Death By Drag Queen: Dorian Corey

If you havent's seen Paris Is Burning yet, go watch it. I'll wait. All set? Good. Dorian Corey was a drag queen with a grisly secret. 

Transcript

Dorian’s friend told police that Dorian had left behind some writing on very old paper. She said it appeared her friend, a celebrated drag queen now deceased, had been writing a story. She could only recall a few details about it. What really stood out for her were the words “revenge” and “murder.”. It could have just been a story, a famed New York City drag queen trying her hand at fiction. Or it could have very well solved a mystery. The mystery of why the queen had a mummified body in a garment bag in her closet for what could have been 25 years.

You’re listening to Wicked Gay, a true-crime podcast about gay people doing awful things.

Oh, and did you know Wcked Gat has a Patreon? Yes! And I’ve got new Patreon subscribers. There’s Dave, and there’s Adam. Admittedly I know them. Admittedly I grew uo with the. Admittedly, they're two of my favorite people in the world. I have two bio brothers and then a bunch of jerks who are my brothers from other mothers., They're two of them. Thanks, fellas.

The podcast episode officially starts here - Hello! Ugh, it’s the doldrums months - Jan through March and then Cadbury mini eggs in April, and suddenly it’s Pride, and you’re drinking a super overpriced cocktail and cheering on a savings and loan being performative. So, I thought I’d go with a story I find kinda fun…ok, it’s weird to say this, and I say this only because I have a dark sense of humor and a fairly fatalistic view of life, but I’ve always found this story fun. I have a friend that I literally see every few years, but inevitably, we bring this story up because it’s kinda delightful. And I know it says on the tin that this podcast is about awful people, but in this ep it’s a little flipped, the murderer seems like she was a really good person. In actuality, it sounds like the VICTIM might have been a bad guy here. There are also some very good reasons for why the murderer may have concealed her crime, even if it was self-defense, which it could have been. 

But before you curse me out, yeah, someone was killed, that’s bad. But the crime was kinda glamorous, and even the dead man’s relative made it sound like no great loss. Ok, justification over. Let’s stomp the runway, hunty!

This is Episode 47. Death by Drag Queen: Dorian Corey

The main source for this episode is an article in the May 1994 issue of New York magazine by Jeanie Russell Kasindorf called The Drag Queen Had A Mummy In Her Closet. I also used Wikipedia, two websites, Black Art Story and A Gender Variance Who’s Who.

Here are some clips. Some of you in the audience might find these familiar, especially the queer people. They’re from one of the greatest documentary features of all time. Paris is burning for those not in the know. "Paris Is Burning" came out in 1990, was directed by Jennie Livingston, and was released in 1990. It’s about New York City's ballroom culture during the 1980s and all the trans people and drag queens, the black and Latin people, who created it and made it their lives and formed competitive houses, which were like families. Ever seen a show called Pose? Performers would and still do compete in balls, showing off skills in fashion, dance, modeling, posing, voguing, all of it.  It also got into the experiences of the drag performers and trans people of color and what their experiences were like living and surviving and thriving on what was kinda the edge of society, hell they made their own society. Anyway, it’s a classic for a reason. All you young queer people, go watch it right now, know your history and note that you’ll suddenly understand the majority of jokes and references you aren’t getting on Drag Race. Hell, Paris is Burning is Drag Race’s spiritual mother. There wouldn't be a Drag Race without Paris is Burning, at least not in its current form. Just listen.

 Dorian Corey is one of the more prominent interviewees in Paris and Burning, and she’s now a deity. She was a 50-something black trans drag queen when trans drag queens were even less accepted than they are today, and if you note the Neo Nazis outside the library’s story hour, you'll recognize that they’re not that accepted today in some parts and places of our somewhat fair country. Before I get to Ms. Corey’s crazy crime, I’d like to get into her backstory.

Dorian was a transwoman who was assigned male at birth. She grew up on a farm in Buffalo. That’s where the other Mr. Harvey is from. It’s very cold, it’s sorta half Canadian, and the food is delicious. And it ain’t salad, let me tell ya. I don’t know how everyone isn’t tipping the scale up there. I’ve grown to appreciate it. Corey, who would eventually become a mother of sorts to many transwomen and drag performers in NYC, was a mother from a very young age. She once explained that his own mother, divorced and remarried, gave him her new baby to look after at 8 years old. The children of yesteryear were way more competent than the sheltered little moppets of today. Kids nowadays get driven to school. My ass had to walk, and then outrun pedo clowns in white vans trying to get me to take acid so they could rape me or steal my immortal soul, or both. They were wild with the suburban legends back in the 80s.

Dorian first started doing drag in Buffalo and also worked at a department store designing window displays, moving to New York in the 1950s to study art. She ended up doing drag full-time, joining a cabaret drag act called the Pearl Box Revue, and traveling up and down the East Coast. Dorian worked as a snake dancer in the show with an actual snake. No, thank you. It was during her time with the revue that she began to transition and, unfortunately, felt she had to cut off all contact with her family. Probably not an easy choice for Mother, right? Be yourself, lose your family. Keep them, but live a lie. A choice queer people shouldn’t have to make, ever.  

Eventually, and I didn’t know this part, she started her own house - the House of Corey, the family she began competing in, voguing balls and snatching trophies. She was also the drag mother to another prominent figure in Paris is Burning - Angie Extravaganza. Angie would go on to form her own house - the House of Extravaganza.

Dorian was beloved in the community, a mother to many, known for being a consummate performer and costume designer and known for her razor-sharp wit and for her ability to cut you up the second you left the room, the shady lady.  One drag queen said she was an angel. 

Dorian also designed her own costumes. She ran and designed a clothing label called Corey Design. At one point, her act involved wearing a 30-by-40-foot feather cape. Once she shed the cape, two attendants raised it up on poles to produce a feathered tent that covered half the audience. Now THAT’S A reveal. You know, in drag, when the queen sorta changes her outfit in some way mid-lip synch? You non-drag fans are learning A LOT today, huh?

Sometime in the 70s, Dorian’s then-boyfriend absconded with all of the money she had won at pageants and balls, and she never saw him again. So she had to start all over. She would later get with a man named Leon, who was reportedly very good to her, although it sounds like they didn’t live together or he moved out cuz of the…we’ll get to it. 

Dorian ended up becoming a mainstay at a joint called Sally’s II. Where she hosted Dorian Corey's Drag Doll Review. The bar was across the street from the New York Times, and Dorian worked there right up until a couple of weeks before her passing. 

Tragically, like many in her community, Dorian passed away from AIDS-related complications at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan on August 29, 1993, at the age of 56. So - young.. In her final performance as Sally, she was presented with the Entertainer of the Year award and performed while wearing a white gown encrusted with pearls and a matching white marabou coat. Her memorial service would later be held in that very same space.The world lost a real one, as the kids say. 

Then we arrive at what happened AFTER Dorian’s passing.

Lois Taylor was a fellow drag queen and good friend of Dorian’s who also appeared in Paris is Burning. She took care of Dorian the last three years of her life. She would later tell a reporter that she’d gone to Dorian’s apartment that day because, on her death bed, Dorian had told her to go to her apartment, gather up all the beautiful costume and design work, and sell it. 

So, one morning in October, Lois went to Dorian’s 4th-floor apartment on West 140th St. Dorian had written the last name she used before she transitioned on the bell so the home healthcare workers could find her. With her were two customers, supposedly straight men, who were looking to buy some of Dorian’s creations for the sumptuous fabric used. It’s like when people strip copper wire but gay. Dorian’s apartment was reportedly covered in clutter. She wasn't the neatest drag queen. So they maneuvered their way to the apartment’s legendary back room, where Dorian kept all of her costumes,

It was while they were there that they noticed a large plaid hanging-type garment bag from the 60s. Lois tried lifting it. It was heavy and clearly overstuffed. Probably thinking there were priceless garments galore in there, she told one of the customers to cut it open. And when he did, a terrible smell emanated out from the dusty bag. And there was something fairly large wrapped in a leather-like material. Lois later told the New York magazine reporter that she didn’t touch what was inside, instead she immediately called the police. Cuz this was potential trouble. Because what was in the bag was a body, a corpse, to be specific, half mummified/half still decomposing. Ugh.  

The corpse was that of a man wearing ragged boxer shorts and one sleeve of a t-shirt (fashion). The coroner later discovered the cause of death. Garment Bag Guy had been shot in the head. Now that’s a story! And the NYC press began to take notice. At first, Ms. Corey wasn’t mentioned, it was just mummy found in suitcase in Harlem apartment. And then it blew up when it made Page Six! Richard Johnson heard about a connection between the mummy in the bag and a fairly well-known 6’2 drag queen. He ended up writing about the story but got some of the details a little skewed and just a bit transphobic…noting that some of Dorian Corey’s “cross-dressing friends” were looking for Halloween costumes and came upon the body in a trunk wrapped in saran wrap and coated with baking soda. He also noted that he’d spoken to the cops about it, and they reportedly told him that the body could have been there for seven months to 20 years. How precise. 

The cops told Johnson that nothing was found in the apartment to explain the carry-on corpse in Dorian Corey’s apartment but that investigators discovered the deceased’s name was “Robert Wells.”8. Page Six’s Johnson also claimed that her friends found and took with them a note that said, “The poor man broke into my home and was trying to rob me.” Was that the whole story? Not quite.

The next day, the New York Daily News got into Robert Wells. They reported that he had multiple arrests for rape, burglary, and assault and reportedly hadn’t been seen since 1968. And that was sort of the story until 1994, and New York magazine got in-depth with it. For instance, the cops thought Wells had been shot with a 25 caliber whatever, and Bobby Wells’ government name was originally Bobby Worley, he was born in December of 1938, he had a brother named Fred Warley in Washington Heights, and he hadn’t been arrested for multiple crimes, but he had done three years in prison for assaulting and raping a woman in 1963. He had gotten out of Sing Sing in 66 and gone to visit his brother and that was the last time he’d been seen

The case’s fingerprint expert was a detective who was very forthcoming with info. The leather-like material the body had been wrapped in was, in fact, Naughahyde. Cheap brown material you'd make cheap jackets out of. Of course - it was a drag queen’s apartment. I'm shocked he wasn’t wrapped up in feather boas. He’d been secured in the Naughahyde with tape. And it was also in plastic bags. The body was indeed half mummified, half decomposing, so there was a trigger warning for just real gross, a lot of liquid in the bag, and the body was floating, and this is a quote in its own soup. Another trigger warning: the detective also said the corpse’s skin fell apart when just touching it. My family knows the cremate me by the way. Just, I don’t want to be a body, I know Im no longer using it but Id really like my shell to have some dignity afforded to it, please. 

Another interesting detail that actually shed light on the actual time period this all went down was the flip tops. When they unwrapped the body, several flip-top keys from cans of beer fell out. These would have been from old-school beer cans. This lets the cops know the body had been there since at least the 70s, meaning Bobby Worley had died at least 15, maybe 25 years earlier. Plus, Naughahyde was popular in the disco era.I'm sure someone had a leisure suit with very wide lapels made out of it. 

Dorian’s drag queen friends had theories. They were also freaked out that she had fitted them for costumes mere feet away from a dead guy. They didn't recognize the name Bobby Wells or Worley, but one queen surmised that Dorian and the deceased might have dated or Dorian could have been into hiding romantically, and it went pear-shaped with Bobby abusing her.

Jennie Livingston was the director of Paris Burning and someone who spent many, many hours interviewing Dorian (probably sensing she was the star of the whole thing) and had a theory about the missing murder weapon. Quote I shot in both her old and new apartments. Living where Dorian lived, its very likely she had a gun for protection, When we were shooting, a gun battle erupted on the street. Dorian just said gunfight at the OK Corll.  I can picture how she said that - gunfight qt the ok corral. God my impressions are bad, I wanted to be miss lena horne, Jennie went on to say but i have absolutely no idea whether she did it. My main feeling is one of bafflement. She added that she couldn't picture Dorian secreting a body away, 

Thats another theory though, maybe Dorian didnt murder him in cold blood or it was a case of self defense, maybe she was hiding Bobby Worley;s corpse FOR someone.

A drag queen called Topaz, who's seductive, claimed that her cousin had shot her lover, and Topaz brought the gun to Dorian, a silver 22 caliber. The cousin needed to get rid of it, and Dorian bought it. 

Bobby Worley’s brother Fred was in his early 60 in the early 90s and lived in and was superintendent of an apartment building in Washington Heights. In an interview with New York magazine, he revealed that he and Bobby were from a family of 7 children, and Bobby was the baby of the family. Fred and his wife and child came from the South to NYC in 1956, and Bobby came shortly after. He was released from Sing SIng n August of 1966 and came to live with Fred and his daily un either 67 or 68. By that time, he was calling himself Bobby Wells and had a son. Bobby was also abusing alcohol and drinking a bottle of vodka a day.

After about three months of living with Fred and his family, Bobby vanished. Fred said he had begun an affair with the woman who lived next door to them and ended up beating up one of her children, a 7-year-old. Yuck. The woman threatened to call the cops…THREATENED…and Bobby took off, and it was the last Frederick saw of him.

And then 25 years later, Fred was told his brother had been murdered. They let the cops bury him in a potter’s field on Hart Island. It’s where NYC buries the unclaimed people, so I'm imagining a really sad lace. 

But the big news? Bobby dated transvestites and transwomen. Fred felt that Bobby and Dorian HAD been a couple. One drunken night, Bobby was out and called what he thought was a love interest, but in fact, he was too drunk to realize he had called Fred’s house. He began going on about the relationship he was in; Fred claimed Bobby’s partner’s name was Dorian. Bobby was drunkenly trying to make up with Dorian after a fight they apparently had. This seems too neat for me but im shrugging.

When asked if Bobby could have gotten abusive with his alleged love interest, Dorian, his brother said he had no firsthand knowledge, but he could definitely see it. After all, this is a man who beat up a 7-year-old. Fred imagined that Bobby might have gone too far with Dorian with the violence, and he found out Dorian wasn’t the one, welcome to her garment bag. 

So the magazine spoke with Pepper LaBejia, who, besides having the name, was a prominent figure in Paris is Buring as well. She’s the one with the hat who tells the story about her mom burning her girl clothes. Lebegia said she lived in a basement apartment with Dorian in the 70s and never smelt a body. As Jennie Livingston said, Dorian had TWO apartments at that time. Pepper tried to put the blame for the body on Lois, the woman who found the body. She thought maybe Dorian was hiding the body for Lois. Lois must have stolen Pepper’s favorite makeup palette or something because that’s really cold of her.

Lois was contacted again. Dorian was a mother figure to her and she stuck by her when she got sick and was dying. When she asked Dorian if she should contact her family, Dorian said hell no. Lois found some letters from Dorian’s mother when they were still corresponding when Dorian came to New York. Her mom knew she was transitioning but never told the rest of Dorian’s family. Lois found a phone number and ended up reaching Dorian’s sister, who said that her family had been looking for Dorian for 30 years. Isn't that sad that Dorian, whatever the circumstances were, didn't think her fault should be in contact with her? Unless they were unaccepting and evil, then who could blame her? 

Lois denied knowing Bobby but said Dorian could have had a lover. But she thought Bobby was too ugly for Dorian. And she denied that there had been a letter about a robbery. What she did mentin was the story she found in Dorian’;s aoartmtne.t On the old yellow paper. It is an unfinished story about a drag queen whose boyfriend is trying to force her to fully transition gender, and she doesn't want to. And the words murder and revenge were prominent. That was Lois’ theory. Maybe she had been with Bobby and bobby wanted her to have surgery, Dorian didnt want to and a fight broken out and Bobbt was either jukked i self dense, by accident or full out udered.

As Lois noted, only Dorian and Bobby knew what had happened, and it would take a seance to find the real answer. 

Dorian’s story has now become infamous gay lore. And it’s been retold in functional form. You know that show Pose, about queer and trans chosen families forming houses and competing in balls. It’s one of Ryan Murphy’s better ones, and it ended when it should have. It's an interesting look at the life and times of these people against the backdrop of homophobia and the AIDS crisis and Madnna ripping them off for a hit song. Highly recommended. Anyway, one of the main characters is a 9 ft tall, I'm exaggerating, but honestly, she looks it, a black transwoman called Electra. She’s basically the Alexis Carrington of Pose, the glamorous bitch with the best of the evil one-liners. Anyway, before she hits it big in the show, she works as a dominatrix. 

In the third episode of season 2, called Butterfly-Cocoon, one of Electra’s clients dies mid-bondage session. Now, as is explained in detail, a black transwoman reporting a white man’s death in her home or place of business isn’t going to inspire much confidence in the cops. The police were enemies of the community at that time. One of the trans ladies in the episode tells a horribly truthful-sounding story about tricking a white guy and him beating the shut out of her and the cops arresting and charging HER. Because she’s a transwoman of color hooking and he's the white straight quotes guy, Electra, and her friends end up hiding the guy’s body in a trunk in her closet. She knows she’s screed if the cops din doubt out. And she escapes legal action. Paris as Burning served as some of the primary source material for Pose, and the story was clearly based on Dorian’s. 

So we’ll never know what happened, but we do know that Dorian was a force of nature and vastly entertaining. Not that that gives murder a pass. Oh, and go watch Paris is Burning and Pose. Both highly recommended

Thank you for listening to this evening. Check out Wicked Gay’s Patreon for Bonny episodes and content. Wicked Gay’s theme song is by Gino and the Goons. The cover art is by Paul Chapman, and the audio engineering is by the other Mr. Harvey. Please be kind to yourself even if you think you don’t deserve it. And god, I hope Michelle Obama runs for president. Nite.