Les Girls

The History of Melbourne Drag starts in 1970 when entrepreneur Sammy Lee brought a troupe of the famous Sydney Les Girls to perform in Melbourne. Their arrival caused a sensation in staid Melbourne and newspapers clamoured to publish pictures of the totally glamorous ‘boys’ who were appearing at the Ritz Hotel in Fitzroy Street St Kilda.

These performers were the pioneers of drag in Melbourne.

Because they were officially classified as ‘male’ they had to get police permits to appear in female attire while travelling to the show, and they weren’t allowed to ‘appear on the street’ dressed as women at all.

The shows were enormously popular with the mums and dads, and that meant with politicians, and with this public acceptance came a relaxing of attitudes to males dressed as females. Gradually the Melbourne drag scene evolved.

When Sammy Lee decided to bring those first “Les Girls” to Melbourne he couldn’t have known what a phenomenon that was about to start. A popular advertisement of the day sang along that Australian’s liked ‘meat pies football, kangaroos and holden cars’. Soon the Les Girls performers were chanting in the dressing room that the hordes of suburban voyeurs lining up to view the Les Girls cast on stage liked ‘football, drag shows, kangaroos and Holden cars’. Les Girls had arrived.

The Les Girls All Male Revue, to use its full name, started life in the back room at the Ritz Hotel in St Kilda. Those first phenomenal years inspired the promoters, and soon they were moving to larger premises in the Upper Esplanade in St Kilda – to a nightclub called Olivia’s, next to the St Moritz Skating Rink. Now the suburban crowds could really be packed in. These were “the glory days”.

But all good things come to an end. Another move to Bojangles – known as BangLand for the regular gunshots heard there – down on the St Kilda foreshore, became the last retreat for the by now, tired formula of free office party tickets for the show, with the margins on the drink prices to make the profit.

Eventually, a more and more sophisticated crowd tired of the 1960’s glamour and mystery and Les Girls closed its doors.

The shows had been a fantasy world that suburbia could escape to but gradually the declining costume budgets, the gradual push of feminism and the shady dealings and notoriety of the Bojangles car park, pushed the shows into Melbourne’s history.

But something was stirring just down the road at the Prince of Wales. POKEYS was recasting the glamour and fantasy.