Labels are a challenging subject in the fight for equality and representation. While some embrace labels for social, political, or personal reasons, others reject them. The Lady Chablis accepted only the name that she gave herself, even though she has been credited with being one of the first people to shine a positive light on the art of drag and transgendered folks in the United States. Let’s honor her wishes and look at her entire life.
Chablis was born on March 11, 1957. Her first five years were lived in Quincy, Florida, until her parents divorced. She was raised by an aunt and grandmother, not seeing her mother until she was nine years old. She did not meet her father again until she was twelve and moved to live with him in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood. She followed her mother back to Florida but sought refuge with a neighbor because of the homophobic and probably also transphobic attitudes in her family.
As is sadly common for teens with unsupportive families, Chablis left home at some point. At the age of 15 she was working in a gay bar, Fox Trot, as a female impersonator while living with an aunt in Tallahassee. By 1974, she was living in Atlanta, working at the Prince George Inn, a gay-owned restaurant, and had named herself The Lady Chablis. After a series of mainstream jobs, she made a new friend who encouraged her to try entertainment again. She found steady performance work in Savannah and moved there in the late 1980s.
Savannah’s LGBT community embraced Chablis. She headlined their inaugural Savannah Pride event in 1999. She also hosted the city’s Miss Gay Pride Pageant for several years. She performed at and hosted LGBT charity events through The Cabaret and Club One in the city for many years. She had been the first entertainer working at Club One when it opened in 1988. She also raised money for the American Diabetes Association for several campaigns.
She came to the general public’s attention in the 1994 novel Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt, a non-fiction mystery that included The Lady Chablis as one of the characters. She insisted on playing herself in the 1997 film version and became one of the first transgender figures to be seen by the general American public in a major motion picture. Primarily, she was simply herself in the short string of films and television productions she was part of for the next 14 years.
In 1997 her biography Hiding My Candy was also published, which detailed her early life and how finding the drag world helped her identify and accept herself, even though she disliked the label of “drag queen.” She was herself – a performer yes, but a woman performer, not someone pretending to be a woman. If we consider how difficult things are for trans folk in 2021, imagine the courage it took to just be a woman in the 1990s and not accept anything less than your gender identity. Even though she did reject that label, preferring “female impersonator” for her shows, she still competed and won many local and national drag queen pageants. She earned the nickname The Grand Empress from the 1977 drag queen pageant she won in Savannah and used that title when she later moved there. However, even though she saw her shows as impersonations, she lived as a woman full-time.
Chablis died, after more than a month-long battle with pneumonia, on September 8, 2016, at the age of 59. She performed in Club One in downtown Savannah until she had to be admitted to the hospital. Her sister, Cynthia Ponder, reported that Chablis wanted everyone to know that they should believe in themselves, be themselves, respect themselves and others, and not let the world change them. That is a legacy that should encourage more of us to reject labels and embrace each other fully, shouldn’t it?