Interesting post about turn-of-the-last-century vaudeville drag from I’ll Keep You Posted: “Long before Rupaul’s Drag Race, there was Bonnie and Semoura Clark’s Vaudeville Show! Long before refined Ballroom ‘realness’ categories, Bonnie Clark worked the minstrel stage with a slightly less alluring kind of charm that catered to the rough amusements of African American vaudeville audiences nearly 100 years ago. But exactly who were Bonnie and Semoura Clark?
“So far, I’ve been able to gather that they were early African American vaudevillians, active anywhere from the turn of the 20th century, up till about 1920. Semoura Clark may have been an attractive brown-skinned female entertainer also known as Semoura McClain. Bonnie Clark was most certainly a man with a high-yellow complexion known to impersonate females in heavy chalk makeup. Maybe they were married or otherwise related or maybe not. It’s even possible that the name Semoura may have also been used by at least one other person working in the company. Regardless, at the height of the vaudeville and minstrel show era, they all worked the segregated stage-show circuits of the South and Midwest.
“The Bonnie and Semoura Clark Black Vaudeville Photographs and Ephemera Collection is now a part of the James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, at Yale University. It consists of studio portraits, publicity stills, handbills, and images of shows depicting the work of female impersonators including Bonnie Clark, Sammie Lewis, Gus Stevens and Phil Black. The collection was originally started by Carl Van Vechten in 1941 in honor of his friend, the late African American scholar, James Weldon Johnson, who died in a tragic car crash in 1938. Johnson’s wife, Grace Nail Johnson, later donated many of his personal papers to the collection, and over the years, so did many other well-known personalities.”
