After the fair closed, the only things to stay were the Space Needle and the Monorail. Harvey Dick, who was renovating Portland's old Hoyt Hotel, recruited Hansen to come south and put on her burlesque show in his new showroom. His bar, the Barbary Coast, had no electricity, only gaslight, and it was famous for the urinals in the men's room: a sculpted, landscaped waterfall you peed into. Says Roxy, "They took a huge dirty old garage and when they were done, you'd swear that whole room had come around the Horn in the last century."

It was at the Hoyt Hotel that local actor Walter Cole first put on a dress. As a lark. It was a gown that Roxy had "borrowed" from Hansen's wardrobe.

"Gracie saw it and she was very angry," Walter says. "But she didn't say a word because she didn't know me."

About drag queens, Walter and Roxy say they're nothing new in Portland. Every burlesque and vaudeville program had a female impersonator, usually the master of ceremonies. The famed impersonator Julian Eltinge was a Portland favorite when he toured from New York, and a dozen pictures of him dressed as a woman still hung in Portlands Heilig Theater when it was torn down. Since the early 1900s, the Harbor Club at SW First Avenue and Yamhill Street had offered drag shows. It became the only bar in Oregon declared off-limits to members of the U.S.

Navy. In the 1930s drag shows moved to the Music Hall at 413 SW Tenth Avenue, which became Club Rumba in the 1940s. In the 1950s the Jewel Box Revue toured the country with female impersonators from Kansas City and played in Rossini's Clover Room, what's now the office space above the Finnegan's toy store.

In the 1960s Roxy was a choreographer and dancer in Las Vegas. He was in Hollywood when he met Hansen, both of them costume shopping for their respective shows. He came to Portland, but only for sixteen weeks, to help launch the new Roaring Twenties show. One night at the old drag bar Dahl and Penne's, Roxy met Walter Cole, a local actor and businessman. He'd owned Portland's first "Beat" coffeehouse, Cafe Espresso. And Studio A, a jazz club at SW Second Avenue and Clay Street. He acted at the Firehouse Theater on SW Montgomery Street. "Attorneys and doctors," Walter says, "that's all I ever got to play. At least I didn't have to do my own wardrobe when I wore a suit."

Since the early 1950s, the Imperial Rose Court of Portland had elected an empress every Halloween. In 1974, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Randy Shuts was a student at the University of Oregon when he won the national William Randolph Hearst Award for a newspaper article he'd written about the court. But like shanghaiing, brothels, and ghosts, drag queens aren't part of the official Portland history book.