Christened Charles H. Dillard, Mr. Charlie Brown died March 21 of sepsis in Piedmont Hospital after undergoing heart valve replacement surgery. Brown was 74 and had been doing drag for half a century.
Born in tiny Siloam, Tennessee, to Charlie and Velma Dillard, “Charlie used to say, ‘We were envious of towns that had a stoplight,’” said writer Richard Eldredge. He collaborated with Brown on a memoir, “Bitch of the South: How I Survived Vietnam, the AIDS Crisis and MAGA Drag Bans.”
Dillard was nicknamed “Charlie Brown” while working, rather ineptly, as the night clerk in a downtown Nashville hotel. Brown’s supervisor saw the disarray of the front desk and said, “(expletive) you, Charlie Brown!” according to Eldredge.
He got his performing start 50 years ago at Nashville’s Watch Your Hat and Coat Saloon. The “mister” in Mr. Charlie Brown was tacked on because a Nashville ordinance required “every female impersonator to let the audience know they were men.”
In the 1970s, drag artists in Nashville had to smuggle their wigs and dresses into the clubs in trash bags. If they arrived at work in full makeup, bullies “would chase ‘em down the street,” Brown told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2023.
Dillard arrived in Atlanta in the mid-1970s. One night at the Sweet Gum Head, a gay bar on Cheshire Bridge Road, Mr. Charlie Brown climbed on the circular bar and did a spirited Vegas-like routine, lip syncing to Della Reese’s “You’ve Come a Long Way from St. Louis,” and kicking over people’s drinks. When Brown finished, the owner came storming up, but to Brown’s astonishment, he offered him a job. Brown worked there as a performer and emcee until it closed.
Brown worked at other Atlanta nightspots, including Illusions and Lips, but may be best known for the 14 years he oversaw Charlie Brown’s Cabaret, a rooftop drag show at Backstreet, a 24-hour gay disco in Atlanta. Audience members at time included Queen Latifah, Elton John…
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