Searching for Whitney
A trans valley girl from Mississippi
“It is a half-hour until show time, and Whitney sits at a vanity table examining her image in the bulb-lit mirror. The sight pleases her, and her lips part slightly in a smile.”
-Los Angeles Times, “Queen Mary : Nightclub Performers Dress for Illusion,” 19861.
In researching queer bars and nightclubs in the San Fernando Valley, I came across a description of a 22-year-old transgender woman named Whitney in the Los Angeles Times. She is positioned as an anecdote in a larger story. The year is 1986 and she is a performer at a well-known drag bar in Studio City called Queen Mary. The piece opens with her doing a lauded Marilyn Monroe impersonation “in four-inch heels and a black lace body stocking.”2 But that’s not what grabbed me.
In 1986, this self-possessed 22-year-old told the Los Angeles Times—a very much Establishment paper with little to no queer literacy—“I consider myself a woman with a surgically correctable birth defect.”3 No elaboration or couching is included. It’s a singular statement that is as declarative then as it is in 2026.
What’s compelling to me is not so much Whitney’s conviction; marginalized people throughout history have had to convince bureaucracies and authoritative bodies of basic tenets of selfhood, and still do. What seized me was the context of Whitney’s declaration: this young woman’s willingness to be completely uncompromising about who she is to an institution like the Los Angeles Times.
Her employer may have fostered this directness. Whitney was in good company at Queen Mary. The only drag bar in the Valley, which opened in the early 1960s, was also low-key known as a trans bar4. Accounts from performers lay the geography out this way: the patrons were primarily straight identified, the stage was for drag queens (people across the gender spectrum), but the back room, known as the King’s Den, was specifically for “crossdressers, transsexuals and our admirers,” according to former trans Queen Mary performer Alice Novic5. “It had a softly lit, wood-paneled barroom with Olivia prints on the wall; a small, almost completely mirrored dance floor; and a fenced-in patio, which we used year-round.”
Around the time Whitney started performing, Queen Mary’s celebratory back bar served as a national destination for transgender people. Novic said in 2005, “[it] was the jewel in the crown of the Southern California transgender scene. People I knew from Chicago and, in fact, t-people from all over the world would book trips to L.A. just so they could see the club.”6
That isn’t to suggest that the Queen Mary was inoculated against police harassment or surveillance. In 1987, the Los Angeles Times reported that the King’s Den had “become a mecca for transvestite prostitution.”7 The year that Whitney was interviewed, police had made 70 arrests, primarily for soliciting prostitution both inside and outside the club. During an undercover operation, police arrested a number of patrons “dressed as women,” including a performer.
Police presence wasn’t exactly new. Around the time lesbians and drag king performers in the Valley were defying gender expression regulation laws, Queen Mary drag queens had their own strategy for evading police raids. Queens would reportedly dress in “formal male attire”8 first (slacks, tie, men’s shoes, etc.), and then slip on dresses, wigs, and makeup over that. Should the police arrive and harass performers for not adhering to the “three-article rule,”9 queens were technically following the mandate.
I love the archive, but its omissions are devastating. I have fallen in love with so many people who are lost to time.
Still, like everything else in the Valley, the tension between respectability and deviance ran deep at Queen Mary. Even as the nightclub was actively being investigated for sex work and at risk of losing their liquor license for damaging “public morals, health or safety,” members of the Studio City Chamber of Commerce openly partied there10. Queen Mary was reported to have an “impeccable reputation with local merchants.” When Whitney worked there, the nightclub was owned by 44-year-old Robert Juleff, a self-identified “quiet, conservative person,” married with four grown children. (He opened the nightclub with his mother.)
And amidst all these dynamics, there is Whitney, a native of Mississippi, who had moved to Los Angeles to become an actress. She is captured as dedicated to her craft, both of performing broadly and perfecting her Marilyn Monroe act:
She takes several hours of dance lessons each day, and practices standing over a hot-air grate in a flouncy dress, she says. On stage, Whitney oozes sex and vulnerability. Perhaps because of her own experiences, she is achingly believable when she sings about loneliness and love gone bad.
But so far, according to records, that’s where her story drops off.
I’ve been looking for Whitney in digital and physical archives around Los Angeles, including the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries. I’ve been reviewing footage from Queen Mary, hoping that I see her—“an alluring blonde entertainer with a Marilyn Monroe pout” at even the very edge of single frame. If I do a see a Marilyn, the year is always too late or too early to match Whitney’s timeline (such as the video above.)
I haven’t been able to find a verified list of Queen Mary performers from circa 1986. I don’t know or have access to Whitney’s dead name. I’ve lost count of how many photos of the nightclub I’ve been through. I’ve zoomed in on black and white faces and wondered if that’s her, but I can never be sure. I have, for seconds at a time, thought that maybe I have found her: a glamorous blonde, a white dress, a Monroe act, an image that matches some details I already have in my notes. But before I can get to the other side, the possibility extinguishes: the year doesn’t line up. That’s a different Marilyn, a different performer, a different club entirely. It’s not Whitney.
I’ve been here before. I love the archive, but its omissions are devastating. I have fallen in love with so many people who are lost to time.
She’s become my Watermelon Woman11; I easily design eight lives for her in the self-imposed breaks announced from alarms on my phone. I see Whitney walking down Ventura blvd with a pale pink gym bag and her hair in rollers. I see her in an apartment in North Hollywood with the radio on and five minutes to get ready. I see her leaving her daily dance lessons, waiting for the bus.
I’ll keep looking for her. 🌴
Next week: RIP the mall.
Hamilton, Denise. “Queen Mary : Nightclub Performers Dress for Illusion.” Los Angeles Times, 26 June 1986, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-06-26-vw-21511-story.html. Accessed 28 Jan. 2026.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Meares, Hadley. “L.A.’s Drag Scene Was Born in a Nondescript Bar in Studio City.” LA Weekly, 2017, https://www.laweekly.com/l-a-s-drag-scene-was-born-in-a-nondescript-bar-in-studio-city/. Accessed 28 Jan. 2026.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Miller, Alan C. “Club Called Mecca for Transvestite Prostitution.” Los Angeles Times, 2 Mar. 1987, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-03-02-me-4224-story.html. Accessed 28 Jan. 2026.
Hamilton, Denise. “Queen Mary : Nightclub Performers Dress for Illusion.” Los Angeles Times, 26 June 1986, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-06-26-vw-21511-story.html. Accessed 28 Jan. 2026.
An informal rule often used to arrest gender non-conforming people: you had to be wearing three articles of clothing assigned to your sex.
Ibid.
The Watermelon Woman is a 1996 written, directed, and edited by Cheryl Dunye. If you have not seen it, you need to stop reading this post and go seek it out immediately.