 | ||||||
By
Nona
Dead Rebel Of The Week
~ Harris Glenn Milstead ~
He would’ve hated me using the name “Glenn” since he abandoned it without regret less than halfway through his life and never looked back. Why not? He hated Glenn. Glenn was the boy who dreaded recess at his Baltimore school playground because he got a pounding nearly every day. Glenn was the boy who was a sissy, a misfit, fat and ugly with strange pale eyes and a hook nose. Glenn was the boy whose torment at the hands of schoolyard bullies, in the days before PC “harassment policies” and “tolerance training”, necessitated a police escort every day for his last two years of high school in the late fifties.
Glenn was the boy who couldn’t wait to get home from school every day to lock himself in his room and transform himself into his favorite celebrity, the person upon whose life he wished to pattern his own, whose face festooned nearly every spare inch of wall in his room – Elizabeth Taylor.
Yep, Glenn was a gay boy. About as gay as they get. As he got older he wondered if he perhaps might be something else – something worse than gay in those days – a man who was really meant to be a woman. He pondered this question for many years. Meanwhile, he began sneaking out of the house in meticulous drag and crash dieted until he attained his goal of a twenty-eight-inch waist and posed for photos dressed as Audrey Hepburn in the Ascot scene from “My Fair Lady”. It didn’t give him the satisfaction he sought and he sunk, depressed, into a truckload of Krispy Kremes. His baffled parents at first tolerated, then battled, and then ultimately threw their hands up and gave up on their son’s predilections. They were unprepared to deal with the full extent of his internal torment, and both he and they knew it. As with most good parents with a limited understanding of the bizarre, they weren’t up to this particular son.
Luckily for Glenn, he did finally meet, at the age of twenty, a friend who WAS up to him, and who would become key in helping Glenn sort out his shit and give birth to the new identity he would forge and find peace in. It would be nobody’s idea of conventional, but that word had never been in Glenn’s vocabulary to begin with.
The friend’s name was John, and he informed Glenn that he made movies and he wanted to make him the most glamorous female movie star since Elizabeth Taylor. Glenn felt like he’d met somebody with whom he was in perfect symbiosis. How had John known, without even trying, Glenn’s secret fondest desire?
But there was a problem, Glenn pointed out. He had entombed the twenty-eight-inch waist in 230 pounds’ worth of doughnut-induced lard. No problem, John assured him. He wanted everything to go big in his movies. “We’ll bill you as ‘The Most Beautiful Woman in the World’,” he beamed.
So, in 1969, Glenn played his first starring role in one of John’s low-budget movies. As filming progressed and he received script pages, Glenn began to get a handle on just how strange his friend was. Among the things expected of him: his character was to get sodomized with a crucifix during a simulated Mass in a local church, get raped by a giant papier-mache lobster, and go on a rabid, murdering rampage through downtown Baltimore before being gunned down by the National Guard. John’s bedroom (the ostensible “office and headquarters” of his moviemaking endeavor, Dreamland Studios) was chockablock full of newspaper clippings and other souvenirs of lurid true-crime stories. Around the time the film was completed and John, Glenn, and the rest of the band of Baltimore queers and misfits who appeared in and worked on the film began shoestring-budget promotional efforts, the Manson family murders occurred. John decided to do a promotional tie-in, hinting that Glenn and some of the other stars of the film might, just might, have committed the crime.
Glenn laughed it off and treated it like a big joke…until the FBI showed up in San Francisco, where he was by now staying, performing with a drag revue called “The Cockettes”. For a few tense days law enforcement called and re-called Glenn and another performer in the movie, David Lochary, in for questioning about Tate and LaBianca. Glenn was tongue-tied and sweaty – how could this have gotten so out of hand? He’d never even BEEN to the Hollywood Hills, and now, thanks to John’s bullshit, it looked like he never would, either. He nearly cried with relief when one of Manson’s followers collapsed under the weight of guilt and turned snitch.
It wouldn’t be the last time John got Glenn into hot water with his outrageous promotional methods. The next time would be the one that put them, and “Dreamland Studios”, over the top.
“Would you eat some dog shit in the next movie?” John casually asked him one night as they sat, back in Baltimore passing a joint back and forth.
“Sure,” Glenn shrugged, equally casual, thinking that John was just bullshitting him. And even if he wasn’t, how bad could it be after nearly being sent up for multiple murder in a death penalty state?
Pretty bad, as it turned out. John wanted to use the shit-eating scene as the promotional set-piece and finale for the film, which had a budget of twenty-five grand and would be filmed mostly on a set that consisted of a hastily-refurbished burned-out trailer. After enduring filming scenes in the uninsulated structure while wearing skimpy clothes in the middle of winter and performing oral sex on the co-star who was playing his son, Glenn spent the final day of filming walking the mutt around the streets of Baltimore for three hours waiting for it to dump. When it finally squatted – aided by an enema – Glenn scooped up the runny turd in his palm and smeared it across his lips. As soon as John screamed “Cut! That’s a wrap!” Glenn raced to the house of a friend with whom he’d had a bitter falling-out, broke in and used her toothbrush and mouthwash, then hastened his way to the wrap party to scarf down doughnuts and smoke pot all night.
It turned out to be worth it. The movie, released in the summer of 1972, with its disgusting finale and meant-to-offend dialogue, became a word-of-mouth hit among the Warhol-azzi hipsters of early seventies New York, and Vincent Canby gave it a boost of negative publicity by viciously ripping it apart on two separate occasions in the New York Times. Two things happened simultaneously for Glenn at this juncture: after such an extended and strenuous period filming in drag, he realized that he truly appreciated being male in his real life and even began entertaining the idea that he’d like to take on male roles in films or on stage, and he started getting offers of well-paying work outside of Dreamland Studios.
John wrote him a male role in the next film, as well as a female one, even including a scene in which the two characters had sex in a junkyard. Hiring a fat chick to serve as Glenn’s female body double, John hawked the film by telling people, “It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘Go fuck yourself’!”
As the seventies wore on into the eighties, John’s films became inexorably more mainstream, and while he continued to appear in them, Glenn branched out. He played a male gangster in an Alan Rudolph picture and became a disco singing star in Europe, even though his singing voice was the same nasally, Baltimore-accented bray as his speaking voice, and his ponderous girth, now well past the 350-pound mark, prevented him from having sufficient breath to complete live concerts without lip-synching. It also made it difficult for him to fully enjoy the buff young men who threw themselves at him at Studio 54, where he had a permanent table, though he certainly tried. Ultimately he met and moved in with a long-term steady boyfriend, a man his own age, in New York, and settled into his own form of domesticity. His father died before they could fully mend their fences, but he rebuilt his relationship with his mother, who finally became ready to love him for what he really was, which in the end, wasn’t so odd after all.
In 1988, after wrapping another dual role in what would be his last collaboration with John, Glenn got a dream job offer: a recurring non-drag spot on the Fox hit show “Married With Children”. He flew to LA and checked into a fancy hotel on Fox’s dime, going to sleep on the night of March 6, 1988.
He never made his 7:00am call the following morning on the “Married With Children” set. He had died in his sleep, ostensibly of a form of apnea brought on by his extreme obesity. But those closest to him insisted he died of happiness, overwhelmed at finally being fully adored, appreciated and accepted in his own identity.
With that in mind, his mother commissioned his tombstone to bear not just the name she’d given him, but the one he and John had chosen in the early sixties, collaborating and scheming in their suburban Baltimore bedrooms while dreaming of movie stardom: Divine.
This Dead Rebel of the Week is dedicated to Paul F. Comparone Jr, - a thankfully still-living rebel.
