Donnie "Dirt Woman" Corker in costume (Photo by Alice McCabe)
Dim the Village Café’s neon, let a chorus of cross-dressers sing sweet dirges down Broad Street, bang the biggest timpani that exists in the musical arsenals, let there be a moment of silence in all the bars and joints from Grace to Main, for Donnie Corker, aka Dirt Woman, is dead.
The late writer, teacher and former Oregon Hill resident Wesley Gibson observed in a Richmond magazine arts roundup of September 1994, “Richmond is a city of tremendous contradictions. There is, I think, embedded in its history, a respect for hierarchy, and then alongside it, an entirely different culture of very strange mutations as the result of collisions between the two. It produces characters and eccentrics that are recognizable. When I say ‘Dirt Woman,’ even my mother in the suburbs knows who Dirt Woman is.”
And, now, at age 65, on a battleship gray Tuesday morning, the bell tolled for Dirt. He died among family in their South Side home. Arrangements are pending.
Jerry Williams, a longtime Richmond cultural observer, critic (and newly minted Richmond magazine theater reviewer) and filmmaker, revived a dormant documentary project about Dirt's life and times last year. They spoke last night. "He's had health problems off and on for the past several years," Williams says. "He'd had congestive heart failure, at least one minor stroke. He had colon cancer 15 years ago and survived that."
Dirt was about as Richmond as you can get. He was born at Grace Hospital (later converted into the Grace Monroe Apartments), one of nine children of the Corker family, who lived in Oregon Hill and on Floyd Avenue. He didn’t excel in school and was shunted into vocational training classes. He was gay, it was the 1950s, and things didn’t always go well: Young Donnie Corker was attacked, raped, knifed and shot. He prostituted. He got arrested. He picked up the nickname and became, through perseverance and a lack of self-consciousness, a figure both of renown and infamy.
The encomiums that follow the decease of a prominent community figure don’t apply here. Little about Donnie, or Dirt, was standard, or, in fact, little. But he was, as the characters in the great Tod Browning classic, “Freaks,” chant, “One of us.”
Dirt refuted — in a thoroughly Richmond voice with a vanishing sliding diphthong accent that came out as half bray and half command — the city’s increasing tendency to measure itself at right angles. Dirt represented an aspect of refutation, even rebellion — for certain, that spirit of contradiction. Although things appear to be nicey-nicey and normal (whatever that is), that’s all a convenient illusion, like the applications of a drag queen’s makeup or the burlesque performer’s costumes that both conceal and reveal. Dirt gave us an aperture into the seething city below its varied surfaces. That didn’t make everyone comfortable. For others, Dirt’s existence was reason to rejoice.
In recent years, we’ve seen the exits of individuals who defined Richmond’s contradictions, from GWAR's Dave Brockie (once a wrestling opponent of Dirt) to the stylist Kinnin Ghia Campbell. The city’s physical qualities have altered, no more so than on West Grace Street by the campus of Virginia Commonwealth University, a part of town well-known by Dirt. Once a gritty few blocks of motorcycle bars, strip clubs, art houses, X-rated movie theaters, beery rock clubs and The Village, it is almost unrecognizable to those who once frequented its lairs. As my associate Anne Thomas Soffee says, it’s been “pant-suited.” Like every death of someone you sort of knew, you are brought up short, to contemplate what the individual meant in your life and, in Dirt’s case, what he signified to the city’s sense of itself.
Dirt the cross-dressing entertainer and down-market Divine, Dirt the calendar poster girl, Dirt the flower seller, Dirt the garlic peeler, Dirt the governor’s credentialed inauguration crasher, Dirt the mayoral candidate despite already being the self-proclaimed Queen of Richmond. Dirt was also the star of Hamaganza, which sought to provide during the holiday season “hams for the hamless,” that through the best and worst parts of two decades raised more than $25,000 for the Central Virginia Food Bank.
And all of this is going into the Williams documentary about Dirt. Since he held a toast/roast of Dirt a few months ago, the last big public appearance of Herself, memories and video clips have been sent in his direction. By the time he's finished, there will be some 50 interviews conducted.
"I've gotten footage of Donnie onstage at the Lee Art [the former X-rated movie house, now the Grace Street Theater of VCU]," say Williams, "dancing and eating dog food." That's not shown in this teaser trailer.
On a personal note, a major reason why your humble correspondent is even in this business is because of a feature profile of Dirt that editor Frances Helms wrote in Richmond Surroundings, Richmond magazine's predecessor, for its July-August 1990 issue. I picked it up off the rack while waiting in line at the Ukrop’s at Grace and Harrison (all gone, all gone). I found the piece sensitive and detailed. One came to realize that being an icon, of sorts, for the counterculture is not just larkish posing in pictures for novelty items. It's often plain brutal.
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File photo by David Stover
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Shots from Dirt Woman's photo shoot for the July-August 1990 issue of Richmond Surroundings (File photo by David Stover)
That Richmond Surroundings chose to put Dirt Woman in its glossy pages, a publication that to my jaundiced eyes mostly ran big-picture stories about TV weather forecasters and their favorite space heaters, meant perhaps that there was a place for my name under the masthead.
Thus, let the bells ring and announcing gongs crash, and the black curtains drop, for Dirt is dead, and so to dust, to be followed along — in time — by the rest of us.
In the meantime, let us go out dancing, as we see Dirt do, though in the shadows, during the 2008 Hamaganza.
