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As Divine, Glenn Milstead starred in a series of films, mostly helmed by John Waters, that earned him a name as a character that audiences loved to hate. The persona was both an homage and a criticism of how drag queens were allowed to be during the 1970s and 1980s. Others in the community displayed themselves as caricatures of grace and decorum. But that wasn’t Divine. Divine was crass, Divine was loud, Divine was everything a drag queen wasn’t supposed to be, and audiences lapped it up.
Yes, some of Divine’s antics were NSFW, even by today’s standards — how many films are going to feature a person eating freshly eaten dog poo or masturbating with a fish? But the point was drag queens could be anything they wanted to be, even if it wasn’t what societal parameters dictated. It’s a shame that the drag community is still fighting that same battle today.
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Milstead passed away due to heart failure in 1988, just over a year before “The Little Mermaid” was released in theaters, so he never got to see the full scale of his impact on popular culture. That scale is ever-growing, even still, with Ursula officially appearing everywhere, from Broadway to video games. But the unofficial ways that Ursula appears in culture prove her staying power.
