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“There are no good girls gone wrong - just bad girls found out.”

— Mae West

"Mae West and her troupe of musclemen" - Mae West was born 1893 and died 1980. In her last movie "Sextet" from 1977 she played a 28 years old woman.

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Few American writers and entertainers have managed to have careers as wild and scandalous as that of Mae West.

A vaudeville performer since childhood, she developed a distinctive sexy stage persona and signature sauntering walk that was inspired by the likes of Julian Eltinge and Bert Savoy.

In 1927, she opened her first play, Sex, which she both wrote and starred in. It centered around Margy, a high-end sex worker, and Clara, the stuck up society lady who was the mother of the man Margie falls in love with. Ticket sales were strong, but city officials were upset about the play's risqué content. West was eventually arrested, tried, and sentenced to ten days in jail for obscenity.

While incarcerated, she told reporters that she'd worn her silk panties in jail, instead of the "burlap" that was usually given to prisoners. The scandal of it all sent ticket sales through the roof.

Her next play was set to be even more controversial: it was called The Drag, and it had an entire cast of homosexuals. The end scene was a massive and spectacular drag ball. The show went for ten performances before it was shut down by police.

Police threatened to shut down all of Broadway if The Drag continued to be performed, so it was cancelled. However, a censored version with a now heterosexual protagonist called The Pleasure Man was allowed to perform a year later.

Eventually, West would make her way to Hollywood and become one of the most iconic stars of the 1930s.

In 2019, The Drag was performed for the first time in many decades at Gay City in Seattle, and has since then been performed several times across the U.S.