The wedding of Joseph Touchette, better known as Tish, was typical for New England in the years after the Second World War. A minister officiated; a hot buffet was served; a friend provided an apartment in Providence, Rhode Island, for the honeymoon. What was unusual was that Tish was the bride. His groom was Norman Kerouac, first cousin of Jack, and most of the guests who gathered at the reception hall outside of Providence were friends from a local gay club. Gay marriage would not be legal for decades, and even weddings staged as campy jokes were almost unheard of—but Tish’s friends had insisted. “That wedding bullshit was all started by a bunch of lesbians,” Tish, who is ninety-three, said recently. Some friends who worked at a Pawtucket bridal salon had offered to outfit the bridesmaids and to provide Tish with a lacy white wedding gown. “It was the first time I ever dressed in drag.” Seeing himself in the mirror, made up with rouge and lipstick, he was pleased with the results. “Somebody said, ‘Tish, you should be a female impersonator,’ ” and he agreed.

Tish, who may be the oldest drag queen in New York City, knew he wanted to be an entertainer from an early age. He grew up in Dayville, Connecticut, the eldest of seven children in a French Catholic, blue-collar family. Following his marriage to Norman, whom he met one night at an underground gay bar, Tish worked factory jobs and took dance and singing lessons at a prominent music academy in Providence; on weekends, he played the local clubs. After a few years, Tish and Norman broke up, and Tish decided to move to New York to focus on his career. “A drag queen is an amateur—a female impersonator is a professional,” he said. For forty years, Tish sang, danced, and amused audiences at clubs, many of them Mafia-owned, across the city and along the East Coast. “They would book us for a week and pa-pa-pa-pa, we’d stay for six months.” He remembers his audition at the Moroccan Village, a popular club on West Eighth Street during the nineteen-fifties, for which he sang “You’ll Never Know How Much I Love You”; he believes he got the job on the strength of his voice. “When the queens saw me taking out my dress in the changing room, they said, ‘You can’t wear that!’ What was good enough for Pawtucket would not work in New York.”

Since 1956, Tish has lived in a one-bedroom railroad apartment on the corner of Bank and West Fourth streets, across from a former travel agency that was later a Taoist decor shop, then a Little Marc Jacobs, and is now shuttered. He pays two hundred and fifty-six dollars a month in rent, and relies on food stamps, social security, and the nominal fee he charges an aspiring actor and chef, Derek, who sleeps on a pullout couch in the living room. (Derek’s name has been changed for this article.) Above the couch is a wall of framed photographs of Tish—you can recognize him by his nose, which is shaped like a teardrop—wearing blond wigs, long gowns, and feather boas. In other images, he is dressed as a man and wears his bleached hair in a pompadour. Beneath these photos is a small framed poster from a nineteen-sixties travelling act, “The French Box Revue,” in which the female impersonators are arranged in a grid, labelled with men’s names: Mr. Dayzee Dee, Mr. Jackie King, Mr. Bobby Dell, Mr. Tony St. Cyr, and Mr. Tish. As George Chauncey, a historian at Columbia, explained in an e-mail, female-impersonation acts were very different from contemporary drag shows, which are as much about creating queer communities as they are about entertainment. Clubs like the Moroccan Village generally attracted “heterosexuals looking for novelty” who were “astounded and fascinated by the beauty and glamor of the performers and their uncanny ability to ‘pass’ as the so-called ‘other sex.’ ”

At the end of their sets, most female impersonators would change back into men’s clothing, but Tish sometimes went out in costume. “I made my living as a girl—except horizontally,” he said with a wink. “It was very easy to do, especially when I was in demand.” Tish never performed at the higher-end clubs, like Club 82, which had a ritzier atmosphere than the Moroccan Village and a larger celebrity following. Adrian, an old friend of Tish’s and a fellow-performer, tried to explain why. “They thought Tish was too trashy,” he said. (Adrian appears on Tish’s wall as a nearly nude Salome, staring into the eyes of a decapitated John the Baptist.) “He was too crazy,” Adrian went on, “He was too outrageous.” Tish was arrested once during the raid of a gay bar, but the police let him go, assuming he was a woman. In 1969, Tish missed the Stonewall riots because he was performing at a night club in upstate New York; he has never marched in a Gay Pride parade.

By the nineteen-seventies, club culture was shifting away from dinner theatre and toward disco. Tish’s cohort of performers had passed into middle age, and the next generation was beginning to cross-dress as part of everyday life. During this period, one of Tish’s boyfriends, Peter, transitioned to become Eve. Tish wasn’t thrilled about the idea, but he took care of Eve because, he said, “that’s when she needed me most.” Like many of Tish’s contemporaries, Eve was a sex worker and died during the AIDS crisis. Now an urn containing her ashes sits in Tish’s living room.

Tish can recall his old set lists in detail but sometimes can’t remember what day it is. The landlord had to shut off the gas because he kept leaving it on. “You’d be surprised with what I can do with a hot plate,” he told me, gesturing toward the narrow kitchen. When I interviewed him this February, the place was warm, but Tish likes to layer, usually wearing multiple sweaters and a beanie over his silver coiffure. In the summers, he spends his afternoons sunning himself on his stoop, lording over the block from his deck chair. Tish doesn’t accept visitors before noon because he goes to bed around two in the morning—a holdover, he said, from working nights. Recently, Derek has gone from Tish’s roommate to his caretaker. He is hoping to inherit the apartment through a “nontraditional family arrangement” provision from New York’s Office of Rent Administration. For Tish, it’s a symbiotic relationship: he has somebody to look after him, and what does he care if Derek wants the apartment after he’s dead? He won’t be needing it.

Tish hadn’t been to a drag club for years. On a recent Sunday afternoon, an outing was planned with Tish’s neighbor, David, and Adrian, who arrived in a distressed pleather jacket that had once belonged to his granddaughter. The men had decided on a matinee at Boots and Saddle, a former leather bar turned drag den, located just a few blocks from Tish’s apartment. As the group descended the dark staircase and entered the bar, a drag queen was reading off bingo numbers to a crowd of revellers. Some of the clientele, mostly gay men and straight girls, were dressed for brunch; others were in clothes from the night before. Two patrons beckoned for the group to take empty seats at their table. Tish told them about his years as a female impersonator, shouting over the music to be heard. The younger of the two, who wore a tight T-shirt and barely looked eighteen, nodded enthusiastically. “It’s so important to know our history,” he said.

The lights dimmed and Fifi Dubois began her set by dancing frantically around the bar, lip-synching to an upbeat eighties number, and then taking the stage to introduce herself. Her face was heavily contoured, which made her look like an alien, but she knew how to work the crowd. Later, Fifi began singing along to a mélange of telephone-themed songs interspersed with deranged monologues, one of which featured a woman screaming, “My pussy is burning, my pussy is burning.” “Who gives a shit?” Tish said. “If we were to say ‘pussy’ in the clubs I worked in, they would have broken your legs.” Fifi lowered herself into a split and then somersaulted on the sticky floor. Adrian looked aghast, but Tish seemed unimpressed. “She’s good, but she’s lip-synching.” There was no getting around this fact for Tish and Adrian: the art of female impersonation had gone downhill. Sipping their Cokes, they began to muse on the past and the long arcs of their careers. “You can’t grow old in this business, darling,” Adrian said. “I’ll never get old,” Tish replied.