When Doris Fish first took to the stage in Sydney in the early 1970s, the drag scene was very different to today's polished and professional queens performing on television and in children's libraries.
Readers are advised this story contains language some people may find offensive.
Emerging after a period of severe repression of homosexuality, drag was crude, crazy and at times violent.
While there were plenty of performances in Sydney, you had to be in the know to find them.
But many in the gay community frowned upon the drag scene.
As they fought for their rights, there was fear that drag queens would not create the right image and were even banned by some pride parades.
Who Does That Bitch Think She Is? is a new book by Brooklyn-based journalist Craig Seligman.
He told the ABC that in bad-girl performances, Doris Fish unashamedly challenged anti-drag attitudes and pioneered today's drag style.
Born Philip Mills in 1952 in Manly Vale in northern Sydney, he developed extraordinary self-confidence and self-acceptance.
"He knew who he was from the very beginning and he liked that person," Seligman said.
After careful consideration, Seligman has used he/his pronouns for Mills throughout his book.
He said Mills considered himself a man and that was how friends and family referred to him.
However, Seligman noted that in the 1980s Mills's circle used feminine pronouns, which was common in the gay community.
A reluctant political voice
As Doris Fish, Mills dressed as a 1950s housewife and, in the early '70s, debuted with Sylvia and the Synthetics.
The radical Sydney theatre troupe was at the forefront of gay liberation and members challenged audiences through audacious and provocative drag performances.
"They did just about anything that came into their heads while they were on stage," Seligman said.
The crowd loved it, even if they risked copping a stiletto to the head, Seligman said.
"The times before then — the late '50s and early '60s and even a bit of the late '60s — had been a very repressed time and I think people felt very liberated by their craziness, and even violence, on stage," he said.
This was the beginning of a 20-year drag career for Mills, which spanned from Sydney to his second home in San Francisco.
It was here, as Doris Fish, that he became a fixture of the drag scene, a television and movie star and a reluctant political voice.
A film like no other
After falling in love with its queer culture, Mills settled in San Francisco in 1976 and rose to become the most famous drag queen in the city.
He performed in a group called Sluts-A-Go-Go, appeared on cable television and participated in many AIDS benefits, even as his own health was deteriorating.
Mills is best known now for his role in the cult camp movie Vegas in Space, which follows three male astronauts who must become women to travel to an all-female planet.
With decorations from a Vegas-in-space-themed party, $1,000 worth of fun fur and a 20-page script, filming began.
Director Phillip R. Ford, who was a film student at the time, says sheer ambition, assisted by stimulants, kept them going through long, exhausting shoots over the next 16 months.
"The biggest challenge when shooting with drag queens in a timeframe that doesn't have a prescribed schedule is that, after a while, they start to fall apart," he said.
"The beards start growing through and we have to just stop there."
The end result is a film unlike any other.
With ridiculous dialogue, stupid jokes and questionable plot aside, the strange and unearthly look of the film continues to captivate audiences.
As Seligman writes: "When it isn't bad, it's spellbinding".
Mills, cinematographer Robin Clark and Ford were responsible for its famous visual style.
"We wanted it to be colourful, shallow and stupid," Ford said.
AIDS a 'cruel trick'
Mills never saw the film on the big screen.
In 1991, six weeks before it premiered at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco, he died from complications of HIV/AIDS.
He was 38.
"It seemed like a cruel trick," Ford said, who estimated in the '80s half the people he knew died during the AIDS crisis.
"San Francisco was like an open bleeding wound and [the film's release] was a bit of a delight that had long been coming."
But it was not until the film was broadcast on a US cable network in the late '90s that it gained a broader audience.
"We hadn't seen gay people represented, much less drag queens — much less drag queens with green and blue and yellow faces," Ford said.
The film is now more popular than ever and will screen at Sydney's Ritz Cinemas in Randwick this month as part of WorldPride.
"I don't expect everyone to like it, but so many people say this is their favourite movie of all time," Ford said.
"I see this as a gift. Doris has been gone for 32 years, however, this is a gift that she gave me."
To most, Doris Fish was a large, very loud, raucous character with a raw, absurdist sense of humour on stage.
But, in the gruelling process of filming Vegas In Space, Ford got to know the "shy, quiet, artistic person underneath".
"I think one of the most significant things about Doris was she was very magnanimous and very generous to other performers, or even to other people who were not performers," Ford said.
"She would regularly just take people, myself included, and put them on stage or put them in makeup or put them in drag.
"It was like she had to create her own supporting casts so she could be the star."
Drag 'about being glam'
The most important element of Mills's drag look was his makeup: "I'd paint my eyeballs if I could", he was fond of saying.
Seligman said Mills was a genius of cosmetics.
"He could take a face — his own face or someone else's face — use white foundation to turn it into a blank mask and then paint anyone else's face on top of it," he said.
Over the years, his look changed from the rough and ready outfits of Sylvia and the Synthetics to a more feminine style, once crafting an elaborate Marie Antoinette outfit.
But Mills still never wanted to look completely like a woman.
"He always wanted to have that little twinge of what he called 'crook' because, he said, if he really looked like a woman, then no one would give him a second look," Seligman said.
In that way, Mills was a pioneer of what has become key to today's drag style replete with irony.
"What they're doing is not about being women, it's about being glam," Seligman said.
"It's about the difference between the way the sexes are perceived.
"It's about the liberation of men and the ability of men — who are supposed to be doing one thing, according to one segment of society — doing something completely different."
- Who Does That Bitch Think She Is? will be launched at the State Library of NSW on February 26.
