Flawless Sabrina

Flawless Sabrina (born c. 1939-1940) also known as Mother Flawless Sabrina and Jack Doroshow, is an American LGBT activist, drag queen, performer, and actress, based in New York City. Flawless Sabrina was a pioneer for transgender and drag queen not only in the mainstream, heterosexual society, but within the gay society as well, where transgender people remained heavily stigmatized. Sabrina currently lives in New York near Central Park, where she has been since the 1960s.

Born as Jack Doroshow in Philadelphia, Sabrina was a pioneer in the transgender and gay communities in the 1960s in New York. In the 1960s, New York drag queens were very stigmatised, not only by the mainstream society, but even within the gay community as well. Sabrina was one of the first widely known drag queens in the United States. She became widely known partially for organizing various drag queen pageants all over the U.S. such as The Nationals, Miss Philadelphia or the Miss Nationals, which was sponsored by Sabrina Enterprises.

During the filming of The Queen, one of Sabrina's most popular films, she took on the moniker of "The Mother" to assure the other participants in the pageants that she was not part of the competition. Very soon, what was a joke became a very personal title, and she became a mentor to several other transgender people living in New York at the time. The Queen is one of Sabrina's most well-known films. It is a documentary-style piece about her last drag queen pageant in 1967 in New York called "Miss All America Beauty Pageant". It won an award at the Cannes Film Festival.

Sabrina was arrested three times in 1968 while promoting her award-winning movie The Queen in Times Square, New York. Because of the success of her film, she was invited to speak on numerous talk shows and made television appearances in drag. This caused a lot of discomfort not only with the heterosexual and conservative public, but the gay public as well.

Despite Sabrina's confidence with herself in drag on television and her appearances, she remained quite mysterious within the gay community, as recounted by Thom Nickels, author of Gay and Lesbian in Philadelphia. Though she was not a huge part of the city night life, she hosted several mansion parties. These parties were grandiose, decadent and had a $2 entrance fee.

Sabrina made a short cameo in Pink Flamingos (1972), John Waters' black comedy crime film focused on drag queens.

In 2008 Flawless Sabrina appeared in the theatre in New York City, in La JohnJoseph's Notorious Beauty.

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