Go-Go Dancing for $40

Lady Bunny grew up in Chattanooga, Tenn., where she was an outlier from the start.

“He loved to dress up in outfits and put on plays with the kids in the neighborhood,” said Bunny’s mother, Becky Ingle, a retired registered nurse who still lives in the same house with her husband. “We used to live in next door to a florist, and they would throw out ribbons in a garbage. And he made an outfit for a little play he did, where he tied all these ribbons together. He was about 6.”

Bunny’s father, H. Larry Ingle, was a history professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. The family’s liberal politics made them black sheep in 1960s Tennessee. The Ingles were vocal opponents of discriminatory housing and the Vietnam War, and they lobbied the City Council to end Chattanooga’s Armed Forces Day parade.

When Bunny was 11, her father got a Fulbright Scholarship and temporarily moved the family to Ghana, where her parents converted to Quakerism from Congregationalism. “It was the best year of my life,” she said, recalling banana trees in the backyard and an anaconda that slithered across the street. “I still gag West African cabdrivers by speaking the remnants of Fante. I can only say a few things, but it tickles them like crazy.”

But it became harder to fit in. “By the time I was 15 or 16, there were tensions in the home, because I was a flamer,” she said. “My dad would say, ‘Jon, all you want to do is flit around and try on clothes.’”

To straighten her out, her parents sent her to a Quaker boarding school in York, England. “I majored in drinking, which the English are good at,” she said. “It was the height of new wave, disco and punk, and I was super into music. Sylvester was my icon. And it was a known secret that I was gay, even though I made it somehow through school without getting gay bashed.”