Outrageous Misfits and a gay icon
30 Dec 2020.

I consider myself fortunate because I got to see Craig Russell perform just before his untimely death. It was at Oz (later Bar 1 Isabella) on a weeknight around 7pm. I attended expecting a train wreck, but five minutes into the show, the entire audience was floored. Russell breezed through drop-dead accurate impersonations of Ella Fitzgerald, Bette Davis, Mae West, Peggy Lee, Barbra Streisand and many others in just 40 minutes.

Craig Russell was super-talented, and a huge fuck-up, a bridge-burner who alienated most of the people in his life. He was spontaneous and reckless and full of grande dame self-pity, but the world has truly never seen a more talented female impersonator. Gay as a goose, he had the audacity to marry a woman, Lori Jenkins, in 1982, their wedding designed to be a media circus. Now, someone has finally written the very first Craig Russell biography, called Outrageous Misfits.

That someone is Toronto author Brian Bradley, who began working on the book in 2008, thinking maybe it might make a good magazine article. The first person he tracked down was Russell’s childhood friend Shirley Flavell. “She suggested others I could interview. There were some who were still so traumatized by Craig that they wouldn’t talk, and others who said too much. I would ask, ‘Are you sure you want me to print that?’ And with both families, they were turning to me to learn things. Lori’s brother, for instance, assumed she was borderline homeless, as he had no idea she was making a great life.” Eventually, the family handed over diaries and scrapbooks and other deeply personal items. They trusted Bradley to tell the truth.

The unvarnished truth. My jaw dropped at how many times Craig Russell committed career suicide. He is responsible for not one but three legendary fiasco shows, in Vancouver, Amsterdam, and at Carnegie Hall. This alone is an impressive achievement. It all began rather humbly in 1971. After working as Mae West’s assistant in Los Angeles as a teenager, he started doing drag in Toronto gay bars. Russell’s rise was meteoric and in 1977, he was asked to star in a movie called Outrageous. The impact of that film put Russell on the world stage, where he fucked up totally. He spent the rest of his career floundering, doing drugs and working a has-been vibe. Then, Russell died abruptly at age 42, of AIDS, on Oct. 30, 1990.

Bradley’s approach is unique. In the course of researching Russell’s life, he learned so much about his wife Lori that he decided to make the book a twin biography. True, Lori wasn’t famous, but all of Craig Russell’s significant relationships were with women - Mae West, Margaret Gibson (who wrote the short story on which Outrageous was based), and Lori, among others. Russell kept the men in his life hidden. Most of them were trade, and Bradley had no luck tracking down any of them, not even Russell’s final boyfriend, a guy named Robert. 

Bradley was eight years old when Russell died, so he never had the luxury of meeting him or seeing him on stage. But Bradley is a man fascinated with our gay history. I could not wrap my head around the fact that no one had ever published a biography of Craig Russell before. In the '90s Canadian broadcaster Allan Spraggett tried, but it never got published. Luckily, Bradley found so many primary sources he was able to reconstruct this short but vibrant life and the research led him to want to know more about Lori and her lifelong dedication to Russell. “Craig and Lori both had a lot of trauma that shaped their adult lives, they were ying and yang. People like Craig get books written about them, but I started to see Lori as equally important to this story.”

As for Craig Russell, he casts a long shadow over Canadian show business. “Craig disappeared inside his characters. He’d say things like ‘Judy really went on last night, didn’t she?’ It's like he had no control over how they took over him, but he knew what they had done to seduce their audiences and he could tap into that same kind of energy. We don’t have impressionists like Rich Little anymore,” says Bradley, and it’s true. When was the last time you saw someone doing impressions in a comedy club or on a talk show? But Craig Russell was more than just an impressionist, or a drag queen. He was an actual artist. “Craig Russell was one of the very greatest,” says Bradley. “I believe he truly deserves his star on the Walk of Fame.”