In 1963, when Brandy Lee was asked to organize a “female impersonation” show in Honolulu’s Red Light District, māhū like her were treated as “the lowest of the low,” she says. Which is exactly why she agreed. “I felt so squashed down in every part of my life at that time that I felt, well, the only way you can go is up,” says the now 82-year-old singer and entertainer. “And the only way to go up is to use entertainment as a venue to change people's way of looking at us.”
Her creation, the “Boys Will Be Girls Revue,” was an immediate hit, and ran at the Glade nightclub until 1980. For 17 years, six nights a week, it attracted a rollicking mix of military personnel, celebrities, locals of every persuasion, and tourists who would flock to the Red Light District on tour buses to witness the glamorous, high femme variety show. “People came to see something glamorous and out of the ordinary. To get out of their humdrum life,” says Lee. “We were women personified.”
Over time, the Glade became a refuge for Hawai’i’s māhū community, the once-revered gender fluid healers, cultural practitioners, and teachers of Native Hawaiian culture. But the nightclub also existed amidst persecution and violence in an increasingly homophobic Hawai’i. In 1963, in the aftermath of McCarthyism, the state passed an “intent to deceive” law that criminalized cross dressing. To avoid arrest, performers — many of whom identified as either māhū or transgender women — were made to wear a large pink pin that read “I AM A BOY.”
In recent years, to Lee’s shock, the Glade’s history has received renewed attention from institutions like Honolulu’s acclaimed Bishop Museum, which featured ephemera from the “Boys Will Be Girls Revue” in a 2022 exhibition exploring the history of māhū in Hawai’i, a partial collaboration with the The Lei Pua ʻAla Queer Histories of Hawaiʻi project. In June, Lei Pua ‘Ala also unveiled an official plaque bearing the seal of the City and County of Honolulu at the former site of the nightclub, now Chinatown’s Maunakea Marketplace, detailing the Glade’s history as a queer landmark.
On a recent afternoon, I met Lee, Lei Pua ‘Ala cofounders Dean Hamer and Joe Wilson, as well as two other performers from the Glade — Sheri Shane, 74, and Jerrine Jeffries, 71 — at the marketplace, steps from where the Glade once stood. Demolished for redevelopment in 1983, the current setting couldn’t be more different — a humble, fluorescent-lit food hall-cum-market — but that doesn’t stop the trio from reminiscing about that era as if it were yesterday. They are sitting at a table poring over Shane’s scrapbook when I arrive. Photos of the performers on stage, their updos buoyant, their smiles wide, are lovingly cut with decorative edges and attached to backdrops of colorful paper. The group oohs and awws as Shane flips through his book, peeling with laughter at an inside joke, a stray memory revived. One page features photos of Shane’s boyfriend at the time, with the heading “Now I Know What Love Is” and a quote from Ingrid Bergman: “A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.” Another features the pink “I AM A BOY” Glade pin, which doubled as a marketing tool for the nightclub.
Lee says she modeled the “Boys Will Be Girls Revue” after shows in New York and San Francisco, which she observed in a magazine about so-called female mimics. “They didn't have lip syncing,” Lee says. “It was all live.” A typical show at the Glade incorporated elements of comedy, singing, stripping, burlesque, and group hula numbers or chorus lines, which all unfolded on the Glade’s multi-tiered stage. But everyone agrees that the highlight of each show was Prince Hanalei, who was billed as Hawai’i’s first male exotic dancer, and often wore nothing besides a G-string and a full face of makeup. “He was so flexible he could stand on his head and twirl things like flames [attached to tassels] on his ass,” Lee says. “He was the star. No one else could do it. He tried to teach me but I was too bottom-heavy.”
Hamer and Wilson highlight the national forces that led to the passing of the “intent to deceive” law, which coincided with the opening of the Glade in 1963. It was only four years into Hawai’i’s statehood, and the influence of the church, police department, and military felt particularly powerful at the time, especially amidst the Vietnam War. A prominent local newspaper reporter from Florida named Bob Jones contributed to the panic, penning articles like “The Deviate: A Growing Community Problem,” which painted homosexuality as a public sickness.
These forces were enough for the mayor’s office to establish a Subcommittee On Sex Deviates, whose leaders introduced the “intent to deceive” law to the state legislature. (It wasn’t repealed until 1972). Under the bill, it was deemed disorderly conduct to “wear clothing of the opposite sex in any public place with intent to deceive such opposite sex by failing to identify his or her sex,” a misdemeanor made punishable by up to a year in jail. “There's a whole consortium of people, including all lawmakers at that time, basically saying homosexuality is terrible,” says Hamer. “It’s really the first time in Hawaiian history that there was this concerted [effort], and it was all coming in from the mainland.”
“It was the influence of outsiders,” Lee echoes, noting how integrated māhū once were within Native Hawaiian society. “Hawaiians, left alone, would be fine with us.”
Wearing the “I AM A BOY” pins was not only humiliating to the performers — particularly for those like Jeffries and Lee who were trans women, or as Lee puts it, “I was a 24 hour drag queen” — but it also did little to protect them from law enforcement, the performers say. “[The police] would be breaking stuff up and a military man would have a cock in his mouth saying, I didn't know it was a boy,” says Lee, laughing. “And they would believe him. We were shit. We had no say. You were just arrested.” It also made them targets for additional harassment on the street. Shane says he had everything from water balloons thrown at him to a cement pot smashed on his face. Jeffries had pool balls and rocks thrown at her. But they often fought back.
“The best one was a bunch of military men in a convertible,” says Shane. “They kept teasing, and when they came around, one of the girls grabbed a rubbish can from the noodle factory — get all the sour noodles in there — and just threw it in the convertible.”
Despite the daily viciousness they faced, “that was probably the best part of our lives, I would say for me,” says Shane. “That drag life, it was the best part. We were somebody for one thing, right Brandy? People knew you. People admired you.”
“We had our group, our own family, and we took care of each other,” says Lee. She highlights the various “houses” that formed at the time, reminiscent of ballroom culture, composed of young kids disowned by their birth families: Kapiolani girls, Olu Street girls, Waikiki girls, Pensacola girls. “If something happened to us, we had nobody to go to, nobody to run to. We had only each other.”
When I ask how she became such a pioneer, blazing new trails for māhū people in Hawai’i, Lee responds in her typical sideways fashion: “You go out and you buy a covered wagon. Get couple horses.” Everyone at the table laughs.
But a few minutes later, she marvels at the opportunities available to trans women today, things like going to school and getting a proper job, which didn’t feel available to her when she was growing up.
“That's the reason I did [the show]. It gave us some kind of respect, some dignity,” she says. “Just by changing people's minds, that was what I called the Hawaiian māhū revolution.”
Now, the Glade is memorialized as part of the official history of Honolulu. The plaque unveiling ceremony was a joyous reunion for performers and patrons of the nightclub, which included mayor Rick Blangiardi, who told Lee he was a fan of her show back in its day. “This plaque stands as a testament to the immense resilience and bravery of those who faced discrimination simply for being true to themselves,” Mayor Blangiardi told the crowd. “It serves not only as a marker of historical importance, but also as an educational tool for current and future generations, highlighting the struggles and triumphs of our LGBTQ+ community.”
For Wilson and Hamer, the goal was also to inspire feelings of comfort and belonging among Hawai’i’s LGBTQ+ youth. “I'm thinking about the ten-year old kid whoʻs queer,” Hamer says. “I want them to be able to say, Oh, we have our own heroes. I'm not completely alone.”
