America’s First Drag Queen, And First Gay Resistance Leader, Was A Freed Slave

“His name was William Dorsey Swann, but to his friends he was known as ‘the Queen.’ … Beginning in the 1880s, he not only became the first American activist to lead a queer resistance group; he also became, in the same decade, the first known person to dub himself a ‘queen of drag’ — or, more familiarly, a drag queen.” – The Nation