Tales from the Archive

Gary Webb, born 1932, remembers his career as a drag artist, starting shortly after the Second World War. From an interview carried out in 2004.

When I was sixteen, a friend of mine, Tommy Osbourne, a great little drag artist was going into this show called This Was the Army which was supposed to be all ex-Army, Navy, Air Force personnel. It had a line up of dancing girls, it had the comedienne (your leading lady) and speciality acts - it was exactly the same as you would see at an ordinary revue except that it was all men. Tommy kept saying to me, "Go on! We'll have a laugh. Oh, you must come." So of course, I signed.

It was the most horrendous thing I can ever remember in my life because I had no idea how to make-up as a woman. Hazel, who ran the show, left me in the hands of a couple of the "old hands", who'd been in the drag business for a very long while. I said to Tommy, "I don't really like these others, they keep giving us awful looks," so he said, "Oh! Take no notice of that," he said, "they're jealous." Dear Reg, bless his heart, made my face up. He gave me little cupid bow lips, hot penny rouge cheeks and he put my eyelashes on the wrong eyes.

All the chorus girls - eight or ten of us - had to open in a ballet scene. This arm came out from the side of the stage and yanked me off - it was Hazel and she said, "What have you done to your bloody face?" I said, "I didn't do anything, Reg made me up." She said, "I'll kill him." That was my start in drag and I thought, this is never going to work...

Left to right: Sonny Dawkes and Gary Webb

I stayed in the chorus about a year, two years and then later on I took over one of the leading roles. I was over the moon and dear Sonny Dawkes, who I had to partner, we just fitted - we almost knew exactly what the other one was going to do. "Oh," he said, "I feel so wonderful with you, darling." It was a fantastic success. We went round with the show, I can't remember how many years now, so many years. I think that we did about every theatre in the country, including the Brighton Hippodrome. It was so beautifully done that people used to sit there and they could not believe they were looking at men. In those days you didn't only have one drag show going round, you had about three or four – they were all following each other, so the audiences got used to drag and the show was almost sold out before you arrived.

In those days, nobody thought about the gay side of it - it wouldn't have occurred to them. That was what the gay world was all about - it was never mentioned but it was always there. I never, ever liked to play gay clubs - I never felt right in a gay club. I can't understand why, I just didn't, I preferred to play to my straight audiences, the ordinary wives and husbands – alright, there were gays out there as well, but it wasn't fully gay.

I played the West Pier in Brighton for seven years. You got all the ordinary public in but you got all the pros as well – everybody that ever lived down here: Jack Tinker, Larry Olivier, all the lot used to come in there because that was their big night to let their hair down – they could do what the bloody hell they liked in there. It was wonderful."

We're sad to report that Sonny Dawkes died in June of this year.

New In The Archive

We are thrilled to receive from Michael James (pictured right), thirteen albums of photographs spanning his life as a gay man, including AIDS activism and glamour shots from the '60s.

Following the sad demise of the Disabled Dykes group earlier this year, their photograph album and six books about sexuality and disability have been donated to the archive as well as a laptop computer, which is helping us out in the office.

Very many thanks to them all.