Now that parts of Towson High School’s campus have been named after graduates Michael Phelps and Randy Dase, can a Divine Auditorium be far behind?
That’s the hope of a group of fans of the late Harris Glenn Milstead — the 300-pound actor, singer and drag queen known as Divine, and a 1963 graduate of Towson High School.
When plans for the school’s renovation were in the discussion stage several years ago, fans suggested that its refurbished auditorium be named after Divine, who first gained attention appearing in movies written and directed by Baltimore filmmaker John Waters.
Divine and Waters grew up near each other in Lutherville and met when they were teenagers. Although they went to different schools, they got to be friends and Divine became part of the troupe of Dreamlanders who worked on Waters’ films. Waters gave him the name Divine.
Divine appeared in nine movies directed by Waters between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s: “Roman Candles” (1966); “Eat Your Makeup” (1968): “The Diane Linkletter Story” (1969); “Mondo Trasho” (1969); “Multiple Maniacs” (1970); “Pink Flamingos” (1972); “Female Trouble” (1974); “Polyester” (1981) and “Hairspray” (1988). In most of his roles with Waters, he was in drag and playing an outsider or renegade.
Branching out
Divine branched out to appear in the plays “Women Behind Bars” and “The Neon Woman” and movies such as “Lust in the Dust” (1984) and “Trouble in Mind” (1985), which weren’t made by Waters. Performing in drag, he also embarked on a singing career at the height of the disco era. His songs included “You Think You’re a Man”; “I’m So Beautiful” and “Walk Like a Man.”
Seeking to show his range as an actor and feeling constrained by his drag persona, Divine welcomed the chance to take on male roles. In 1988, he was scheduled to make a guest appearance as ‘Uncle Otto’ in the Fox network series “Married…with Children,” but the night before the taping, he died of heart failure. He’s buried at Prospect Hill Cemetery of Towson, not far from Towson High at 701 York Road.
Following his death, People magazine named Divine ‘The Drag Queen of the Century.’ In 2018, fans Tom Williams and Jesse Salazar commissioned the artist Gaia to immortalize him by painting a mural of him on the side of a house they own in Mount Vernon.
Divine has remained a cult figure, particularly within the LGBTQ community, and has provided the inspiration for fictional characters, art works and songs. Books and documentary films have been devoted to his life, including “Divine Trash” in 1998, and “I Am Divine” in 2013.
The representative of Divine’s estate, Noah Brodie, is the CEO of Divine Official Enterprises LLC, which operates a website that features ‘I’m So Beautiful’ T-shirts and other Divine merchandise and administers a popular Facebook fan page devoted to Divine. The john_waters_divine_trash_page, run by Scott Elkins, is a second Divine- and Waters-friendly fan site with a large following on social media.
Confusing the press
Divine identified as a gay man toward the end of his life, but there were times earlier in his career when he liked to keep people guessing. When he moved to the Los Angeles area after “Pink Flamingos” opened there, Waters wrote in his 1981 ‘memoir and trash manifesto’ Shock Value, Divine “danced nightly in the Hollywood hot spots and confused the press by telling them: ‘Gay? Are you kidding? I’ve got a wife and two kids back in Omaha.’”
Although he dressed in drag when he was performing, Divine never wanted to be a woman, Waters said in a 2019 interview with E. Alex Jung of New York Magazine and Vulture.
“People thought Divine – they always think wrong – was trans,” Waters said. “Divine never dressed as a woman except when he was working. He had no desire to be a woman…He didn’t want to pass as a woman; he wanted to pass as a monster. He was thought up to scare hippies. And that’s what he wanted to do. He wanted to be Godzilla. Well, he wanted to be Elizabeth Taylor and Godzilla put together.”
In spite of the attention he received as a drag queen, Divine repeatedly expressed that he felt limited by his drag persona.
“My favorite part of drag is getting out of it,” he once told an interviewer. “Drag is my work clothes. I only put it on when someone pays me to.”
Divine was the consummate professional, Waters wrote in “Shock Value” before his death.
“Underneath all this cockeyed glamour lives a serious actor who wants nothing more than to work every day,” Waters observed. “If getting publicity can result in a job offer, Divine is certainly game. If hired, he will give you his all without any moral objections to the script. He’s eaten dog turds, crawled through pig shit, mainlined eyeliner, eaten guts, and risked arrest by appearing in my films, but I’ve never once seen him throw a star fit.”
International following
When Towson High’s renovation plans were in the preliminary design stage, Divine’s fans suggested that a refurbished auditorium would be an ideal place to honor the graduate, since it’s where students have their plays and musicals and Divine developed an international following as an actor and entertainer after he left Towson High. Noting that the auditorium wing already stands apart from the rest of the school complex, visible from the Aigburth Road entrance, they said a ‘Divine Auditorium’ sign would make it even more memorable.
Another connection is that Towson High was used as a filming location in Waters’ 1994 film, “Serial Mom.” The movie follows suburban wife and mother Beverly Sutphin, played by Kathleen Turner, who resorts to homicide when people hurt her family or eschew proper rules of etiquette around trash recycling or wearing white shoes after Labor Day.
Waters selected Towson High for the scene where the protagonist, Beverly Sutphin, runs over her son’s math teacher with her car in the school’s parking lot. Although Divine wasn’t in the movie, Waters later said that the location held personal significance for him because Towson High was the school where Divine had been bullied as a teenager. The distinctive stone that’s visible on the building’s exterior as ‘Serial Mom’ backs over the math teacher is a dead giveaway as to the location.
Michael Phelps Way and Randy Dase Field
One precedent for naming part of Towson High’s campus after a graduate is that a section of the road the school is on, Cedar Avenue, has been named in honor of Class of 2003 member Michael Phelps, the swimmer who won more Olympic medals than any other athlete, a total of 28 across four Olympic games. An honorary street sign calls it Michael Phelps Way.
Last Saturday, the school officially named its new athletic field Randy Dase Field, after the 1972 graduate who earned nine varsity letters as a student-athlete and returned after college to spend his entire career there as a teacher and coach. Dase taught social studies for 43 years and coached soccer, basketball, lacrosse and badminton for a total of 97 seasons, guiding the Towson Generals to 10 state championships, eight in lacrosse and two in soccer.
The new athletic field is the first completed component of a multi-phase expansion and renovation that’s underway at Towson High, whose main building dates from 1949 and was designed by Smith and May. A four-story addition is scheduled to open next year and much of the original building, including its auditorium, will be renovated after that.
Nothing ever came of the suggestion for a Divine Auditorium that was made before construction got underway. Waters mentioned the idea during at least two of his spoken-word performances in Baltimore several years ago, drawing cheers and applause from the audience when he did. It took a long time for the construction work to begin, and the fans say they never heard back from the school after they first proposed the idea.
Up to the county
Now that work is moving ahead, is there a chance the auditorium will be named after Divine?
Lawrence “Bo” Du Val, the school’s principal, said he’s been at Towson High for only two months and isn’t aware of any pending request to name the auditorium after Divine. Asked about it after the Randy Dase field dedication ceremony last week, he said he didn’t know that Divine was a Towson High graduate or that “Serial Mom” was partially filmed on campus.
Du Val said the Baltimore County Public Schools system has a procedure for naming parts of schools after graduates or other honorees and that decisions are made at the county level. He said that’s the process Towson High followed in naming its athletic field after Randy Dase.
Next, he said, the school will be installing a sign naming the snack shack and comfort station at the new athletic field after Dr. James “Jim” Fragetta, a community volunteer and pediatrician who was a long-time member of the Towson Sports Boosters and instrumental in bringing the new field to fruition.
Fragetta passed away in 2019 at the age of 58 and is remembered by staff and alumni for his spirit and dedication to improving the student experience at Towson High. The building cost more than $575,000 and will be known as the James Fragetta, M. D. Comfort Station.
In the meantime, fans visit Divine’s grave at Prospect Hill Cemetery around the year, leaving plastic pink flamingos; costume jewelry; mini disco balls; high heels; beer; vodka; tubes of lipstick; empty palettes of eyeshadow and other tributes. Cemetery President Carolyn Parker Knott said in 2021 that Divine’s is the most-visited grave in the cemetery, and fans have come from as far away as Australia.
At one point Divine’s gravestone was defaced so badly with cuss words, lipstick kisses and other markings — including profane lines from Waters’ movies — that directors put up a sign asking visitors to “please be respectful of the impact of your visit on families who have loved ones buried nearby.”
One of the next days when Divine’s fans are expected to visit the cemetery is his birthday, Oct. 19. He would have turned 81.
