Harris Glenn Milstead
was born in 1945
and spent his early life
in the suburbs of Baltimore.
He stood out in a way a lot of people didn’t like. His voice was high and soft, filled with kindness and well suited for his round happy face, but it wasn’t a manly voice. It betrayed an essential femininity that disturbed his peers, who regularly beat him black and blue before and after school.
He was different. People could see it from a distance, even if they had never met him. And we all know how many of us out there respond to the different. We don’t like it. It frightens us. Reminds us of how we are different and how we too can be found wanting if someone were to ever notice and point their finger in our direction.
But the good thing about being different is that it allows us to find others who have been similarly shunned from society—and that bond we form with them is often stronger than the ones shared by those who have somehow always managed to fit in.
There was a teenage boy in Glenn’s neighbourhood. John Waters had long hair, hated school and aspired to be a filmmaker. Together the two of them bonded over their love of movies—especially those with strong and glamourously outrageous female stars like Elizabeth Taylor and Tura Satana. When he was 17, John got his first film camera and Glenn was recruited to help bring his home movies to life.
It was John who casually suggested Glenn’s new name. It was for the credits of Eat Your Makeup, one of John’s earliest films. Glenn thought it was a fine enough name and from that point on he was always Divine.
When he first started dressing up like women, his aim was to look like Taylor—his idol—and pictures from that period show how close he came, but his weight kept him from completely recreating her iconic presence, so he decided to create his own. If he could never be as beautiful as the other drag queens he met, then he would one-up them by being more outrageous and memorable than they could ever hope to be. While they aimed to fit in and pass, he decided to stand out and be impossible to ignore.
And people noticed. John’s films were unlike anything anyone had ever seen (in one of them, Divine portrayed Jackie Kennedy leaping out of the car just a few years after the president’s assassination) and they become the stuff of cult infamy—especially in San Francisco.
Without a penny to his name, Divine was flown out to the city to meet and perform with The Cockettes, a group of men and women who aimed to take the notion of gender and revel in all its many absurdities. As he got off the plane he was treated like a superstar and those who knew him said that was the moment when Glenn ceased to be and Divine was truly born.
For their next film, John wanted to do something that had never been done before. Something people could never forget. Which is a tall order when you have a budget of $10,000. It would have to be truly shocking and once he finally figured out what it would be, he asked Divine if he would do it and Divine said yes, even though he assumed John was just joking.
But John wasn’t joking. He couldn’t have been more serious. So during one cold Baltimore afternoon, Divine waited patiently for his co-star—a small dog—to take a shit on the sidewalk, so he could scoop it all up and eat it while John filmed.
John was disappointed with how little the dog pooped, but he didn’t make Divine do a second take. He wasn’t a sadist.
This simple act of gag-inducing taste bud atrocity ensured that the film, Pink Flamingos, would go on to become one of the most famous and controversial cult films of all time. It became the stuff of whispered urban legend. “Did you see that?” “Can you believe someone actually did that?” “What is wrong with those people? I gotta see that again!”
And with that Divine became a superstar.
There’s a lesson there. One that is almost transcendent in its literalism. So many of us expect to simply be handed the success we feel we deserve—to have our innate unique specialness hosannahed and celebrated the second we present it to the world. We don’t want to do the work or make the effort to stand out—we want everyone else to turn their heads and look at us, because we’re convinced we deserve it.
But ask us to take a risk? To do something that has the potential to embarrass and humiliate us for the rest of our lives? To brazenly reach out for the glory we feel we deserve? No, thank you. What if it all goes wrong?
What if I can’t get the taste of dog shit out of my mouth?
And for those who delight in literalism, of course Divine’s act here is a metaphor. I’m not urging anyone to eat dog shit. In fact, I am flat out saying it here—DO NOT EAT DOG SHIT. It has already been done.
Divine beat you to it.
But you have to take those risks. You can’t expect the world to pay attention if you don’t—not when everyone else is playing it safe. We need brave outrageous people to shine out and dare us to dream—to show us that there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophy.
By the standards of his time, Harris Glenn Milstead should have lived a quiet, lonely unhappy life. He would have spent it as a hairstylist, cutting hair and pretending he was something he was not. But he refused to do that and went so far as to break the laws of his day to transform himself into a legend whose image still endures decades after his death.
We all have the spark of Divine within us, but we have to be willing to show it to the world and that is an admittedly terrifying thing to do. There are consequences. It might not turn out the way we want.
But is failure worse after you’ve taken a risk than it is because you’ve taken none at all? At least the former allows you to live your life knowing that you tried, while the later torments you with fantasies of what might have happened if you had.
(You can learn more about the fabulous and woefully short life of Divine in the new and wonderful documentary I Am Divine, now available on DVD.)