Among the aftershocks that followed the political earthquake of 1968, newly widened fissures provided openings for fringe candidates to tread that became paths for later mainstream candidates who were African American or feminist or identified with the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer communities (LGBTQ). The first such fringe candidate to receive widespread attention was Joan Jett Blakk, who campaigned in a way that sought to amuse a wide variety of Americans while conveying views representing all of those groups. A feat not easily managed.
Joan Jett Blakk was (and as of this writing still is) the show-biz name of Terence Smith, an African American drag performer whose professional alter ego is a staunchly feminist woman of no particular race. His stage name itself is akin to cross-dressing by being an example of cross-naming. Smith adopted and adapted the name of the lead singer from the popular cutting-edge rock group Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, displaying his skill at loosening the screws of racial connections, as it were, by dubbing his drag persona Blakk rather than Black.
Similarly in performance, when Joan Jett Blakk spot-on lip-synched songs such as Patsy Cline’s “Tell Me Now / Get It Over,” it was for more than laughs; it was also, stunningly, as if Blakk was inhabited by the soul of that late great southern white country singer. Likewise when, recostumed and recoiffed to render Renata Tebaldi pouring her heart into the aria “Ebben, Ne Andro Lontana,” Blakk brought that diva’s soul to the stage—powerfully demonstrating how profoundly human connections cross sexual and racial differences.
Such connections obviously—and for Blakk seriocomically—are rarely perceived at first glance. “We got a chance to really terrify a lot of suburban families,” she laughed when speaking about her 1991 campaign for mayor of Chicago. “Before they knew it there was a whole—what do you call a group of drag queens?—a gaggle?—a gaggle of drag queens right before them handing out paraphernalia and they thought, with all that commotion, it was something quite serious.” And yet it was in fact comically serious. “We got people to notice us,” Blakk said, summing up that campaign. “We got people to notice that drag does not have to be just standing at a microphone pretending to sing a Dionne Warwick song.”1
Unlike the many fringe candidates who nominate themselves, Joan Jett Blakk was asked to run by Queer Nation, a national LGBTQ activist group founded in 1990. The organization’s Chicago branch first turned to her in 1991, hoping she would help them gain visibility by running in that year’s mayoral race. They chose Blakk because she was already well known for her astonishing performances onstage. Though reluctant at first, being a member of Queer Nation she agreed to give the political stage a try.
Being nothing if not adaptable, candidate Blakk quickly made news in ways that amused a broad spectrum of Chicagoans, appearing in the press following a spur-of-the-moment response to a cop in a coffee shop. “We were creating quite a commotion and this policeman came up and said, ‘I don’t understand; what’s going on here?’” Blakk recounted. When told they were there with mayoral candidate Joan Jett Blakk, the police officer dared her to go out to the squad car and kiss his partner. Though the candidate protested, “He’s got a gun; I’m in a dress,” the group included a photographer and the point of the campaign was, after all, visibility. “I went out and . . . handed him a flyer and before he knew it I had kissed him and I said, ‘Thank you! Vote for me; I’ll set you free.’”2 As the camera flashed and later, when the photo appeared in the press, Chicagoans laughed.
The success of Blakk’s losing bid for mayor resulted in Queer Nation turning to her to run for president in 1992, the year in which President George H. W. Bush, a Republican, faced challenges to his reelection from Democratic Party nominee (and winner of the election) Bill Clinton, and H. Ross Perot, a widely popular businessman running as an independent.
Once again Blakk succeeded in attracting the media spotlight by managing to elude security at the Democratic National Convention and gain entrance, with a film crew, to the convention floor. With that razzle-dazzle as backdrop, Blakk filmed her announcement as a candidate. Catching the attention of the news media, ever vigilant for amusing visuals, Blakk was conducting a full-fledged press conference moments later—until, seeing men in identical suits approaching, the nominee and her entourage quickly split. The event led to so much media attention that, at the Republican National Convention that followed, Pat Buchanan, a conservative and anti–gay rights contender for nomination, brandished Blakk’s appearance at the Democrats’ convention in his speech to the delegates.3
Using the brow-raising campaign slogan “Lick Bush in ’92,” Blakk took the show on the road.4 In Milwaukee she waved to voters as part of that city’s Gay and Lesbian Pride Day parade, seated in a convertible decked out with the slogan “Let’s Take the ‘L’ Out of Flag Day.”5 In campaign speeches she tickled listeners with one-liners such as “I’m the only candidate who can successfully skirt all the issues,” then delivered zingers, as in this reference to Ronald Reagan: “We’ve had a bad actor for president; why not a good drag queen?”6
Not every aspect of Blakk’s campaign aimed to seduce views through humor. She again made national news by choosing as her vice presidential running mate Miriam Ben-Shalom, who herself had been in the media spotlight when she was prohibited from reenlisting in the army because she was openly gay.7 Reflecting on her campaign when interviewed on National Public Radio, Blakk set laughs aside to explain:
Any time people have to fight for civil rights, it’s the same thing, no matter who’s struggling with it—blacks, or women, or gays, or American Indians. . . . What I’m about as an activist is certainly my visibility as a gay person, because that’s the—one of the main problems facing gay people is invisibility. . . . If people don’t see that there are gay people everywhere, then things like the killing of Allen Schindler [a gay sailor murdered by two shipmates] . . . people really wouldn’t think of doing that kind of thing.8
While many Americans were amused in ways that increased the degree to which they perceived Blakk as a person rather than a freak, not all found the humor endearing.
In addition to Pat Buchanan speaking out against Blakk’s campaign, so too did the highly acclaimed (and gay) writer and cultural commentator Bruce Bawer in his book A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society. Bawer criticized Blakk for being a presidential candidate “who presents himself as a representative of the gay population [and] insists on playing the fool, the absurd outsider; the whole idea of gay politics, after all, should be to stop heterosexuals from thinking of gays as the most ‘other’ thing around.”9 Bawer’s complaint represents what is, far and away, the most important insight we gain from the fringe candidacy of Joan Jett Blakk: the fact that the LGBTQ community is no more monolithic in its views than any other group of human beings.