Pope of filth — the making of Divine, who turned disgust into an aesthetic weapon

Somewhere between Baltimore’s row houses and the stratosphere of cult stardom, Harris Glenn Milstead created Divine: not a drag queen, but a character, a monster, a force of nature in a size-52 dress. He demanded “he”, never “she”, even in full Divine regalia – this was performance art, not drag. 

On Sunday, 19 October 2025, he would have turned 80. Instead, he died at the age of 42 in a Los Angeles hotel room in 1988, discovered by his manager, Bernard Jay, on the morning he was supposed to tape a guest spot on Married... with Children, his long-awaited crossover into mainstream television.

The spoiled brat from Lutherville

In the beginning: let there be light! Harris Glenn Milstead was born on 19 October 1945 in Baltimore, the only child of affluent, socially conservative Baptists who had clawed their way up from working-class roots. “I was probably your typical precocious American spoilt brat,” Divine once said.

His parents gave him everything. By age 12 Glenn had already become large, a condition that would both define and confine him. At high school, bullies tormented him mercilessly. Too fat. Too effeminate. Too interested in flowers and painting.

He tried to conform, attended a beauty school, learnt hairdressing, even dieted down to 140 pounds (63.5kg) with a 28-inch waist and an Ivy League look. But conformity never quite stuck. Instead, young Glenn threw lavish parties where he dressed up as Elizabeth Taylor. His parents paid the bills. They always did.

Enter Waters, Enter Divine

Everything changed when Glenn Milstead met John Waters in the mid-1960s. Waters was a wayward aspiring filmmaker obsessed with making “the trashiest motion pictures in cinema history”.

He had gathered a coterie of friends, outsiders, beatniks, hippies, queers, who hung out at Martick’s, a downtown Baltimore bar where they smoked marijuana and plotted their assault on conventional American taste.

Waters gave his friends new names. Harris Glenn Milstead became Divine, borrowed from a character in Jean Genet’s novel, Our Lady of the Flowers, about des hommes gays and banditti living it up in the demimonde of Parisian society. Waters also gave him a tagline: “The most beautiful woman in the world, almost.”

Divine joined Waters’s acting troupe, the Dreamlanders, keeping his film work secret from his conservative parents, who’d bought him his own beauty salon in Towson.

By 1970, Divine had abandoned hairdressing and opened a vintage clothing shop in Provincetown, Massachusetts, called Divine Trash. When the venture failed, he sold off his landlady’s furniture to raise cash and fled to San Francisco to escape the warrant authorities had issued for his arrest.

But Waters kept calling him back to Baltimore.

The John Waters films

Divine’s collaboration with Waters produced some of the most transgressive films in cinema history. Multiple Maniacs (1970) featured the infamous “Rosary Job” scene: a blasphemous sexual act performed in a church using rosary beads. It was deliciously shocking and sacrilegious, designed to provoke and transgress against Catholic imagery and conventional morality. It ended with Divine being attacked by a giant lobster named Lobstora.

Then came Pink Flamingos (1972), an “exercise in poor taste” about Babs Johnson, who claims to be “the filthiest person alive”. The final scene became cinematic legend. Babs eats fresh dog faeces. 

“I followed that dog around for three hours just zooming in on its arsehole,” Divine told reporters. He only did it once. But for the rest of his life, people couldn’t stop talking about it. Pink Flamingos became a midnight movie sensation and Divine became the pope of filth, turning disgust into an aesthetic weapon.

In 1972, his parents discovered his film career and cut him off financially after he once again begged for money to keep his extravagant lifestyle afloat. He reacted by taking his two pet dogs and vanishing. For the next nine years he sent them more than 50 postcards from around the world, always merry, forever without a return address.

Female Trouble (1974) saw Divine playing both Dawn Davenport, a rebellious teenage girl who descends into crime and obsession with stardom, and Earl Peterson, the boyfriend who impregnates her. The performance remains one of his most versatile.

Polyester (1981) marked a shift towards mainstream accessibility. Divine played Francine Fishpaw, a victimised housewife, opposite former Hollywood heartthrob Tab Hunter. This was Divine’s first truly sympathetic role, showing his range beyond burlesque camp.

The man who made Divine a star

Jay first saw Divine perform in Women Behind Bars in 1976 at the Truck and Warehouse Theatre in New York. “I must admit, when I went backstage, I really thought I was going to speak to a woman. But when I walked into his dressing room, there was this man sitting on the floor. I helped him up.”

Divine proved tenacious. He wanted Jay as his manager, and eventually Jay agreed to take Tom Eyen’s new play, The Neon Woman, to San Francisco, featuring Divine as a female strip club owner. Eartha Kitt, Elton John and Liza Minnelli attended.

Jay saw commercial potential. Divine had been performing a combative nightclub act, shouting profanities at audiences. Jay suggested adding disco songs. It was 1979, and disco remained the soundtrack of liberation in gay clubs.

Venues would drop Divine from the ceiling in a cage, wearing shiny outfits. He would insult the revellers, and they loved it. Dresses clung and flared, eyebrows arched like questions that could never be answered. His voice was a rasping, jubilant roar, part diva, part mischief, part comic horror. He was vaudeville, burlesque, pantomime, cabaret.

Divine started hanging out at Studio 54 with Bianca Jagger, Minnelli, Debbie Harry, Andy Warhol, Grace Jones, and the rest of New York’s crème de la crème of decadent glitterati. Jay, his manager, would also be there, but it was strictly business. He was there with his own friends. Never the twain shall meet. 

Speaking from his home in Johannesburg, where he for years served as CEO of the successful Joburg Theatre, Jay offers brutally honest recollections. “Although I liked Divine, we had nothing in common. Divine smoked a lot of pot. He hung out with pot heads. But he was extremely professional. If he had to perform at 2am, he would pitch up. He also hardly drank alcohol. 

“He had no clue how to work with money. When he had it, he would spend it. He grew overweight because he had become addicted to Italian food, sometimes eating it by the handful,” Jay says. “Also, we never travelled together. He was a snorer. I could not sit next to him on a plane.”

Despite their differences, Jay understood the contradiction at Divine’s core: “He never called his act drag. People calling Divine a drag queen upset him. He framed it as theatre. Divine was a character. A man wearing a woman’s dress. His big desire was to be taken seriously as an actor in male roles. And he was good. A top act.”

Born to be cheap

With composer Bobby Orlando, Divine launched his music career with Hi-NRG singles including Native Love (Step By Step) and Shoot Your Shot, successful on the international disco circuit.

In 1984, Divine signed with InTune Music and began working with the then-unknown production team of Stock Aitken Waterman. The result was You Think You’re a Man, a Hi-NRG stomper that became a UK Top 20 hit.

When Divine performed it on Top of the Pops, it sparked the most public outrage since the Sex Pistols. Thousands of viewers complained to the BBC about this “fat drag queen in a skintight dress” appearing on their family television.

The body politic

Divine’s work offered liberation through laughter. Before body positivity had a name, he wore size, excess and attitude as armour. He was one of the first performers to make plumpness a badge of honour. It could be monstrous, political, free.

Hairspray and the mainstream

In 1981, Divine finally contacted his estranged parents. His mother had learnt about his career from a Life magazine article. The family reunited.

Then came Hairspray (1988), Divine’s final collaboration with Waters and his masterpiece. Set in 1960s Baltimore, the film told the story of Tracy Turnblad, a “pleasantly plump” teenager who rallies against racial segregation while pursuing stardom on a local dance show.

Divine played two roles: Tracy’s loving mother Edna Turnblad and the racist television station owner Arvin Hodgepile. As Edna, Divine made himself deliberately unglamorous, with varicose veins an artist drew on his shaved legs, wearing flip-flops and a hideous house dress.

His performance was tender and hilarious. Critics adored him. Divine had finally arrived. Producers had cast him as Uncle Otto in Married... with Children, a guest appearance that could become recurring. At 42, Divine stood on the verge of the mainstream career he’d always wanted. It could have happened. 

The morning after

On 7 March 1988, three weeks after studios released Hairspray nationwide, Divine was staying at the Regency Plaza Suites Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard. He’d spent all day at Sunset Gower Studios rehearsing for his appearance on Married... with Children, scheduled to tape the following day.

That evening, he dined with friends at the hotel restaurant. Jay later said that Divine was buzzing with excitement, talking about how this was the start of a new life. He even spoke about losing weight and wanting to play “character roles”, such as sheriffs, lorry drivers, real men.

Jay said goodnight to him outside the hotel room door. Divine said: “See you bright and early, Bernard, tomorrow’s the big day.” At about 3am, he died in his sleep of a heart attack. 

“I was waiting at 7.30am, and he was always on time,” Jay recalls. “Later I asked the hotel manager for the room’s key. I opened the door and walked to his room. He sat in bed, purple, dead. In his pyjamas, upright. I could do nothing. It is sad that on the day he was going to get a break to portray a male character other than Divine, he died.”

In his memoir Not Simply Divine, Jay wrote that it was “the cruellest twist of fate”. Jay sat with the body for a few hours, alongside some of Divine’s other friends. 

Divine was buried in Prospect Hill Cemetery in Maryland. Waters gave a speech and served as a pallbearer. Whoopi Goldberg sent a wreath: “See what happens when you get good reviews.”

In the ensuing weeks, the Internal Revenue Service confiscated many of Divine’s possessions and auctioned them off for unpaid taxes.

The legacy

Divine changed counterculture, breaking the rules of polished, high-femme performance with his aggressive, trashy aesthetic. Disney’s Ursula the Sea Witch in The Little Mermaid (1989) directly drew inspiration from Divine’s look and larger-than-life personality. Later musical adaptations of Hairspray have cast male actors as Edna Turnblad in homage to Divine’s performance. Harvey Fierstein won a Tony for the role in 2003.

In 2024, Chappell Roan, one of the year’s biggest new pop stars, posted photos of her Divine-inspired look. Rihanna has referenced Divine’s signature make-up.

“His ‘drag’ was inherently political,” says Jake Hall, author of Shoulder to Shoulder: A Queer History of Solidarity, Coalition and Chaos. Divine showed that theatre could be a weapon against repression, blurring every boundary, masculine and feminine, beautiful and grotesque, saint and sinner, until only performance remained.

The Divine paradox

In 1992, Jay published Not Simply Divine!, a memoir of his years managing the star. Divine’s mother, Frances Milstead, criticised it and accused Jay of writing a “mean-spirited” work. It wasn’t, since Jay was simply writing the facts and loved working with him. Divine wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. She published her own book, My Son Divine, in 2001.

The truth lies somewhere between hagiography and exposé. Divine was difficult, demanding, moody. He was also kind, generous, professional. He was a soft-spoken man named Glenn who created a chimera named Divine.

Divine embodied the Jungian Shadow made flesh: the rejected, the repressed, the monstrous aspects of the psyche that polite society tries to bury. He lived as an archetype, a Trickster who held up a mirror to the collective unconscious and forced audiences to confront their own hypocrisies about beauty, gender and desire. 

He completed the hero’s journey into the Shadow and returned with treasure: the knowledge that what society rejects can also liberate, that ugliness can be art, that beauty standards are arbitrary constructs meant to control us.

In a beige world, rage can be radiant. Divine proved that sometimes the most beautiful woman in the world, almost, is a man who decided to be unforgettable. And he remains, 37 years after his death, utterly unmatched.

Filth is my politics. Filth is my life. DM

Herman Lategan is a journalist and writer based in Cape Town.