At Woody’s on Church St., Joseph Philpott has just gone on stage.

He is decked out in a black velvet gown, with a bouffant blond wig, detailed makeup and countless rhinestones. He looks glamorous, and calls himself “a gorgeous creature who is an over-exaggeration of the feminine ideal.”

Philpott is a drag queen who performs under the stage name Carlotta Carlisle. On this night, he lip syncs a monologue from the TV sitcom Designing Women, before songs by Gladys Knight, Alannah Myles and Céline Dion. The audience eats it up, many dancing and singing along.

This is what the Church and Wellesley neighbourhood is all about. There is joy, adulation, celebration and pride in the crowd.

Outside the bar, the vibe is tamer. The historically LGBTQ-oriented community, running along Church St., bordered by Charles St. to the north and Gerrard St. to the south, was once a vibrant destination. The daily lineups for countless gay bars, eclectic small businesses and packed bathhouses have been replaced by coffee shops, gentrified pubs and corporate chains.

Other than during Pride month festivities, the crowds are smaller. Many once-popular bars and shops have closed, often because of rising rents. Societal acceptance of gay and lesbian people gave them other places to go. Online dating has pulled people out of bars everywhere.

The neighbourhood has lost its sparkle. But you can find the missing energy in the bars when the lights go down and the drag show goes on.

“Drag is the fabric that keeps gay bars together,” says Sky Gilbert, a professor, writer, drag performer and co-founder of Toronto’s Buddies in Bad Times Theatre.

But the fabric doesn’t stretch as far as it once did.

The careers of drag performers are limited to these few blocks. If they aren’t on a stage here, there is only minor corporate or charitable work in Toronto. Most theatres now don’t have drag on the bill. Yet the local scene birthed the performer who put drag performance on the map in Canada, bringing drag into mainstream (and straight) venues in front of elite audiences.

Craig Russell was a female impressionist. He performed the likes of Judy Garland, Tallulah Bankhead, Ella Fitzgerald and Bette Midler, among others.

Starting in Toronto gay venues in the late 1960s, he went on to tour North America, the United Kingdom and Europe. He developed a TV and film career, and was a known performer in the global entertainment industry. He not only proved drag as an art form, but demonstrated there was an audience for it.

“Craig was the consummate performer,” says Gilbert. “He sang beautifully. He could imitate anybody. He had an incredible wit. He was the total package.”

In an era when homosexuality was illegal, Russell performed every week in some of the biggest North American venues in and out of gay neighbourhoods. He was the most mainstream drag performer in the world long before drag performer RuPaul hit the scene.

“Anybody who is really talented in the theatre (has) an entry card into that world,” says Gilbert.

When many people wouldn’t have talked to him on the street, Russell’s “talent trumped and it was his ticket to the mainstream.”

Drag has always been part of the Toronto gay community, and has a long-held place in LGBTQ culture. Gilbert says the appeal comes from an audience attraction to femininity, confidence and challenging gender norms.

“It’s about gender being restrictive and being able to play with your identity,” he says. “It doesn’t matter what genitals you are born with. You can dress as you like and act as you like … (Drag) was part of gay liberation.”

Russell led the way for drag in Canada. Born in 1948, he was raised in Port Perry, Scarborough and Toronto. His father was a military man, who did not appreciate having a son who wanted to wear girls’ clothes and shoes.

“His father was ashamed and embarrassed when his son was so not manly,” says Allison Badger, Russell’s daughter. “He wasn’t accepting of that.”

A love for entertainer Mae West distracted him from that alienation. The American actress and singer was not only talented as a performer, but she was a cultural icon for sexuality and social subversion.

Russell was infatuated with her. He started a fan club at the end of high school in 1965, of which he was the only real member. After notifying her official fan club of the alleged Toronto following, West called him and charmed him into coming to California to meet. He eventually worked as her personal secretary.

Under West’s influence, he fell in love with the idea of performing himself and she taught him anything he wanted to know.

Russell returned to Toronto and took up female impressionism full time. He spent hours upon hours practising impressions of entertainers he loved. His first outfit included a skirt made of black chiffon that was stitched to a black bra. With his reddish hair teased out, he was a dead ringer for Ann-Margret.

Russell began performing in Toronto gay bars, including the 511, the August Club, Club Manatee and St. Charles Tavern. He mastered impressions of entertainers like West, Bette Davis, Carol Channing and Peggy Lee. The venues were packed. The audiences loved him.

By today’s standards, he was a drag queen, but Russell insisted he was an impressionist. His impressions included voice, fashion, hair, makeup, facial and verbal expressions. He imitated gestures down to the movement of a pinky finger or flick of a cigarette.

He added humour to each impression, from West’s deadpan one-liners to Davis’s disdain for rival actress Joan Crawford.

“His strongest asset is the ability to bring out the hilarious subtleties of these classical vamps,” said a 1972 review in the Hollywood Reporter.

He also sang their music. The majority of drag performers lip sync, but Russell sang — any song on the drop of a dime — with impressive vocal range.

Craig Russell as Marlene Dietrich, Mae West and Peggy Lee from The Craig Russell Show 1980 in Amsterdam.

Before long he was booked at bigger theatre venues, including Toronto’s Massey Hall and Theatre in the Dell. He began touring through Ontario from Hamilton to Sault Ste. Marie.

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“We’ve had female impersonators . . . but none of them could handle the big ladies of stage and screen so well,” a 1972 St. Catharines Standard review read. “All you have to do is sit there, sip your suds and pick your lower jaw off the floor every now and then.”

Russell eventually had regular engagements at the Imperial Room in the Royal York Hotel on a stage shared with Marlene Dietrich, Eartha Kitt and Tina Turner.

In 1972, Russell was wooed back to California to perform and tour the United States, telling his mother he was on his way to being a star. He jumped to the big screen in the 1977 film Outrageous. Russell played a gay drag queen.

“Outrageous was very important,” says Gilbert. “It showed the drag queen as a lead character, and a real person. . . . That was groundbreaking.”

Outrageous was one of the first gay-themed films to receive widespread theatrical release in North America. The film’s presence at the Berlin International Film Festival brought Russell overseas.

“I became, for all intended purposes, a hard-working woman,” Russell said in an interview at the time.

He rubbed shoulders with top stars, and earned the respect of entertainers he imitated. Davis called him brilliant. Lee said he was her favourite impersonator.

Russell’s entourage grew to include a promoter, makeup artist, dresser and full band under the direction of musician Paul Hoffert, the co-founder of Lighthouse. They regularly took top billing in Provincetown, Mass., and went on to do shows in San Francisco, Amsterdam and Berlin, playing large theatres. The highlight for him was his first performance at Carnegie Hall.

By 1980, Russell’s career began to ebb. Struggling with drugs, alcohol and fame, disastrous performances in New York and Vancouver tarnished his reputation. He later made a sequel to Outrageous. It flopped.

Russell died of an AIDS-related stroke in 1990. His last years were so publicly marked by struggle, his legacy was muddled.

“In terms of performing, Craig was enormously talented. I am not seeing a lot of talent out of drag queens these days,” says Gilbert. “Nowadays we just have stand-and-deliver drag queens . . . They are talented but they also aren’t getting booked at Carnegie Hall.”

Back at Church and Wellesley, Joseph Philpott says drag queens “are the last of the showgirls. You can’t go to any club or supper club or restaurant and see a live entertainer anymore. But you can go to a drag show.”

There aren’t a lot of performers like Russell, he continues, and they are limited locally.

Kevin Levesque performs in drag as Miss Conception. His show is cabaret-style like Russell’s, including live singing and impersonation of movie, Broadway and Disney characters, in addition to Adele, Tina Turner and Lady Gaga. He sees his interpretation as parodies, calling himself a “female delusionist.”

Influenced by Russell and impressionist Christopher Peterson, Levesque has performed regularly in Toronto for years. But it is his touring in the U.S., Mexico and the cruise ship circuit that has “opened a lot of doors” to allow him to perform his style of show with live singing and musical accompaniment.

“I do my live shows at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre but there’s more cabarets in the United States,” he says. “It’s paying off like crazy there right now.”

Where drag has flourished in Toronto is as an art form. There are different styles. Russell would be known as an impressionist, or even as a Fish drag queen because he strived to look authentically female.

The online magazine Queerty describes common styles of drag. Club drug has emphasis on outrageous fashion and makeup. Pageant drag performers thrive on competition.

Other types include Androgyny (having masculine and feminine characteristics), Camp (a clown-like esthetic, with additional emphasis on humour), and Activessle (drag with religious imagery, often performing for a charitable or activist function).

A newer type is Faux drag, also known as BioQueen, where the performer is a biological female but performs as a male doing drag as a female.

Allysin Chaynes is part of a performing group called the House of Filth. They try to defy any stereotype or definition of what drag could be by incorporating different performers with a variety of styles. They’ve been called drag terrorists because they are not seen as traditional.

Chaynes’s work is varied. She works as a host doing live commentary for movies and drag shows, and also DJs a goth-punk drag show. She usually doesn’t sing, but does lip sync and sometimes plays her own instruments including guitar, banjo, lap steel and mandolin.

“I call myself a mockstar rockstar,” she says.

Chaynes, who only wanted to be identified by her drag name, Philpott and other queens agree drag is such an expansive art form it is almost not definable.

“Performance-wise, there are as many different kinds of drag as there are artists willing to perform it,” says Philpott.

Those who remember Russell credit him as a fabric of their community and an influence for the outrageous transformation that happens when the house lights go down and stage lights go up at a drag show.