Tish (Joseph Touchette), center, backstage at Crazy Horse, New York City, spring, 1967. Photo courtesy of J. D. Doyle/Queer Music Heritage.

Anyone who’s been around the Village for a while knows Tish.  Colorful, compelling, and always a good neighbor, he can be found on sunny days on his Bank Street stoop presiding over his famous sidewalk sales, accompanied by the music of the forties coming from his radio.  Tish will be 88 years old on February 24, 2012.  He was the first person I met when I moved into my apartment on Bank Street.  He would tease me about my boyfriends and I would tease him about his.

He was born Joseph Touchette and grew up in New England to French Canadian parents, an only child for almost seven years, spoiled by both sides of the family.  He was the “petit garcon” which got garbled into half French and half English and became his nickname, Ti-boy.  He is blessed with a large and close-knit family: brother Dede, six years younger than Tish, and married 56 years; Bang, two years younger than Dede, and married 52 years; his brother Donnie who he used to take care of and who loved to hide in the maze of cornfields, now 57; his sister Agnes who lives in Florida; and his sister Rita who lives in Connecticut in his mother’s house.  Tish lost one brother, Buck, who was born when Tish was 11 years old.  When he goes home to his many nieces and nephews, he’s “Uncle Joe.”

Tish started working as a young boy.  He recalls running across the field from school, dressed in a suit and tie, to work at the woolen mills factory.  The mill was converted by the Germans and become known as William Primms Metals; they manufactured safety pins and bobby pins.  Tish’s job was to thread the wire; he started out as the #3 boy who oiled the machines.  Eventually, he moved up to the #2 and then to the #1 boy where he supervised others.  He weighed 98 pounds and was expected to lift 98 lbs.  He laughs now and says “I didn’t know I was so macho.”  He also worked at the La Rosa Macaroni Company.

He made $18 a week, gave his mother $12, and spent the remaining few dollars for tap dancing and ballet lessons at the Rhode Island Conservatory.

Tish sang in church at weddings, funerals, Sunday services and Tuesday night devotions to the Blessed Mother until he was 25.  His closest friends were his piano teacher and her sister, the organist, two unmarried women known in those days as “old maids”.  He had some friends who were likely gay but no one used that expression back then; anyone effeminate was called sissy or pansy. It was unsettling to be a gay person in so small a community, always wondering if you are the only one.

Early on Tish went to Boston and was so naïve he didn’t realize the dancing girls were all dancing boys. What he did realize was that he was in awe of the elegance of the experience.  He was about 17 or 18 when he heard of a club in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, called a “gay bar.” The first time he saw two men dancing was at The College Inn in Boston and it took him a week to get over it.  His uncle was in a jitterbug contest and one of the men dancing was a friend of his mother’s.

Tish was twenty, ready and eager to move to New York City when his father died at the age of forty. This was the saddest time of his life not only because he loved and missed his father but because he knew it was up to him to stay home and help his mother who was then thirty-eight years old. For the next six years, he helped care for his siblings until his mother remarried a man who was a very good stepfather to Tish and the father of his brother Donnie.  

Tish lived across the street from the church where his grandparents were sextons and the cemetery was literally in his back yard. When his father died the family went directly from the house to the church to the cemetery and instead of taking a limousine they simply walked back to the house. Tish joked with his brother that all they had to do was look out their window to see if the wind blew the flowers off their father’s grave. 

His favorite subject in school was history and he loved walking through the graveyards of the different churches where he could see the tombstones of the French Canadians.  The Protestant cemeteries were where the revolutionary war Yankees were buried.

One of his early jobs was at the legendary Celebrity Club in Providence, Rhode Island, believed to be the first interracial nightclub in New England, where he and his friend Bing would go for Sunday afternoon jam sessions. The club featured top national jazz and R&B acts as well as local talent in the 1950s. Musicians like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Billie Holliday would come to Providence and stay for week-long engagements.  On one of those Sunday afternoons, Louis Armstrong was there; he didn’t have all the members of his band with him, just six people.  Tish heard the gravelly voice behind him “Wanna do a set?” And so Tish did “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and “All of Me” with Louis and rounded out the afternoon at the bar talking with Armstrong’s singer, Thelma Middleton.

Tish had been working at the Wonder Bar in Norwich, Connecticut for six weeks when the owner received a letter from the State Liquor Authority (SLA) stating Tish could no longer work there in women’s attire because it was against the laws of the state of Connecticut for a man to wear female clothes.  The Connecticut mill towns were struggling to deal with the SLA. So Tish’s career as a female impersonator – the word “drag” was never used – was delayed a while longer.

He compares his appearance at that time to Adam Lambert: he didn’t want to break any laws but delighted in being obvious; he wore pants but lots of theatrical make-up. He had his brown hair curled and used his mother’s bleach to gradually lighten it. Three-quarters of the audience was from the submarine base. Tish’s brother, then a sailor stationed in New London, would tell Tish how his friends would say what a great time they had at the club. Tish warned him not to let on that the star of the show was his brother – 80% might like it but the other 20% might want to kill him. He was so popular that the Wonder Bar put his picture in the Norwich Bulletin advertising “Miss Tish”.  His friends, his family, his relatives, in fact, the whole state accepted him as the “Joe” they always knew.

He left the Wonder Bar for the Stage Coach Inn in Voluntown, in the town of Norwich, the birthplace of Benedict Arnold, a club that had been a real stagecoach inn during the Revolutionary War.  It was across the street from a Catholic church.  One afternoon a priest came into the club. “Are you Tish?” the priest asked.  “I have nothing against your show but when my parishioners come to seven o’clock confessions on Saturday evening, there’s no parking!” Tish’s fans from The Wonder Bar had followed Tish the twelve miles to the Stagecoach Inn.  He assured the priest he would be there for only two more weeks because The Wonder Bar wanted him back. The owner there said that since Tish started, he had paid off his mortgage and gotten a new car.

Part of his act was telling the audience that the owner of the bar had decided that Tish should have other impersonators in his act and so he was going to audition some people from the audience. Tish would seriously scrutinize the room, pick out the three roughest looking sailors and prompt them to do exactly as he did; he would sashay around the room in flowing chiffon and, to the delight of the audience, the sailors would have to do exactly the same.

Tish met his first boyfriend when he was 27.  Philip was 24, lived across from Brown University, and was planning to get married, when he visited a club in Pawtucket, Rhode Island where Tish was singing Sunday and Monday nights.  The club was located next to Slaters Textile Mills, the first textile mill in the country, constructed in 1789. Tish tells the story of the seven clowns from Barnum & Bailey Circus coming to the club one night from the circus in Providence. The next day the circus moved on to Hartford where 67 people died in a huge fire, making that the last time Barnum & Bailey Circus was held under a tent.

Philip’s father was a sergeant in the Korean War and Philip introduced him to Tish in Connecticut.  It was a congenial enough meeting but afterward, his father made it clear to Philip that if he kept seeing Tish he’d have to move out.  Philip lived in his car for three or four days without saying anything.  Soon after he moved into the barn with Tish. The barn belonged to Tish’s great aunt and her husband who lived in a colonial home on the property. They had converted part of the barn to a two-room apartment and when the couple would argue, that’s where the husband would sleep. Tish had been living with his mother but when she remarried and the apartment became available, Tish moved in and gave his aunt three dollars a week. There was no plumbing and no water and he cooked with a kerosene stove and used an outhouse at the bottom of the hill, but he loved living there and stayed for two years.

In 1952 Philip visited New York to find a place to rent.  Within a week he found an apartment at 49 MacDougal Street, got a job at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and came back to get Tish and Francis, a friend of theirs who was what in those days was called a “state kid”, essentially a foster child, who went on to become a doorman in a very exquisite hotel. They packed the car with as much as they could possibly squeeze in; Tish says it reminded him of Tobacco Road.

Their next apartment was four rooms on West Fourth Street and Sixth Avenue above a club called The Pepper Pot where Tony Bennett got his start. Tish says it was Bob Hope who first saw him and urged a name change from Anthony Dominick Benedetto to Tony Bennett. Jimmy Walker who had been mayor of New York City in 1926 had once kept a mistress on the top floor of the building.  In 1953 when that apartment became vacant, Tish wanted to live there but the rent was too high. It was $200 a month.

Tish decided to apply for a job at Moroccan Village.

“I’d like to work here,” he told them.

“What do you do?”

“I’m a female impersonator.”

Tish’s act consisted of singing French standards in the style of Edith Piaf in a black dress or as Mary Martin singing “Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair” from South Pacific which was then playing to enthusiastic reviews.

He auditioned, got the job, everyone happily took him under their wings, and Tish began his reign in New York City.  It was at Moroccan Village that he started wearing wigs and exquisite gowns.  The bullet holes were still evident in Tish’s dressing room where Bobby Dell, the M.C., had gotten shot in the arm two years before. Tish says if there had never been a mafia, there would never have been gay clubs.  The Profacis and Gambinos kept them going. They were known only as The Boys.

He had been working at Moroccan Village for two years and was feeling overwhelmed; he was understudying everybody, singers and dancers, and was considering giving his notice. A man came in and introduced himself as Tutty and said he had a club in Hoboken, had heard Tish was leaving and said he was looking to replace someone named Georgette and would pay Tish for two nights’ work what he was now getting for six.  Tish soon found out it wasn’t a club at all; it was a bar. One of the musicians who played for Tish had been the person who accompanied Frank Sinatra to his audition on the Major Bowes Amateur Hour, American radio’s best-known talent show.

In 1954 Tish, Philip, and Francis moved from West Fourth Street into a one-family house in Hoboken where Tish worked at Tutty’s, the bar downstairs. The house was next door to the Democratic Club. Frank Sinatra’s mother, who was the president of the Democratic Club, would come in to use the oven to make chicken in the basket and French fries to sell for a dollar at fundraisers.  On The Waterfront was being filmed in Hoboken; the longshoremen would come in and drink beer and try to get the guys to peddle the dresses they confiscated from the ships.

In 1955 Tish began working at the Holiday Lounge which was around the corner from the Clam Broth House on Hudson Street; he sang on Friday and Saturday and was the bartender on Sundays and Wednesdays.  He remembers the spectacular views from the window of their apartment overlooking the Hudson and loved watching the ocean liners, the Queen Elizabeth going out and the America coming in.

On the last day of 1955, Tish moved into Apartment Number 1 at 51 Bank Street.  He piled his belongings on the floor and went out clubbing to bring in the new year. His rent was $52 a month.

Tish’s early days on Bank Street were busy ones.  He already enjoyed a circle of friends from his two years working at Moroccan Village. When Moroccan Village closed, he went to the Soiree on Third Street.  He was never without work and performed both in what was known as “white tablecloth clubs” and clubs with sawdust on the floor. Posh or less than posh, he always insisted on the same salary.

Next was Tippy’s.  “Where’s the dressing room?” he asked when he walked in for the first time with his group.  “Oh, we don’t have a dressing room.”  So they found a few empty beer crates in the backyard, turned them upside down, put tablecloths on them, and that’s where they would put on their wigs and makeup.  The neighbors in the adjoining building would look out the windows and talk to them while they got ready for their show.

For about three months in the early sixties, Tish worked at the Heat Wave, now the Blue Note. At the Heat Wave, Tish was a male dancer in an ensemble of four guys and one girl named Helen.  It was Helen who suggested that during this slow period Tish might as well work as a male dancer while he waited for female impersonation jobs to come along.

The opening number was the French Apache Dance, featuring one guy wearing a beret and a handkerchief around his neck. The finale was the same group dressed in tuxedos, with top hats and canes.  Soon the manager asked Tish why he was working as a male dancer.  The manager’s friend had a club called the Capri, in the same building as the famous 82 club, known as “the” club for female impersonators.  So off Tish went to the Capri where booking agents regularly attended the performances.  One agent suggested Tish start his own revue and promised him bookings.  At the time, circa 1962, the Jewel Box Revue was very popular – it was composed of 25 men and one woman who is almost 90 now. The booking agent suggested the name The French Box Revue.

Once the booking agents saw the show Tish quickly was offered club dates at resorts in the Catskills.  For three years from the fourth of July to Labor Day, six nights a week, Tish was booked.  He was featured at Evans Nightclub in Loch Sheldrake which burned to the ground in the mid-seventies.  Another club he worked was Martha Kaye’s Peppermint Lounge off Route 17.  Sunday night after the last show was a quick trip into the city to pick up his mail and Tuesday afternoon it was back to the Catskills by car with his friend Lenny, with whom he is still close friends today.  They speak every night on the telephone. If one doesn’t call, the other one will.

Winters he was back with his revue at the Crazy Horse on Bleecker Street, now Terra Blues. The Crazy Horse, an espresso house that let you bring in a bottle of wine, was next door to The Bitter End where Woody Allen played.  Bill Cosby worked in the cellar at another club on Bleecker Street.  It was the heyday of nightclubs in Greenwich Village.

Tish worked six nights a week, would come home at four in the morning, get up at one in the afternoon and go to Jeanne’s Patio or Tors for coffee and socializing, always on the lookout for beautiful guys to work in his shows.  His weekends were spent going out for fun. He headed for after-hours clubs with a mix of straight and gay people, show people, musicians, dancing and relaxation.

The Catskill work lasted about three years.  By now it was 1970 and the French Box Revue was being booked everywhere.  At Silhouette, a club in Brooklyn, the owner apologized to Tish for having promised a booking to someone else for one week — it was Christine Jorgenson.  But that run was short-lived and the owner told Tish he was relieved to have the French Box Revue back because all Jorgenson could do was talk about her operation.  Often the Revue would get booked for a single week and end up staying for much longer – that was the case with a club in Hazlet, New Jersey where a one-week booking became 22 weeks.  Owners were always ecstatic with the audience's enthusiasm.

In those days these were all straight clubs.  Straight couples went there for the entertainment value.  Revues like the Powder Puff Revue and Guys Will Be Girls were very popular.  Tish was friends with Mabel who played piano at Arthur’s Café where the club owner, like so many other proprietors of the day, was careful not to have his place singled out as a gay bar.  But even in full drag Tish was welcomed.  Often the bartender would say “Tish, there’s a drink for you over here.”  “From who?” Tish would always ask.  One night the bartender answered: “From a lieutenant!”  It turned out to be one of the policemen from the Sixth Precinct where Tish had been booked for a one-night special party.

Tish loved being an entertainer and never felt it was a chore, but the world of female impersonator revues was slowly drifting away.  That’s when Tish started his celebrated stoop sales.  On Saturdays and Sundays he would set up shop with tables and clothes racks; feather boas, beaded gowns, and rhinestone-studded treasures would be for sale.  It is a Bank Street tradition to see him out there on the stoop from early spring until it gets too cold, selling clothes, shoes, jewelry, books, art, and whatever else friends and neighbors bring him.

In the sixties, Tish had a silver-gray French poodle called Albert.  A French designer who created Tish’s wardrobe was breeding French poodles.  Albert, the product of a brother and sister poodle who mated, could no longer be considered purebred.  This incited the French designer’s boyfriend who threw the puppy across the room, leaving the dog with a limp. The designer was shaken and told Tish he had to help her find someone to adopt the dog before it suffered any more abuse.  Tish planned to give the dog away – he said the dog looked like a sheep because he had never been groomed or properly cared for – but instead he took the dog to a groomer and Albert turned out so handsome that Tish kept him.  They were inseparable for 17 years.  Tish laughs when he tells the story that on the night he met the boyfriend he told the guy “You’re not much of a man for what you did to that dog.  I ought to get the boys to break your leg.” That night at the club Tish was impersonating Kim Novak but he likes to say there was no doubt who the real man was.

In the seventies Tish, then 41, had a girlfriend.  Diane was 21, lived on Carmine Street, and was a beautiful blonde who Tish said looked like Alice in Wonderland.  She worked as an elevator operator at the New Yorker Hotel and started coming to the Capri where Tish worked.  They were together for three years and became very close but she became demanding.  She told Tish “I want to have your child, a baby with blue eyes and blonde hair.”  And Tish said “But, Diane, I have brown hair!”

If you’re alone and depressed, invite Tish.  Tish can make a joke out of anything.  He was recently in the hospital and whispered to the nurse “You’ll have to give me your phone number so I can find out where the people who work here learned to cook so bad.”

Tish considers himself lucky because any affair or relationship he has had always came to him.  He never had to go looking.

One of those relationships was Peter Russell.  Peter would follow Tish down the street until one day they started talking and became friends and Peter moved into Bank Street and lived there for several years.  Tish tried to talk Peter out of his desire to get breast implants, but Peter wouldn’t listen.  Determined to become an entertainer, he had his implants, became known as Eve, and became one of the best strippers and dancers in Tish’s revue.  Peter and Tish would go out to clubs after hours and one night a doorman greeted them with “Here they are, mother and daughter” to which Tish replied “What do you mean? Peter doesn’t look like my mother.”  Another time they were leaving a club at six in the morning.  From behind someone put his arms around Tish and said: “You’re coming home with me this morning.”  Without seeing his face, Tish resisted and kept walking.  Peter saw who it was, though – it was Mick Jagger.

Drugs and alcohol took their toll and Peter died young of cirrhosis of the liver.  Murphy, one of the original organizers of the Gay Pride Parade, planned a memorial at St. John’s Church on Waverly Place in the Village.  Tish made him promise not to call on him to come up to speak.   When Murphy started saying how so many people loved Eve “but no one loved Eve more than Tish,” Tish walked up to the pulpit.  He talked about how he had loved Peter when Peter was Peter and how he had loved Peter when Peter was Eve.  He talked about the many arguments they had and how he always took him back.  “You don’t turn away someone you love.”

Tish and Billy first met at the Crazy Horse.  “I hear you take in roommates,” Billy said to Tish, and Tish said yes, he did.  So in moved Billy as a roommate who for twenty dollars a week slept on one of the two couches in the front room.  One night Tish found a note from Billy that said “please don’t go to any after-hours clubs.  Come home.  I love you.”  And that was how Billy moved into Tish’s bed.   Billy continued to give Tish money and one night started peeling off hundred dollar bills, 18 in all, for a grand total of $1800.  Tish always knew Billy was a hustler and suspected that’s where the money was coming from.

One day there was a knock on the door.  Who is it?  “FBI”.  Billy in only a t-shirt and underwear bolted through the window, fled into the next building, made his way up to the roof, and then sprung through a skylight into a living room.  He told the people he had just been robbed, they gave him some clothes, and he walked away.  What Tish didn’t know until the FBI told him was that Billy had been forging checks.  When Billy would go home with a john he would tear out the last check in the john’s checkbook and forge it.  In time Billy met a girl and they had a son.  “If anything ever happens to me,” he said to Tish, “I want you to raise my son.” Tish said “of course” and Billy was off.  Five years later Tish ran into Billy’s wife and son at the Chicken Rib.  The son was in a cub scout uniform and was selling chances.  Billy’s wife told the boy, “this is your father’s best friend.”  Billy had vanished.

One night Tish walked into his living room to find Mikey, Peter and a new boy sitting on his couch.  Mikey said “I want you to meet Roger.”  Roger had come to the city from Albany, had gotten a job as a busboy at Studio 54, and had met Mikey and Peter at the Haymarket, a club notorious for young boys looking to meet older men.  Mikey explained that Roger had gotten robbed his first time there and needed a place to stay.  Tish immediately felt protective of him.  He was 34 years younger than Tish.

He told Roger if that’s how he wanted to make his money, that was his business, but he should let Tish introduce him to some generous and trustworthy older men. Roger continued to live with Tish for ten years; his parents would come down from Albany to have dinner with them.  During all those years Roger had a generous companion, Ray, who spent over one hundred thousand dollars on him and together they traveled the world.    Roger and Ray had their share of break-ups, mostly because Ray insisted on showing off Roger and introducing him as his “boyfriend” to which Roger would say “No I’m not.” Tish always encouraged Roger to make up and go back, reminding him that he didn’t have that kind of money and to be nice and enjoy the attention and lifestyle Ray was able to give him.

One night Roger came home with a t-shirt that said: “I love Tish”.  Tish wouldn’t let him wear it –he didn’t want it to look like he owned the boy.  When Tish was working his night clubs, Roger would go out dancing and bar hopping.  He would come home and wake Tish up and make bacon and eggs for him.  He would bring Tish flowers and give him a kiss every night before he went out.   His friends would tell Roger, “What do you want with Tish? He’s old enough to be your father” and Tish would tell him “what do they mean ‘your father’? I’m old enough to be your grandfather”.  For the entire ten years they lived together, Roger always gave Tish thirty dollars a week even when he went away on his trips.

Roger’s drinking got alarmingly worse.  As his health started to fail, he moved out of Tish’s and went to live with Ray who took very good care of him and paid for the funeral.  Tish went to the funeral in Albany with Roger’s mother, grandmother, and sister.   Roger was twenty-eight when he died.

We sit in Tish’s living room. He points to an urn on a shelf and tells me that’s where Peter’s ashes are.  He sits across from me on a roomy burgundy couch.  On the wall behind him are two ornate crystal backed mirrors and dozens of framed photos of Tish’s past, his days as an impersonator, his friends as impersonators, his boyfriends, and his four friends who had sex changes.  On the wall behind me is a picture of his mother, four brothers, and two sisters.  I ask if there is anything he wished he had done but never got to do.  He answers “travel”.  He continues to subscribe to National Geographic, to a French Canadian Genealogy monthly publication, and to Readers Digest in French from Montreal.  He has never been to Montreal and plans to go with his friend Lenny in the spring.

Tish loves Bank Street. He treasures the friends he has made through the years, some only familiar faces whose names he’s never known.  He misses those who have come and gone, the ones he worked with through the years, the ones who lived with him, and the neighbors who lived in our building. We reminisce about the old days and how the block has changed. The years have brought steep and staggering hikes in commercial rents with the newest retail clothing shop on the block rumored to be paying sixty-six thousand dollars a month.  Shanvilla, the grocery store on the corner of Bank and West Fourth, is now a French country antique store; the hair salon on the northeast corner and the travel company on the southwest corner are both Marc Jacobs boutiques.  All kinds of stores have come and gone in the retail space in our corner building: the Chinese laundry and Left Bank Books on West Fourth are now Minerva Café, a lively café run by great people.  The corner store was a butcher shop where Tish remembers buying steaks in 1956; then came a cobbler; next Ivan’s Tie Dye where Ivan created clothes for Janis Joplin; Arnold’s Turtle, a vegetarian restaurant;  Joe’s Café run by a father and son; and for twenty years La Focaccia.  The newest addition is Tremont, an exceptional restaurant featuring New American food with a Mediterranean accent.

Happy 88th birthday, Tish. You are one of Bank Street’s treasures.

(Copyright Silvia Sanza)