Ideology

Welcome back to Yesterqueers! My name’s Amanda and I’m a public historian who talks about queer history on the internet.

This photo that’s attached to most writing about Swann is actually of a female impersonator named Jospeh Brown who was part of the wildly popular vaudeville duo Gregory & Brown that performed at Paris’s Nouveau Cirque in 1902. As far as we known there are no photos of Swann, and we’ll talk about why a little later.

William Dorsey Swann was born William Henry Younker in Washington County, Maryland in 1858 or 1860. He was born enslaved, the 5th of Mary Jane Younker and Jack Swann’s 13 children. The entire family was owned by a woman named Ann Murray, who was also William’s godmother. Although Mary Jane and Jack were Protestants, Murray took it upon herself to make sure that Swann and his siblings were baptized and confirmed in the Catholic Church.

By all accounts Swann’s mother worked to create a joyful and loving environment for her children, and after Emancipation Mary Jane and Jack bought a small farm for the family in Washington County. Formerly enslaved children were not usually educated and instead went to work as soon as they were able to help support their families; Swann got his first job as hotel waiter when he was around 8.

Swann moved to Washington DC in 1880 in search of a better-paying job. He quickly found work as a janitor at a Business College, where he also learned to read & write in his spare time. According to Henry and Sara Spencer, the white educators who employed him, Swann sent his relatives “all he could spare from his earnings,” and they described him as “industrious,” “refined,” and “courteous,” with a “sensitive nature.”

Swann created a circle of friends easily and soon began hosting secret gatherings called “drag balls” or just “drags.” The origin of the word drag is a subject of much debate, it might be an evolution of the phrase “grand rag” which is a 18th century term for masquerade balls, it could have originated with a gay British secret language called Polari, or it could have originated with the fact that the long dresses worn by female impersonators in the 19th century dragged across the stage.

Like Swann, many of the attendees at these drags were also formerly enslaved men working low-level jobs in the nation’s capital. According to an article in the Washington Critic in 1887, the attendees “nearly all had on low neck and short sleeve silk dresses, several of them with trains. They all wore corsets, bustles, long hose and slippers, and everything that goes to make a female’s dress complete” These parties had food and drinks and dance competitions.

Swann took the title of “queen” among his friends after being inspired by the Queens of Liberty featured in DC’s annual Emancipation Day parade: Black women in elegant crowns who sat atop elaborate flower covered floats and personified Black freedom. According to scholar Channing Joseph, “Swann is the earliest-documented person to be known as “queen” of a crossdressing ball described by its participants as a “drag.” Holding the title “queen” of the drag—or, more familiarly, “drag queen”—signified that Swann held an honored place in the queer community.”

Swann’s balls likely started around 1882, and by 1887 they’d drawn police attention. On the night of April 12, 1888 a patrolling police officer spotted people who he suspected to be Black men in women’s clothes leaving a carriage and entering a residence on F street. The residence backed up to a hospital, so the officer talked his way into the hospital and spied on the gathering from a third floor window. He had a clear view of “thirty men parading about the room, many of them in women’s clothes” and called in to his station to say that he’d found a “drag.”

Eight more officers arrived in short order and broke down the door at 1114 F Street, or as the newspaper put it “the front door was found to be fastened but opened under a little pressure.” The article in the National Republican went on to say that the Queen, Mr. William Dorsey, “stood in an attitude of royal defiance” wearing a white silk dress with a ten-foot train, white kid gloves past the elbow, and a black wig. The drag was being held to celebrate his 30th birthday. When a police officer reached to arrest him, Swann cried “You is no gentleman!” and fought fiercely – buying enough time for at least half of the attendees to escape by jumping out third story windows to the roof of the first floor below. To quote Channing Joseph again, “in its determination to defy authorities, the group is the earliest- known queer resistance organization.” Eleven men, including Swann, were arrested that night.

Swann was arrested again on January 1, 1896 and charged with “keeping a disorderly house” (aka running a brothel) when in fact he was hosting a drag. He was tried and convicted by January 3 and was sentenced to 300 days in jail. During the trial the judge is quoted as saying “I would like to send you where you would never again see a man’s face and would then like to rid the city of other disreputable persons of the same kind.”

Three months into his bogus sentence, Swann petitioned President Grover Cleveland for a pardon, marking the first time in history that, quoting Joseph again, an “American took specific legal and political steps to defend the queer community’s right to gather without the threat of criminalization, suppression, or police violence.” 30 people signed the petition in support of Swann.

In response, U.S. Attorney A.A. Birney stated “This petition is wholly without merit . . . the prisoner was in fact convicted of the most horrible and disgusting offences known to the law; an offence so disgusting that it is unnamed. His evil example in the community must have been most corrupting.”

Cleveland denied the pardon due to the “character of his offence.”

Swann’s growing reputation made it harder and harder for him to stay in Washington DC, so in 1900 he returned home to Hancock, Maryland. He died in 1925 at the age of 67.

After his death, Hancock officials burned Swann’s house to the ground, destroying any documents or memorabilia that he may have had. But the royal drags he’d started were already spreading to other cities and his impact on our community could not be burned away.

William Dorsey Swann would almost certainly have been lost to history if not for the tenacious work of journalist and queer culture historian Channing Gerard Jospeh. In 2005 he just happened to stumble across an 1888 Washington Post article about the raid on Swann’s birthday party and he followed the breadcrumbs into a secret world of drag balls and queer resistance in Washington DC in the 1880s. His forthcoming book, The House of Swan: Where Slaves Became Queens is due to be published in early 2026 and I for one cannot wait to get my hands on a copy.

That’s it for today! As always, more information, including sources and further reading, is available in the usual place.