These were the seeds of the outrageously over-the-top character of Divine, who Glenn would become shortly after beginning his artistic relationship and friendship with the underground filmmaker, John Waters. For him, Elizabeth Taylor was the very embodiment of these things and was his main inspiration when he first went out in drag. He was obsessed with glamour and fashion. I mean, this was someone so iconic, so outré they actually ate real live dog poo as soon as it was evacuated… in “the sickest movie ever made.” She was fresh… exciting.īorn Harris Glenn Milstead in Baltimore on Octo(my paternal grandmother‘s 35th birthday), the future-shock Divine always stood out amongst his peers. Nevertheless, Divine, who’d gone from bullied gay teen to cult movie queen, helped me accept myself and my specific brand of Pafford peculiarity all the same. Size 11 feet leading to long, slim legs clad in the tightest possible drainpipe jeans probably had something to do with that. To hit that home, Tracey Waistnedge and Joanne Povey, my closest college comrades at Bletchley Park, bestowed me with the moniker The Golf Club. I was far from fat, in fact I was pretty skinny all the way through to my thirties. In the mid ‘80s the term Body Positive had yet to be coined, and heifers were largely reviled, or eaten. In the bitterly divided decade of Thatcher’s Britain, Divine, along with David Bowie and Dead or Alive (and possibly one or two other acts that didn’t necessarily begin with a D) was a breath of hot air that helped me understand a lot more about myself than any anodyne boy band sporting regulation Calvin Klein undies and Levi 501s ever could. I spent my tricky teenage years coming to terms with a burgeoning outsider identity in the green and not always pleasant land of rural Buckinghamshire, an hour north of London. Embracing the American counterculture of the 1960s, the delicious, decadent Divine developed a name for himself as an utterly ignoble impersonator of the contradictory gender in a series of controversial John Waters films, moving into theatre in the 1970s and, lastly, embarking on a music career in the 1980s, which is where I discovered this rotund, raucous trashbag. Out of all of my alternative heroes growing up, Divine, the gorgeously grotesque female caricature created by a misfit from Maryland, was definitely one of the weirdest. He called himself Divine and he was proud of his creation: a unique and hilarious high-camp cartoon, a Miss Piggy for the blissfully depraved.”
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