Each Friday and Saturday night in the small dressing room behind the stage of Lips Atlanta, Charles Dillard begins the transformation he has performed for almost 50 years. The wig is usually short. The dress, often with sequins, reveals lots of cleavage. The jewellery is rhinestones, the bigger the better. Pencilled-in brows with a sky-high arch replace the ones that no longer grow back. A glittery pink semicircle of eyeshadow hovers above lashes heavily coated in mascara. With a generous swoosh of pink blush and a coating of pink lipstick, Mr Charlie Brown is ready to take the stage. It’s the fifth anniversary of Lips Atlanta, the drag dining club in the American state of Georgia, and Dillard is one of the original MCs. At 69, he is also one of the most well-known and longest-performing drag queens in Atlanta. His career has taken him all over the world, granted him entry into the television and film industry – he recently shot a scene as himself in the forthcoming film Limited Partners starring Tiffany Haddish and Salma Hayek – and it has allowed him to make a living doing the thing he loves the most, making people laugh. Those who know him best describe him as supremely witty and one of those people who has no idea how many lives he has touched. “The best thing about my career is I am entertaining. I am making people laugh. In five years, I hope to be right here,” says Dillard on a recent afternoon seated at a booth in Lips Atlanta. “If you can’t laugh at a 69-year-old fat, baldheaded man in a dress, you don’t have any business here after dark.” The world of drag has evolved since Dillard first began, moving from novelty to mainstream with the release of books, films and television shows such as RuPaul’s Drag Race . But drag performance is nothing new. Men have been dressing up as women for thousands of years, as far back as ancient Greece when male actors dressed as women to play the roles women were not allowed to perform. The life and death of the Las Vegas showgirl As a boy growing up in Westmoreland, Tennessee, Dillard says he always knew he was gay. Back then, it wasn’t something you shared, he says. “I grew up on a country farm in a missionary Baptist family,” Dillard says. His grandfather was the founder of a church in Tennessee. His father, a foreman at a shirt factory, and his mother, a woman of strong Christian faith, raised their three children in a close-knit family. He was 19 when he went to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, one summer and first saw a drag performance. Back in Nashville, he took a job as the male lead in a drag show. One night, they did a turnabout, and all the male leads dressed in drag. “I was a hit and that was it,” Dillard recalls. In 1976, he met Fred Wise in the ladies’ room of the Carousel Club in Knoxville, where Dillard worked as show director. Wise’s ex-wife introduced them. “Charlie was on stage when we walked in. He was doing a snake act. I had never seen anything quite like him before,” says Wise, 63. Together they entered the heyday of modern drag, moving from Knoxville to Atlanta in 1978. Dillard took a job at a club as an entertainer. Two years later, he was crowned Ms Gay Georgia. Eventually, he told his family what he did for a living. “Of course, they didn’t like it and they prayed for me and begged for me to quit, but that was my lifestyle,” he says. His sister, 13 years older, is the only family member to ever see him perform. She covered her eyes when she stuffed a US$1 tip into his cleavage. By 1990, Mr Charlie Brown was an Atlanta legend. That year, Vicki Vara, whose family owned the popular Atlanta bar Backstreet, was looking for a big draw. “When people came in, it was a big empty room and people left,” she says, referring to the top floor of the club. “I remember thinking we needed a crowd starter.” They tried dancers and a few other things, but nothing worked. Vara knew the drag scene was exploding and Dillard was the name on everyone’s lips, both for his talent and his activism in the gay community. “He was raising money for charities. Whenever they needed a host or an MC, he was perfect for it,” she says. “He has been an icon for sure, and everyone knows him in the gay community.” Charlie Brown’s Cabaret was exactly what Backstreet needed. The show would kick off at 11pm and sometimes wouldn’t end until 7am. Dillard hired the best performers, and the club attracted some of the biggest celebrities passing through town. In 1997, the club was featured in an HBO documentary, Drag Time , a film which confirmed drag was fully mainstream. It has also become more inclusive, extending beyond the stereotypical heterosexual male dressing as a woman for laughs to a mode of expression for members of the LGBTQI community. It was also becoming big business, and Dillard was part of that wave. Drag queens of Beijing strut their stuff while they can Dillard had been on the road doing shows from Boston to Key West and Las Vegas to Amsterdam, but back at home, the tides were changing on the club scene. In 2004, Backstreet closed, a victim of metro Atlanta’s neighbourhood bar battles. Dillard kept touring and landed a gig at Blake’s on the Park, where he worked before meeting Mark “Yvonne Lame” Zschiesche, co-owner of Lips. When they opened the first Lips location in the late 90s at a small restaurant in New York’s West Village, Zschiesche and his partner wanted to create a party atmosphere – a club scene with great music, drag queens and good food. The concept was such a hit in New York, they soon opened outposts in San Diego and Fort Lauderdale. Five years ago, Atlanta seemed a good location for what was then their largest club. (Chicago is opening soon and will be the biggest Lips ever.) More than 100 drag queens showed up for auditions, Zschiesche says. He was looking for polish, personality and great performers. “I didn’t know that many queens in Atlanta, but Charlie Brown is known nationally,” he says. “I knew she was very funny. I met her and her husband. I didn’t even see her in drag.” Dillard was offered a spot on the roster of 30 performers at the club. Though Lips was already thriving, Zschiesche says they have gotten a boost in the past decade since the debut of RuPaul’s Drag Race . Same-sex marriage in Asia inevitable, says gay rights activist “Television just catapults people to another level,” he says. “Now you have people who have become instant celebrities and the world loves celebrities. That in general has helped us thrive more.” And still every Friday and Saturday, Dillard can be found on stage at Lips, delivering barbs to the birthday girls, bachelorettes and a handful of men. At the shows, nothing is off-limits for teasing. “I make fun of where they live, how they dress, anything,” Dillard says, but it’s all in fun and he doesn’t take any of it for granted. “I am very fortunate to still be doing this at age 69. I live for the show each night.” And each night, to show his gratitude, he walks up to every person in the audience and makes sure he says thank you.