Dot Your I's, Cross Your Ties

I’ve been writing my column for a year now and I hope I’ve helped readers of SLUG realize that this gender-bending world I live in isn’t as cut and dry as a feather boa and a fierce lyp-sync at the club. I myself was  born with a very complex persona, but my rich theatrical background has spawned many a side character I play with and bring out of the armoire every now and again.

Let’s see, there’s Christy Yummycochie, who’s my Asian porn persona, Corvette Summers, a coke whore madam, Rotunda Bunsagger, the obese shut-in, Mozilla Foxfire, an afro-sporting cyber crime detective, Fawn Vonblondenberg, my wild socialite heiress, and Viola Ated, a 16-year-old polygamist compound child bride.

This isn’t stuff that’s just born off the rhinestone cuff. To help delve into the complex richness of character development, I spent an afternoon with the co-creators of Salt Lake City’s very own theater darling and major gay rights activist, Sister Dottie Dixon. If you’ve grown up in Salt Lake, Dottie Dixon is someone that you’ve met before––a mother, aunt or maybe a neighbor. I sat with actor Charles Frost and activist Troy Williams, who explained why it took two men to create such a powerful matriarch.

Three years ago, Williams (who is the Public Affairs Director and RadioActive Producer for KRCL) was doing the now defunct half hour program Now Queer This. Williams felt that the program could use a little light heartedness to invert the heavy narrative of the show’s material––bashings, suicides and drug addictions that sometimes run rampantly through the gay community. Sounds like most of my mornings.

To achieve this goal, Williams approached Frost, a decade long friend and respected thespian, to help head up this relief society. Frost felt overwhelmed with the prospect of writing, recording and editing a weekly satire, but eventually rose to the challenge and Sister Dottie was born. A housewife from Spanish Fork (Spaneesh Fark), Dottie is in her 50s with a gay son, Donny and husband Don, who is a laid-off steel worker from Geneva. Frost pulled many of the best mormantics for Dottie from his Spanish Fork born and bred mother and her besties.
 
“She’s [Dottie] fabu in her own way,” Frost says. “She’s not well educated, yet she’s worldly wise. She’s full malapropisms, poor grammar and loves her gay son.” Frost wanted to make Dottie everything he wasn’t––a devout Mormon mother who embodied the true-natured women who are the advocates and champions for, as Sister Dottie puts it, “The miniturized and minoritized people of the world.”

Williams, who edits the episodes, wanted to jump on the covered wagon and help write the Sister Chronicles. As an Oregon native, Williams confessed it was initially difficult to develop the syntax for Dottie, luckily he had a few Spaneesh lessons from Frost. 

Pulling from Frost’s childhood memories, Williams was able to add an extremely complex back story and genealogy, including Dottie’s three times great grandfather, Heber Orson Maxwell O’Donovan (notice the initials) who married a Sioux Indian, helping fulfill Brigham Young’s prophecy of turning the native people into a white race––an actual story of Williams’ polygamist lineage.

Initially, Dottie made guest appearances on Now Queer This once a month. After the program was canceled, she got her own 3-minute spots. She currently appears every Friday at 3 p.m. and Saturday at 10 a.m. on KRCL. It’s really not surprising that Dottie’s persona outgrew these small time slots. She needed her own stage show. One that could deliver a more positive message than say… Broke Back Mountain, which in the end shows if you’re gay, you’re going to get fag-bashed and live in a trailer for the rest of your life. It took some convincing to get Frost on board. He feared actualizing the character and putting himself out there to be judged. He was quite comfortable living Dottie behind the mic, but worried about being able to deliver her joie de vivre with the same bravado.

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