New Film Celebrates Milwaukee LGBTQ+ Trailblazers

Drag performer, social columnist and philanthropist Karen Valentine poses for a photograph. Photo courtesy of Michail Takach

A documentary debuting this Pride month honors eight elders in the Milwaukee LGBTQ+ community, including one of the oldest living out gay men in the city and legends of the local drag scene.

Michail Takach is president of the Wisconsin LGBTQ History Project. He told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” that one goal of the project is connecting people across generations to decades of local queer trailblazers. It’s also a response to prior tellings of history focusing on shame and pain in the LGBTQ community.

“It created a culture where a lot of people just simply did not talk about their past. The past was a source of embarrassment and for many of our elders, it was also a source of trauma,” Takach said. “There wasn’t the intergenerational transfer of knowledge of history that happens in almost every other community. A lot of LGBTQ people grow up completely disconnected from what came before.”

Karen Valentine is one of the subjects featured in the documentary. She is a social columnist, philanthropist and performer in drag shows in the Milwaukee area for more than 40 years.

She told “Wisconsin Today” she and other drag performers in the 1980s were focused on raising money for HIV and AIDS causes, as well as to support local sports teams and other organizations.

“It really wasn’t a career or a way to really make a living. We all had jobs during the day. We were just flattered that people were happy to see us on the stage,” Valentine said. “I never, for once, took for granted the honor that I was awarded by being able to take to the stage and be applauded to do my little fantasy of what I did when I was a child in my playroom.”

Valentine said she sees her drag persona as a character, not unlike that of Carol Burnett or Paul Reubens as Pee-wee Herman.

Karen Valentine poses for a photograph. Photo courtesy of Karen Valentine

“They’re somebody we create in a dressing room and we bring to the stage,” Valentine said. “For that hour-or-two-hour show, we give you all a little vacation from reality. We bring you into our little fantasy world, our dreamland, and we could escape into the wonderful world of humor and music, where things can’t hurt us … it’s escapism for me.”

Takach added that drag performing has a history of not just entertainment, but as a form of defiance dating back to the earlier days of America’s underground gay bars.

“They were a place where there weren’t a lot of people who wanted to be seen,” Takach said. “Imagine trying to be a fundraiser in a space where most of your beneficiaries can’t be publicly known.”

Valentine said that drag has evolved to become something of a cottage industry over the four decades that she’s been performing.

“I’m at the twilight of my life and career and I do every once in a while get somebody saying, ‘When are you hanging up the lashes and the Ferragamos?’ And I say, ‘Honestly I don’t know. I guess when they stop asking,’” Valentine said. “I’m very flattered that I’m still included in the run.”

Takach said this project also hopes to address a “generational ageism” in the LGBTQ community, and argued performers like Valentine would have been pushed to the side in the past because of age.

“Ageism is a powerful dividing line, because it tells our elders that there’s no more space for them, that they no longer have purpose or value, or they’re no longer welcome,” he said.

“One of the things we’ve been trying to do with the Beacons project is assert that not only did these elders blaze the trail and carve out these spaces … these are (places) that they’re always going to be welcome, because they built them,” Takach added.

“Beacons of Brew City” premieres at the Oriental Theater on June 16.

New film connects across generations to Milwaukee LGBTQ+ trailblazers was originally published by Wisconsin Public Radio.