American drag queen and activist William Dorsey Swann was born in 1860 and died on this day in 1925. Born into slavery on a plantation in Hancock, Maryland owned by Ann Murray, there is some evidence that his biological father may have been white. After the Civil War and President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation of slaves, his parents purchased a farm in Washington County. Like most enslaved children, Swann received no formal education, as a teenager moved to Washington D.C., finding work as a hotel waiter and later as a janitor at a local business college. In 1884, he was arrested for stealing books from a public library and imprisoned for six months, but was pardoned following a petition to the President, supported by his former employers. In the mid-1880s, Swann began organising secret balls for queer men, called a “drag” (possibly a corruption of “grand rag,” an antebellum term for a masquerade ball). He was the earliest-documented person to refer to himself and his queer friends as “queens”, inspired by crowned Black women who appeared on floats in Washington’s annual Emancipation Day parades. By 1887, his drag balls attracted press attention and were, inevitably, raided by police. In 1896, he was convicted for the offence of “keeping a disorderly house” (a euphemism for a brothel) and was sentenced to ten months’ imprisonment, unsuccessfully petitioning President Grover Cleveland for a pardon. He left Washington in 1900 and returned to Hancock, dying in 1925, aged 65.