Gay miss

Still, Jones returned to Hot Springs, where he began his drag career in Performing under the name Norma Kristie, Jones participated in the first-ever Miss Gay America intaking home first prize. The club was paying for that.

We had one here and one in Hot Springs, and you would be jeered at, people would get out of their cars and throw stuff at you. Just to measure it. And then, maybe, he will haunt the place, restored — if the universe is kind — to the fresh-faced drag queen beauty who won the first Miss Gay America crown back in He speaks as wistfully as Norman Jones gets of wishing he could clone 25 copies of himself, so he could do everything without having to rely on others who might not do it his way.

So yeah, Jones has some haters. Norma Kristie) became the first-ever titleholder. Picked on in school as a boy for his flamboyant mannerisms, Jones said he eventually gained some measure of relief from taunting when he became the manager for the football and basketball teams at Lakeside High School.

No, when he goes, it will likely be at Disco. Founded by Jerry Peak, the pageant aimed to celebrate the art of female illusion. When Jones was in the third grade, the family moved to Hot Springs. Raised in Malvern and Hot Springs, gay miss he graduated from high school inJones eventually ended up in the U.

While stationed near Washington, D. You could be stopped on the street, especially if you were going into the bars. After winning the title, Norman Jones purchased the pageant indedicating 30 years to growing it into the most prestigious and respected.

Miss Gay America is a national pageant for female impersonators. During his senior year in high school, Jones said, he started frequenting a local pool, where he soon found he was obsessed with staring at a handsome male lifeguard. Your subscription goes a long way, and by making an additional donation you'll deliver necessary resources to ensure independent journalism thrives in Arkansas.

Not install a window, mind you. Arkansas native Norman Jones, a towering drag performer who won the first-ever Miss Gay America pageant and the driving force behind some of the state’s most beloved gay clubs, died Monday at.

Norman Jones first Miss :

Still without a concept of what it meant to be gay after growing up in a religious family where even mentioning sex was taboo, Jones said the feelings troubled and confused him. A native of the tiny town of Sparkman, Jones was born in a plank shack with no indoor plumbing in Junethe son of a sawmill worker.

Miss Gay America began in at The Watch Your Hat and Coat Saloon in Nashville, TN, where Norman Jones (a.k.a. It made my high school life much easier. If home is the place where you feel most in control of your own time and destiny, Discovery surely is his home.

Established inthe pageant is based on the Miss America contest and follows a similar format. Inside those walls, Norman Jones sees even the sparrow fall. But any cross or catty word ever said about him must be balanced with the good: He is a man who fought prejudice in heels and a pageant gown decades before it was OK to be gay in America; who attended the first national gay pride march in Washington, D.

These clubs continue to work as a crucial melting pot of gay and straight, now that attitudes have changed.

He is survived by his husband, Mark Bostian, who he married in after decades of partnership. In the middle of our interview, for instance, on an afternoon when Discovery was a hive of activity as his most trusted employees prepared for another summer weekend, Jones excused himself after being told workmen were there to measure a window.

Inhe gained an ownership stake of the drag pageant, which he ran until and continued to be involved with until The night club relocated to Riverdale inwhere it still thrives today next to Triniti, another club that was founded, owned and operated by Jones.