Remembering Atlanta drag legend Charlie Brown

Mr. Charlie Brown, the reigning queen of Atlanta drag queens, has taken her final bow. The performer died Thursday night at Piedmont Hospital from complications following heart valve replacement surgery. He was 74. For 50 years, the self-proclaimed “Bitch of the South” entertained Atlantans with his bawdy brand of comedy, withering audience monologues, and risqué musical numbers on stage at Lips Atlanta, the Atlanta Eagle, Underground Atlanta, Illusions, and dozens of other nightlight spots. But Brown is perhaps best known as the namesake emcee and female impersonator at Charlie Brown’s Cabaret, the rooftop drag stage he oversaw from 1990 to 2004 high atop Backstreet Atlanta, the city’s massive 24-hour gay disco.

As news spread Thursday of his worsening condition, his 6th floor room at Piedmont’s ICU unit became a who’s who of Atlanta drag royalty as Shawnna Brooks, Nicole Paige Brooks, Mona Lott, Heather Daniels, and others arrived to say goodbye. Fittingly, the performer’s chosen family tearfully exchanged hugs in a sun dappled sixth floor waiting area underwritten by Dr. and Mrs. Charles L. Brown, III. (No relation to the performer.)

“Today the words ‘legendary’ and ‘icon’ are thrown around with no weight attached but when I think of those words, Charlie Brown fills my mind and heart,” says Atlanta drag performer Phoenix, who shot to international fame after appearing on RuPaul’s Drag Race in 2011 (As Brian Trapp, a closeted teenager in Forsyth County, the future drag star first saw Brown perform in 1999 at Atlanta Pride in Piedmont Park). “Charlie was a queen ahead of her time. Drag may be mainstream now, but it wasn’t always this way. Throughout so much of her career, being gay was looked down on, imagine what people thought of drag . . . but I can hear Charlie now [saying] ‘f*** ‘em!’ Charlie was truly something special, and to watch her at work was magic.”

Photograph courtesy of Charlie Brown/Fred Wise

His cabaret at Backstreet from 1990 to 2004 helped make the Midtown dance club an international tourist destination. Over the years there, Brown performed for celebrities including Sir Elton John, Janet Jackson, Jermaine Dupri, Sylvester Stallone, Queen Latifah and in 1996, visitors from across the globe in town to attend the Summer Olympics in Atlanta. In 1997, HBO cameras were set up in the club to film Charlie in action for the feature documentary Dragtime. (Brown’s signature empowering LGBTQ+ rights monologue, delivered at the close of each show at Backstreet, is featured in the film’s closing minutes).

Born Charles H. Dillard in tiny Siloam, Tennessee on December 29, 1949, Charlie was raised far from the bright lights of Atlanta’s vibrant nightlife scene. He was the grandson of a Missionary Baptist preacher and a deeply religious mother. Recalled Brown in 2020: “Believe it or not, I did not pop out of my mama wearing a wig, sequins, and three pounds of Max Factor foundation. And believe it or not, the first time I ever stepped on stage, I wasn’t wearing stiletto hooker heels. I was a little boy decked out in his Sunday best, singing in a gospel trio. I learned at an early age, you don’t get to choose your roads in life. God does. And he chose me to be a gay man from a small Southern town whose greatest joy is making people laugh.”

After coming out to his commanding officer at training camp in the United States Air Force at the height of the Vietnam War (of his decision to enlist, Brown recalled, “I figured I’d rather fly over Saigon than march through it.”), Brown was processed out of the USAF “for conduct unbecoming of a soldier.” Taking a front desk job at the Holiday Inn in downtown Nashville, Dillard was christened with his future stage name by a frustrated night auditor. Arriving to find the hotel check-in system in a shambles, the auditor took one look at the mess and yelled, “Goddamn you, Charlie Brown!”

His drag persona was created one night during a “turnabout” show at Nashville’s Watch Your Hat and Coat Saloon, when the bar staff and drag performers swapped places for the evening. Brown later recalled, “When I got in that hair and dress with the make up on and realized I could do comedy? And when I discovered I could make that whole bar laugh? I had found my calling.” The “Mr.” in his stage name was the result of a Nashville city ordinance, a nightclub crackdown passed in the early 1970s requiring female impersonators to inform audiences they were in fact, men in dresses. “We had to enter and leave the club with our drag concealed in a garbage bag,” he wrote in a 2023 editorial for Nashville newspaper the Tennessean after lawmakers there passed a ban on drag performances in public spaces. (The law, which Brown noted in the editorial as being “far more dangerous than anything we ever faced back in the 1970s,” was later overturned by a federal judge.) “We were equally careful to scrub our faces free of make-up before leaving each night. Otherwise, you could encounter a redneck looking for an excuse to beat up a gay man in a dress.”

Photograph courtesy of Charlie Brown/Fred Wise

A weekend visit to Atlanta’s Sweet Gum Head drag club in 1974 resulted in an impromptu performance by Brown, who scaled the circular bar to perform Della Reese’s “You Came a Long Way From St. Louis.” At the end of the number, he was climbing down when Brown noticed club owner Frank Powell charging toward him. “I thought he was going to make me pay for the drinks I had just kicked over,” Brown recalled. “Instead, he offered me a job. As big and as scary as Atlanta was, I immediately felt I belonged here.”

“Charlie’s subversive talent came from years of practice and craft but it also came from an unexpected place—his home,” says Martin Padgett, author of A Night at The Sweet Gum Head. “Charlie had always been inspired by the hilarious women in his family and by the plain words of his father who told him life would go so much easier if he found a way to laugh. He honored that and them, since he first took to the stage more than 50 years ago.”

Photograph courtesy of Charlie Brown/Fred Wise

When the Sweet Gum Head closed in 1981, Brown shifted his focus to AIDS fundraising as friends and fans all over the city suddenly became sick and started dying. In the early days of the epidemic, Brown went bar to bar with a sealed can raising money for Charlie Brown’s Christmas for PWAs (People With AIDS). The fundraisers financed trips for young Atlantans diagnosed with HIV/AIDS so they could spend the holidays with their families in an era when an AIDS diagnosis was a death sentence. Brown would eventually sign on as a headliner at the new high-end Peachtree Street drag showplace Illusions, where a young RuPaul Charles routinely scraped together the $2 cover to catch the “Monday Night Madness” show. Writes RuPaul in his new memoir The House of Hidden Meanings, “I can still remember the names of the girls we’d go to see there . . . The biggest star was Charlie Brown, a white girl who always did Millie Jackson, specifically her version of ‘(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don’t Want to Be Right.’ The live version of the song led to a hilarious spoken-word breakdown, which Charlie had down pat.”

Photograph courtesy of Charlie Brown/Fred Wise

Marc Jones, who worked with Brown as show director and choreographer at the Sweet Gum Head and later at Illusions, reflected Thursday, “I have always been so proud of Charlie for not only his entertainment value to our city but for his immeasurable charity work over the years. Almost every night we were off from our shows, we did AIDS charity work. Charlie worked tirelessly to help others. The city has suffered a great loss.” In 2022, the City of Atlanta and Mayor Andre Dickens honored Brown for his decades of work both on stage and raising money for Atlanta’s AIDS charities by presenting him with the Phoenix Award, the city’s highest civilian honor, during a Pride event held at city hall.

Photograph courtesy of Charlie Brown/Fred Wise

In 1990, Brown began his 14-year reign as the “head bitch” at Charlie Brown’s Cabaret atop Backstreet, which at the time held one of Atlanta’s few 24-hour liquor licenses, which meant the entire city ended up there in the wee hours. Of Backstreet’s legacy, Brown recalled in 2020: “Whether you were gay, straight, bi or trysexual (as in: open to trying anything), you were welcome at Backstreet. The club would get so crowded, we’d start the drag show at 11 p.m. and sometimes, it would run until 7 in the morning when sunlight greeted our last-standing regulars as they stumbled home. Officially, the cabaret had a 200-person occupancy but on some nights, more than twice that many would wedge themselves into the space to see the show.”

After Backstreet shuttered, the performer opened a namesake cabaret at Underground Atlanta. In recent years, health issues frequently sidelined Brown, but he returned to the stage in 2022, performing at Lips Atlanta weekly for Saturday brunch and then headlining his own show, Mr. Charlie Brown’s XXX Rated Cougars, at the Atlanta Eagle on Saturday nights. (The Eagle has announced this Saturday’s upstairs drag cabaret stage will be dark and wreathes will be placed in front of the staircase in Brown’s honor).

Plans for a celebration of life will be announced on Brown’s official Facebook page and on the Atlanta Eagle Facebook page. The performer is survived by Fred Wise, his husband and life partner of 45 years. Brown recently completed work on a memoir, Bitch of the South: How I Survived Vietnam, the AIDS Crisis and MAGA Drag Bans, which will be released later this year to commemorate Brown’s 75th birthday.

Photograph courtesy of Charlie Brown/Fred Wise

In the closing pages of Bitch of the South, Brown summed up what he hoped his legacy would be, writing, “Ultimately, I want to be remembered for entertaining people, for making them laugh. Whether it was the Watch Your Hat and Coat, the Sweet Gum Head, or Backstreet, I’d walk in the club on many nights and see someone sitting alone, staring into their drink, blue as hell. I’d sit down with them and ask, ‘What’s the matter?’ And before I got up, I’d tell them, ‘You’ve got a friend here now.’ And those people would come back week after week and we’d become friends. Hell, we became family. I always wanted to have an open door to help others. Our show at Backstreet became a mecca for queer kids from small towns who couldn’t be free to be themselves. I knew what that felt like. I was one of those kids from a tiny Southern town. I knew first-hand how it felt to get the hell out of there and find a place where there were other people like you. Where you had a community. Where you were powerful in numbers. That’s why I always did that monologue at the end of every show at Backstreet. We were all fighting for the right to exist back then, in the middle of an epidemic that was killing our friends every day, every week. Years later, those kids would come back and tell me how I had inspired them to stand up for themselves and not be bullied and run over. They said they learned to be proud of who they are. If Charlie Brown accomplished just that—being that bold brassy bitch onstage who inspired others to be themselves and to be proud of their LGBTQ+ identities, that’s everything to me.”

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