema. One of the more intriguing aspects of his foreshortened life was an attitude described here as Romantic Cruelism: a pose of complete indifference or dark humor even in the face of tragedy.
Fish displays it when his parents divorce; when a younger sister dies after a mysterious illness; and when one Synthetic, who had been a childhood friend, dies in a fire. “The young don’t know what to do with endings,” Seligman writes, and there were so many more to come.
“Who Does That Bitch Think She Is?” revisits and draws from a 1986 profile of Fish that Seligman wrote for skittish editors at Image magazine, a weekend section of The San Francisco Examiner. Aside from overuse of the words “notoriety” and “notorious,” it is confidently written, wistful and quite personal; Seligman’s nowhusband, Silvana Nova, was part of Fish’s scene.
The author of a previous book comparing Pauline Kael and Susan Sontag, Seligman diverts here and there to Sontag’s “Notes on ‘ Camp,’” but spends most of his time simply retracing Fish’s footsteps. At times these seem akin to the old Hans Christian Andersen version of “The Little Mermaid,” whose hero is granted the power to walk out of the water, but only with the pain of swords going through her. ( In one parade, Fish’s elaborate costume included fiberglass “legs” that drew blood from his own, covering the stains with black tights.)
Seligman’s own stance is mostly one of wary wonderment, that drag queens have gone from “totally beyond the pale” to mainstream acknowledgment, “from feared freak into object of fascination,” from the shaky spotlight to — however contentiously — the kindergarten rug. He piles a lot of historical weight on Fish’s shoulders, but his subject carries it like Joan Crawford in a padded Adrian frock.