Flawless Sabrina and the Queer Art of the Jewish Drag Mother

• In Event: Reading Jews in Drag: (Re)Interpreting Modern and Contemporary Performances of Jewish Gender-Bending

Abstract

Performing as Flawless Sabrina, a self-styled “Bar Mitzvah mother” emcee, the late Philadelphia-born artist Jack Doroshow is credited with pioneering America’s drag pageant system in the 1950s-60s, hosting a culturally revered avant-garde salon in their Manhattan apartment populated by the likes of Andy Warhol and Truman Capote, and working with Hillary Clinton on legal reforms for transgender rights. Doroshow committed their life and career to modeling a nearly boundless form of self-expression that transcended gender norms, as well as to supporting socially ostracized young people who sought to more fully inhabit themselves and to own their creative power. Channeling the stereotypical American Jewish mother and the caring open-mindedness of Doroshow’s own relatives, Flawless offered their many devotees unconditional, self-sacrificing love laced with razor-sharp wit, grit, and mindful intentionality. Additionally, their practice of drag drew on their studies in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, cultivating special interest in drag’s liberatory effect on the spectator. Synthesizing interview research and close readings of Flawless Sabrina’s media representations, such as her starring role in Frank Simon’s documentary film THE QUEEN (1968), this paper considers Doroshow’s connection to and performance of Jewish sensibilities. Drawing on the existing literature about the fraught cultural resonance of the Jewish mother stereotype in twentieth- and twenty-first-century American culture, it argues that Doroshow reimagined and diffused the stereotype in their own life and work, performing Jewish motherhood as charismatic generosity, mentorship, and nurture offered to a broad community of queer and trans youth.

Author

• Golan Y. Moskowitz, Tulane University