Introduction
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis did us at least one favor by recovering the name of Charles “Babe” Baker, proprietor of nightclubs from New York to Miami and producer of drag entertainment for decades. In the summer of 2022, the DeSantis administration tried to pull the liquor license of the R House Restaurant in Wynwood, a drag brunch venue that offered a “children’s menu.” The complaint declared that the brunch was a “public nuisance” and that the restaurant was violating criminal laws against “lewdness.” In making this claim, Florida officials cited a 1947 Florida Supreme Court decision centering on Baker’s local Ha Ha Club, which had hosted the “vile and obscene shows…, using female impersonators who are in fact males.”[1]
It was a flash out of a 75-year-old past, but very much in the spirit of a twenty-first century Florida that wanted to prohibit rainbow flags for Freedom Summer 2024 and erase painted rainbow crosswalks all over the state for 2025. Nevertheless, rainbow flags flew, multicolored lights flashed in defiance, and protests spread over crosswalk erasures. The R House settled DeSantis’s complaint by paying a hefty fine and introducing a mandatory minimum age of eighteen. In contrast, back in the 1940s Babe Baker, who had done business down South since 1933, survived threats to his cast of “Broadway entertainers,” who continued to play the winter tourist season in Florida. A distinguished ally of Babe’s was Jules Podell, president and director of Florida’s Federal Amusement Company and manager of the Copacabana nightclub in midtown Manhattan.[2] The Club Ha Ha cast included famous “female impersonators” who came and went from season to season, including super drag star Jackie Maye, tagged by journalist Walter Winchell as the “all-time tops in female impersonators.”[3]
For me, the most tantalizing aspects of Baker’s saga have been revelations about the career of one of those rarely documented stars—a “male impersonator,” or a drag king, as we could call them today. Ha Ha Club advertisements from the 1930s to the 1950s featured the image and name of Blackie Dennis, a favorite with Babe Baker fans from New York to Miami, a star vocalist who liked to open the show with Hoagie Carmichael’s “Stardust.” Blackie, whose real name (the family assures us) was Micholina Lombino (1911-88), was generally listed on programs alongside the cast of “female impersonators.”
Unfortunately, little information survives about most drag kings of Blackie’s generation. The exception, of course, is Storme DeLarverie (1920-2014), who is remembered and celebrated for her long career (1955-69) with Danny Brown and Doc Brenner’s Jewel Box Revue. As the “Lady of the Jewel Box,” Storme was vocalist, emcee, and—like others before and after her—“the only girl in the company.” That phrase also was used to describe Miss Mickey Mercer, a “male impersonator” and predecessor of Storme in the Jewel Box, whose legacy—like so many others—is preserved by JD Doyle’s Queer Music Heritage website (see www.queermusicheritage.com). To have at least one girl on stage to share the spotlight with a dozen or more “female impersonators” seems significant or at least traditional, and probably made things seem a bit more “normal.”[4]
Drag queens and kings in a grand finale at the Club 181, 181 Second Avenue in the East Village, circa 1948. On the front row far left is Gail Williams, who provided this photograph in 1988 at a gathering of friends from the early 181 chorus line who knew Blackie Dennis.
There were other girls in the business who kept an eye on the careers of colleagues and competitors. In an interview many years later, Gail Williams (aka Gail Crumpton), a drag king from the Club 181 (181 Second Avenue, 1945-51), did not remember Storme but said that, yes, there was a woman with the Jewel Box—a white woman, she recalled, named Tommy—undoubtedly Miss Tommy Williams on Queer Music Heritage.[5] Other “male impersonators,” a few years older, who were named and admired by the performers at the 181, were Pat Burns and “Larry.” While nothing more is known of their careers, Buddy/Bubbles Kent (aka Malvina Schwartz)—who played the 181 and Jimmy Kelly’s on Sullivan Street and was part owner-manager of the Page Three at Charles St./7th Ave South—recalled in a now-famous interview with Joan Nestle that Pat Burns had had a “drinking problem,” as such things were called back then. But she was striking, Buddy reported, hair slicked back with Vaseline Hair Tonic. Buddy wanted to be like her.[6]
Drag shows that featured the performers mentioned here traveled extensively. The Jewel Box’s itinerary included Seattle, as veterans from that corner of the world have testified in essays collected as An Evening at the Garden of Allah: A Gay Cabaret in Seattle. Stars who played with the Jewel Box around the country cited engagements in Erie, Pennsylvania; Syracuse and Rochester, New York; Cleveland, Ohio; and Detroit, Michigan. According to old-timers interviewed, one light-hearted moment included Mickey Mercer singing “Donkey Serenade” with a live donkey on stage.[7]
Another voice from the traveling shows delineates Babe Baker’s status in the business. Singer and female impersonator Ricky Remonde (aka Ricky Reynolds) relates that after years with the Jewel Box, he “traveled with Babe Baker’s Ha Ha Revue, a traveling show based in Hollywood, Florida.” He continues, “It was a big revue, like the Jewel Box, but not as well known. They were the only big traveling shows featuring female impersonators.” [8]
At this juncture, it is vital to acknowledge the role that members of the family of Blackie Dennis, and especially her nephew Ronald Lombino, have played in putting together her story and this episode of Babe Baker’s show biz history. All too often, extensive swaths of gay history have been lost because family members have kept from public scrutiny—even from community or academic archives—significant papers, photographs, or correspondence of relatives. The Lombino clan—including nephew Ronald and great-niece Francesca DiPaola, a performer in her own right—was more sensitive to the entertainer’s legacy and proud of one of their own who rose to fame and fortune.[9]
While there are some stories recorded about how drag performers from the early years got into the business, details from Blackie’s story—as told by family and friends—provide unique points of view. One of eight children of Italian immigrants who took refuge in the early twentieth century on Manhattan’s East 118th Street, in what is remembered historically as Italian Harlem, or a Little Italy uptown that flourished before the downtown neighborhood did, Blackie was ambitious. An old friend who as an adolescent was “smitten with her personality and her gorgeous black hair, every strand in place,” recalled many years later that Blackie “was always interested in becoming an entertainer.” That same friend, Venera Catherine Magazzu, recalls that summer campers at upstate New York’s Summit Lake Camp staged weekly shows, with a young Blackie Dennis as an enthusiastic participant. It seems most likely that the International Ladies Garment Workers Union—the union that represented the campers’ uptown “dressmaking” community—would have sponsored this camp and offered a taste of show business.[10]
Blackie, for one, took the offer and herself seriously. To that end, as the family recalls, in her early twenties she packed a bag and, with the help of one of her five brothers, took the subway downtown at East 116th Street. Like so many girls who knew what they were looking for in the early 1930s, she made her way to Greenwich Village and a “first job,” according to her old friend Venera, at a place called the Full House, on the corner of Cornelia and West 4th Streets.[11]
Notes
[1] David Ovalle and Ana Ceballos, “State Agency Says Miami Drag Show Violated ‘Lewdness’ Laws,” Miami Herald, August 9, 2022, https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article264172111.html; Jo Yurcaba, “In 1947, Florida Shut Down a Popular Drag Club,” NBC-Out News, August 27, 2022, https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/1947-florida-shut-popular-drag-club-state-resurrected-case-rcna40947; Daniel Villareal, “Ron DeSantis Signs a Slate of Anti-LGBTQ Laws To Make Florida a Citadel of Normalcy,” LGBTQ Nation, October 10, 2023, https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2023/05/ron-desantis-signs-a-slate-of-anti-lgbtq-laws-to-make-florida-a-citadel-of-normalcy/. The Miami Hyatt Regency Hotel was later targeted for its “Drag Queen Christmas” in 2022.
[2] Florida Department of State, Division of Corporations, Corporations, Limited Liability Companies, Limited Partnerships, and Trademarks, Document No. 130008, https://search.sunbiz.org/Inquiry/CorporationSearch/SearchResultDetail?inquirytype=EntityName&directionType=Initial&searchNameOrder=FEDERALAMUSEMENT%201300080&aggregateId=domp-130008-6c96e5c2-5ffb-4c5d-9452-e29fc40cf814 (accessed May 12, 2026). Podell ran the Copa from 1940 until his death in 1973.
[3] “Jackie Plays Double Role,” Daily Oklahoman, April 19, 1953, 95.
[4] For Storme’s career with the Jewel Box, see Storme: Lady of the Jewel Box, directed by Michele Parkerson (1987; New York City: Women Make Movies); “Stormé DeLarverié,” accessed May 12, 2026, http://storme-delarverie.com. For extensive coverage of individual performers from the Chinese Tang Dynasty, 600 AD forward, see “Drag King History,” www.dragkinghistory.com. Both Blackie Dennis and Storme DeLarverie are highlighted.
[5] America’s Foremost Female Impersonators, Club Jewel Box, Miami, FL, 1940s, 22, https://www.queermusicheritage.com/fem-jewel%20box1.html.
[6] Michail Takach and B. J. Daniels, A History of Milwaukee Drag: Seven Generations of Glamour (History Press, 2022), 77; Gail Williams, interview by author, Lake Worth, FL, November 25, 1988; Buddy/Bubbles Kent, interview by Joan Nestle, New York City, February 8, 1983, Lesbian Herstory Archives. “Jimmy Kelly” was Giovanni Di Salvio.
[7] Don Paulson and Roger Simpson, An Evening at the Garden of Allah: A Gay Cabaret in Seattle (Columbia University Press, 1996), 121.
[8] An Evening at the Garden of Allah, 95.
[9] Ronald Lombino, interviews with author, 2015-2026; Francesca DiPaola, interviews with author, 2015-2026.
[10] Venera Catherine Magazzu, Young and Gay at 90: An Unadulterated Story (Trafford, 2006), 31-32.
[11] Young and Gay at 90, 32.