Brown was entertaining at Sweet Gum Head and White was at Hollywood Hots. By the 1980s, White and Brown had each independently returned to Atlanta and were working on the same street - Cheshire Bridge Road.
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They first met in Jacksonville, Florida in 1977, where they were both working at the time. “Lily never wanted to be ‘the pretty girl.’ She did what we used to call ‘freak drag.’ When she barreled onstage, you never knew what you were going to get.” Jordan would later turn his transformative experiences in Midtown Atlanta gay’s underground into a screenplay for his 2000 film, “Lost in the Pershing Point Hotel.”Ĭharlie Brown, White’s longtime friend and Charlie Brown’s Cabaret co-emcee at Atlanta’s iconic gay dance club Backstreet says the performer was like a sister to her. “Years and years ago, Lily was doing a kind of drag that is wildly popular now,” Jordan recalled in an email to Eldredge ATL. When he moved to Atlanta in the mid-1970s, Emmy-winning “Will & Grace” and “Sordid Lives” actor Leslie Jordan found himself living downstairs from White in a dilapidated building in the Pershing Point section of Midtown. “I hung out with all the Ramones-type rock n roll bands. “I made it cool to be crazy,” White explained in the 2015ĭocumentary “Queer Moxie,” co-directed by Atlantans Heather Provoncha and Leo Later, after becoming a solo act, White’s jet black piled up wig, dark signature make-up and rock n roll-inspired, ribald comedic antics on stage made her act completely different from her more glamorous show tune and pop song lip-synching contemporaries. With great flutterings of ostrich plumes and waving of soiled white gloves, the Grease Sisters gave staid old Peachtree, as well as conservative homosexuals, a good lesson in the blurring of traditional sex roles.” The members have names like Miss Kitty Litter and Miss Lily White and wear preposterous musty old frilled and flounced dresses that are coming apart at the hems.
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Reported Atlanta alternative newspaper The Great Speckled Bird in its Jedition: “At the end of the parade came two trucks carrying the Grease Sisters, a new kind of drag group that seems to be mocking the old queenly preoccupation with elegance, fantasy and pretension. With friends and fellow drag performers Kitty Litter and Alvina LaVerne, the trio formed The Grease Sisters, a comic drag act that specialized in spotlighting - and spoofing - female singing trios, including the McGuire Sisters.Īmong The Grease Sisters’ high-profile early gigs? The JAtlanta Gay Pride celebration. You will be greatly missed, Lily.”Īccording to biographical information posted on her Facebook page, White graduated from Rome High School and went on to study architecture at Georgia Institute of Technology (She credited her pre-drag career work as an architectural designer for inspiring her subsequent stiletto heel-accented original drag costume designs).Īfter getting her feet wet doing drag in Tennessee with friends and fellow iconic Atlanta drag queens Diamond Lil and Billy Jones, White made her way back to Georgia in the early 1970s, where she performed at Peaches Back Door and The Locker Room, the city’s then-24 hour club. Atlanta hasn’t been the same in a long time but when this bitch got with the others from Backstreet for their reunions, it felt like home again. fan Jayuar Allen posted: “Waking up to the news that a true legend and pioneer for my community and the drag world has passed away. On Thursday morning, as two generations of fans awakened to the news of her death, Lily White’s Facebook page filled with tributes. In response, friends and fans sent her well wishes and shared their memories of her 45-year drag career, most of which was spent in Atlanta. In her final years, slowed by multiple strokes and a fall, she occasionally interacted with fans on the social media platform.
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In the fall of 2019, the pioneering Atlanta drag performer took her private cancer battle public, announcing her move to hospice care on her Facebook page. The performer’s sister, Michelle Souder Tucker of Cedar Bluff, Alabama confirmed the passing on White’s Facebook page early Thursday morning. White, born Kyle Dennis Souder, died late Wednesday afternoon, from complications of cancer in hospice care in her hometown of Rome, Georgia. Atlanta drag legend Lily White has toasted her adored adopted city for the final time.