Seventy-two years ago today, on October 19, 1945, Harris Glenn Milstead
was born in
Baltimore,
Maryland to a conservative middle-class family. He is better
known by his stage name,
Divine.
Divine was an American actor, singer and
drag queen closely associated with the independent filmmaker
John Waters, He was a
character actor,
usually performing female roles in cinematic and theatrical
appearances, and adopted a female drag persona for his music career.
By the time of Divine's birth in 1945, the Milsteads were relatively wealthy and socially conservative
Baptists. At age 12, Divine and his parents moved to
Lutherville, a Baltimore suburb, where he attended
Towson High School, graduating in 1963.
Glenn "Divine" Milstead
high school yearbook age 17
During his childhood and adolescence, Divine was called "Glenn" by his
friends and family; as an adult, he used the stage name "Divine" as his
personal name, telling one interviewer that both "Divine" and "Glenn
Milstead" were "both just names. Glenn is the name I was brought up
with, Divine is the name I've been using for the past 23 years. I guess
it's
always Glenn and it's
always Divine. Do you mean the
character Divine or the person Divine? You see, it gets very
complicated. There's the Divine you're talking to now and there's the
character Divine, which is just something I do to make a living. She
doesn't really exist at all."
At one point he had the name "Divine" officially recognized, as it
appeared on his passport, and in keeping with his personal use of the
name, his close friends nicknamed him "Divy".
When he was 17, his parents sent him to a psychiatrist, where he first realized his
bisexuality, something then taboo in conventional American society. In 1963, he began attending the Marinella Beauty School, where he
learned hair styling and, after completing his studies, gained
employment at a couple of local salons, specializing in the creation of
beehives and other upswept hairstyles. He eventually gave up this job and for a while was financially supported by
his parents, who catered to his expensive taste in clothes and cars.
They reluctantly paid the many bills that he ran up financing lavish
parties where he would dress up in
drag as his favourite celebrity, actress
Elizabeth Taylor.
In the mid-1960s, Milstead befriended
John Waters; they were the
same age and from the same neighborhood, and both embraced Baltimore's
countercultural and underground elements.
Waters gave his friends new nicknames, and it was he who first called
Milstead "Divine". Waters later remarked that he had borrowed the name
from a character in the
Jean Genet novel,
Our Lady of the Flowers
(1943), a controversial book about homosexuals living on the margins of
Parisian society, which Waters – himself a homosexual – was reading at
the time.
Waters also introduced Divine as "the most beautiful woman in the
world, almost", a description widely repeated in ensuing years.
Milstead joined Waters' acting troupe, the
Dreamlanders, and adopted female roles for their experimental short films
Roman Candles (1966),
Eat Your Makeup (1968), and
The Diane Linkletter Story (1969). Again in drag, he took a lead role in both of Waters' early full-length movies,
Mondo Trasho (1969) and
Multiple Maniacs (1970).
