How one 80s drag queen revolutionized what it means to be fabulous

In his exhaustive and thoroughly entertaining biography, Who Does That B***h Think She Is? Doris Fish and the Rise of Drag, critic Craig Seligman mines the life and times of Australian-born drag artist, sex worker and genderf**k provocateur Philip Clargo Mills, aka Fish, who in his short time in the limelight in Sydney and San Francisco helped shape what drag is all about in 2023.

Seligman calls his book an “expiation” for the sin of not recognizing Fish for what he was when Seligman knew him in the 1980s and early 90s: one of the artists responsible for a sea change in how Americans view and interact with LGBTQ+ people.

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“How did I get from a world in which you couldn’t tell anybody that you were gay, and you could go to prison for having gay sex, to one in which gay marriage is celebrated and embraced by the majority of the public, and there are gay pride marches in the cities?” Seligman asks.

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Part of the answer, he says, is Fish.

In his role leading the gender-bending Sylvia and the Synthetics — Australia’s answer to the Cockettes from Fish’s future hometown — to his iconic appearances in West Graphics’ genre-busting drag greeting cards, a decade-long engagement with Sluts-a-Go-Go and a star turn in the cult classic film Vegas in Space, Fish was recalibrating the world’s relationship to queer people and “bringing a camp sensibility into the general consciousness.”

Fish died of complications from AIDS in 1991. He was 38.

I spoke with the book’s author in San Francisco, ahead of an event at the GLBT Historical Society Museum there, which attracted a constellation of Seligman and Fish’s contemporaries who had survived the plague that took Fish and so many others.

The room was heavy with a sense of loss for what might have been.

It was also buoyed by Seligman in his role as Fish’s Boswell, there to speak for those who could not speak for themselves.

In the book, Seligman refers to Fish with male pronouns, which his subject preferred.

LGBTQ Nation: What does the title of the book refer to?

Craig Seligman: “Who Does That B***h Think She Is?” was the name of the benefit that was given when Doris was dying in November 1990. And no one knows exactly where the title came from. I think it was just kind of the way drag queens talk and everybody thought it was funny.

The idea was that it would be a funny title for the book, but underneath there would also be this layer of sadness. I wanted to know what the title actually refers to. And then beyond that, there’s the whole question of Doris’s identity. Doris compartmentalized his life. He was an artist. He was a drag queen. He was a hooker. Which one of those was he at any one moment? Which one did he think was?

LGBTQ Nation: The book not only chronicles Doris’s life and career, but your own as well, because you two intersect when you arrive in San Francisco.

CS: Yeah, I like to say it was a way of writing a memoir without talking about myself. 

I had gone to Stanford and fallen in love with the Bay Area. I went away for a few years and when I came back fell immediately in love and never, never, never, never wanted to leave San Francisco, and the day I did leave San Francisco was the most heartbreaking thing in my life.

I moved into a house with several roommates, who turned out to be really good people and became good friends and then I went to work for Mother Jones magazine. That’s where I met my husband Silvana and many of the people who remain my best friends.

LGBTQ Nation: Tell me about your first encounter with Doris. Was he in drag at the time?

CS: Yes. Silvana and Doris were in a serial soap opera together at Club 181 in the Tenderloin. It was called Naked Brunch. And it was an unexpected huge hit. There was a big story about it in the Pink Section of the Chronicle. It got so crowded that people actually fainted. That got the cast members very excited.

There were four episodes, and each one ran for two or three nights and then there would be a couple of months and they would do something again. Not just Silvana and Doris but a whole host of the city’s best-of drag queens were in it, and many of them were women.

LGBTQ Nation: What did you think of the show?

CS: Fabulous.

I had a great time. I thought it was hilarious. I thought these people were wonders. At the same time, I think aesthetically I completely dismissed it. I never thought about it as a work of art or a work — I certainly never thought of it as political art. And it was only in retrospect that I can see those shows as having the importance that now I really think they had.

LGBTQ Nation: When did you first meet Doris?

CS: The first time I met Doris, Sil gave a cocktail party — he was well-known for his cocktail parties in that period — and Doris and a drag queen named Miss X arrived directly from a shoot at West Graphics. It was during the filming of Vegas in Space and they were shooting a card whose tagline was, “Nine planets in seven days. Never again.” They were still made up in blue makeup as space aliens.

I was pretty gobsmacked. I immediately formed a friendship that’s lasted to this day with Miss X. Doris was friendly to me — a little distant, as Doris was to people. Doris didn’t have a lot of time for people who weren’t of use to him.

LGBTQ Nation: There are a lot of variations on drag, from Dame Edna to the Cockettes to RuPaul. How would you describe Doris’s version?

CS: Well, it changed. You know, when Doris first did drag in Australia she was very frumpy, and only little by little did she become glamorous and learn to do makeup in a really professional way. But when Doris first performed with Sylvia and the Synthetics, their aesthetic was very much like the Cockettes. It was genderf**k, or gender-bending. Spangled tops over hairy chests. And gradually Doris became more serious about her drag.

But she said, up until the end, she always wanted it to remain “crook”. Because the point was never to look like a woman. Doris said, “I could easily go out on the street and fool people into thinking I was a woman. But what would the point of that be? I wouldn’t get the attention I crave and I have a pathological need for attention.”

So the drag became more sophisticated. Not only more feminine, but you know, Doris, especially once he began working on the West Graphics cards, developed more and more looks. But it never became an attempt to be anything else than a man in a dress.

LGBTQ Nation: What’s the quote from the book? “It was all about look, look, LOOK!”  

CS: The point is to look. “Just look!”

LGBTQ Nation: Another quote from Doris in the book reads, “It never occurred to me you couldn’t finance a feature film on a prostitute’s salary.” Tell me about Doris’s movie, Vegas in Space, and his day job. 

CS: The day job definitely precedes Vegas in Space. As I recount in the book, Doris went home with a guy one night in a suburb of Sydney, and there was a massage table in his bedroom. And Doris said, “What’s this table for?” And the next day he was hooking.

And he was a natural. He immediately loved it. Doris had an enormous libido. One of his contemporaries, Miss Aboud, said if Doris didn’t have sex at least twice a day he would have died. So Doris found a profession that allowed him to have sex at least twice a day. And Doris was, from what I’m told, pretty indiscriminate with his customers. Doris saw himself as providing a service to his customers — cussies, as he used to call them, that’s very Australian — and he used to really appreciate that about them.

Later on, he saw himself working as a social worker. He had a lot of clients who were straight guys who would come into town for the weekend looking for a guy. But he also had clients who had bodies that didn’t make them immediately attractive to other gay men. For example, amputees, guys with colostomy bags, and Doris was a regular for them. And when Doris had to stop hooking because he became ill, he really worried about those people.

Bill Ford, a Vegas in Space collaborator, said many were the times that they would be sitting in the kitchen working a scene and then Doris’s phone would ring and he would say (in a low voice), “Hello, this is Phil. Yeah, $50. Pretty versatile, about 7 inches.” And then he would disappear for a half hour when the client would arrive. And then he’d come upstairs with a check for $50 and sign it over to Bill.

LGBTQ Nation: Tell me about Vegas in Space

CS: In 1983 or 1984, Doris and his housemates, Ginger Quest and others, had a party. Doris took $1,000 worth of his earnings as a hooker and went to New York to Canal Street and spent it on fun fur and mylar and came back and lined the house with it. And he also had a bunch of metallic paints that he pilfered from his time working at a wallpaper company in Australia. And they used these metallic paints and glow-in-the-dark paints all over their faces and they put black lights all over the house. And they had this Vegas in Space party.

The idea was they would be like alien showgirls, and the party must have been something. I was not there. But when it was all over and they woke up the next morning, Doris looked around and said, “This is too good just to tear down. Let’s make a movie!” He had in mind a 15-minute movie, John Waters style, that they would do in an afternoon, and then show maybe at the Roxy or at a place like that.

Doris had no idea what went into filmmaking, but he found a film student at that time, named Philip R Ford, and when these queens saw the rushes, they went nuts, and it just snowballed from there. They started shooting more scenes and it soon became apparent to them that they had enough material for a feature movie and they spent three or four years shooting and maybe it was seven years to the premiere.

It’s one of the weirdest-looking movies you’ll ever see. The shots you see of the city in Vegas in Space, Doris actually constructed it on a table from lipstick tubes and perfume bottles and powder containers and things like that. It’s cosmetics as skyscrapers and they’re incredibly imaginative. It’s the most immediate experience of Doris as an artist, and they’re really quite wonderful.

LGBTQ Nation: How does it compare to Andy Warhol or John Waters movies?

CS: Well, certainly all drag queens knew who Andy Warhol was, and his superstars. There is the Warhol influence and there’s the John Waters, but I don’t think Vegas in Space looks like a movie made by either of those filmmakers.

What I really compare it to is Pink Narcissus, a lost and rediscovered classic work that was made by this guy named Jim Bidgood, who was a drag queen in New York in the early 60s and a window dresser. It’s a real cult film. And it’s like Vegas in Space in that it’s all handmade, and looking at it, you would have no idea that it’s all made in an apartment. It looks like it’s made in a vast space.

The real difference between the two is Pink Narcissus is pornographic. There’s a lot of men in wispy little costumes, a lot of genitals. Vegas in Space is the opposite of pornography. There’s — since it’s all women, and none of the people who were principals in working on the film had much interest in women’s sexuality —  there’s really nothing erotic about it.

LGBTQ Nation: How long was Doris living with AIDS, and how did he react to his diagnosis?

CS: There’s a letter which I quote in the book from Doris to his father, from 1989, in which he says, “I’ve just had a whole battery of tests and the diagnosis is, as I suspected, full-blown AIDS, as I’ve suspected for the last five years.”

And so it’s an interesting question, “Why did Doris take so long to get tested?” Except, I know part of the answer to that. I don’t think I got tested ’til around that time. None of us really wanted to know because before then, it’s like, you could get tested and you could find out that you have a death sentence, which is what we thought HIV was. But did you really want to know? I think Doris got tested finally when he got so sick that it was necessary to start treating symptoms. But he had suspected for a long time.

The answer to the second part of your question, how did Doris react to his diagnosis? He reacted with an absolute aplomb. He didn’t get freaked out by it. He suspected it was coming. The interesting thing is that Doris was the most open person I’ve known about every part of his life, but he wasn’t open about that until fairly late. I don’t know if he was worried about his hooking business, if he was worried about the stage career, but that was not something he was open about.

LGBTQ Nation: How would you sum up Doris’s legacy?

CS: Drag now is no longer viewed the way it was when I was growing up, as female impersonation. It’s an art form in its own right. And the drag queens you see on RuPaul, for example, aren’t generally trying to convince you that they are cis women or women of any kind. They are trying to convince you that they are fabulous. It’s that little twist that Doris always called “crook.”  That little twist, I feel, is there in most of them even if not in their makeup and their wardrobe and in their presentation. This came from Doris’s generation of drag queens.

LGBTQ Nation: Is drag political?

CS: Absolutely. Gay visibility is political. And you don’t get more visible than drag. I think that’s what freaks people out on the right about drag right now. They’re feeling the way it’s always been, even the 60s and the 70s: “We don’t care what you people do. Why do you have to tell us about it?” And Esther Newton in her great book on drag, Mother Camp, talks about drag queens as being the symbol, in most Americans’ minds, of homosexuality. And there you have it: drag queens are us.

LGBTQ Nation: Do you worry that the Drag Race generation isn’t as political as Doris’s generation was? Are they absent the anger and the radicalism that makes drag political?

CS: I agree, but first of all, Doris did not consider himself a political drag queen at all. Doris didn’t think drag had anything to do with politics. Doris called himself a political couch potato. It’s only me looking back who’s saying Doris was totally political.  

And the second part of what I want to say in answer to what you’ve just said is, those drag queens may not have thought of themselves political. You better believe they do now. They see what’s going on. They don’t have the choice to be apolitical. They have to get out there and be themselves in order to battle what’s going on right now.