Junior LaBeija, Master of Ceremonies
“Gus is the Cat at the Theatre Door.” So begins T. S. Eliot’s poem “Gus: The Theatre Cat,” from his 1939 volume “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats,” which originated as letters to his friends’ children and which became, four decades later, the basis of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical “Cats.” Gus, who appears at the top of Act II, is said to be shabby of coat, with a palsy that makes his paw shake, and he reminisces about the great roles he played in his prime. In the garish 2019 movie version, Gus was played, with incongruous poise, by Sir Ian McKellen. Next month, a reimagining, “Cats: The Jellicle Ball,” opens on Broadway, after a rapturous run downtown. It recasts the musical as a queer ballroom competition, the kind that flourished underground in Harlem in the eighties, while “Cats” prowled on Broadway. Fittingly, Gus is played by a veteran of the ballroom scene, Junior LaBeija, of the Royal House of LaBeija.
At nine o’clock one recent evening, LaBeija, who is sixty-eight and gender-nonconforming, sat in a booth at 3 Dollar Bill, a night club in East Williamsburg, where the group Open to All hosts biweekly ballroom nights. This one was to be a Jellicle Ball, featuring members of the cast. LaBeija’s coat was far from shabby; it was a Blackglama mink (slogan: “What becomes a Legend most?”), which they removed, with unhurried majesty, along with three fur stoles. They wore cherry-red boots and had a salt-and-pepper beard and long, pearly nails that they flashed like claws.
“I have thoughts about being forever young,” LaBeija said, when asked what they had in common with Gus. They spoke with declamatory grandeur, as if issuing a decree. “Old Deuteronomy”—the “Cats” patriarch—“has the power to restore me back to my youth, and I get to reconstruct, revise, revisit all the things that I experienced. I don’t want to be considered aged. I don’t want to experience loneliness, isolation. So, I choose to stay mentally young and, through visualization, I create a mystique through fashion that allows me to revisit every era that I was prominent in during my youth. That’s what the audience gets to see.”
LaBeija was born James L. Goode, Jr., in Harlem. Their mother raised them as a Jehovah’s Witness. At fifteen, after a violent dispute with a sibling, LaBeija recalled, they gained legal emancipation and moved into single-room-occupancy housing alongside substance abusers and sex workers. They were, as they put it, an “F.I.T.: fag-in-training.” By 1974, they’d been adopted by the House of LaBeija, the oldest of the ballroom houses, founded by the trans pageant queen Crystal LaBeija and her friend Lottie LaBeija, as an alternative to the white-dominated drag circuit. “My mother’s name was Gigi LaBeija. My father’s name was Butch-Stephanie LaBeija. And I, therefore, became Junior LaBeija,” they said. At their first ball, they walked in the category Nostalgia, in thrift-store regalia. “I came as the Black Al Capone: the hat, the overcoat, the pin-striped suit.” They won.
In 1982, the year that “Cats” opened on Broadway, LaBeija began doing drag at Andre’s, a gay bar on Eighth Avenue. “I already had a reputation as a whimsical, clever butch queen,” they recalled. “My extended family taught me all of the tricks of the trade: hair-removal cream, eyebrows, lashes. A water balloon or a chicken breast wrapped in a sandwich bag for flesh. Teased hair, gorgeous earrings. Jewelry like I’m Elizabeth Taylor.” Their best outfit was a knockoff Jacqueline de Ribes ruffled black-satin evening gown, with black gloves and a chestnut wig. “It wasn’t about being a sex kitten, because I didn’t have the tits,” they went on. “But I had the ingenuity of knowing how to hit the light.”
In “Cats,” Gus sings of his greatest part, Firefrorefiddle, the Fiend of the Fell. LaBeija’s signature role was master of ceremonies; by 1975, they were calling out the ballroom categories, with the authority they’d learned ministering door to door. “When people heard me, they saw that I had the ability to evoke in another individual, ‘Yeah, I’m sexy. Yeah, I’m beautiful. Look at me,’ ” they said.
The filmmaker Jennie Livingston captured the underground ballroom scene in the 1990 documentary “Paris Is Burning”; in one scene, LaBeija hollers, “O-p-u-l-e-n-c-e!” The movie, which came out just as Madonna’s “Vogue” was ushering ballroom into the mainstream, later inspired the Ryan Murphy series “Pose,” with Billy Porter as an m.c. clearly based on LaBeija.
At 3 Dollar Bill, revellers arrived in fabulous coats and hairdos. LaBeija received air kisses from the younger members of the house, including Pepsi LaBeija, Marcus LaBeija, and the N.Y.C. chapter mother, Samil LaBeija. The crowd gathered under a disco ball, and an m.c. announced the first category: Face. LaBeija surveyed the scene at a royal remove. “On Valentine’s Day, I didn’t have a date,” they said. “I was in rehearsal. But I remember Valentine’s Day when I had men in the bed, with a rose between their legs, sleeping.” ♦