Tina Louise Hummer Papers

Tina Louise Hummer was born in Nashville, Tennessee in 1955. She grew up in North Nashville with her parents and six siblings, where they lived in a public housing development. Her father was a medic and paratrooper in the 101st Airborne of the U.S. Army, while her mother was a homemaker.

During her chilhood, Hummer first realized she identified as a girl or woman. She dressed in her mother's clothes and makeup as a teenager, and started cross-dressing by age 17. She befriended a few drag queens during this time, too. Two of her first drag influences were Milton Berle, an American comedian and actor, and Jim Bailey, an American singer, film, television and stage actor. She was also influenced during a summer camp where she watched a movie about pioneering transgender woman Christine Jorgensen.

In the 1970s, still a teenager, Hummer saw an advertisement in the newspaper for The Watch Your Hat and Coat Saloon (also known as "The Saloon"), a drag show bar on 2nd Avenue in downtown Nashville. Too young to get into the bar, Hummer would watch the drag shows through a small window. Soon, she befriended some of the professonal drag queens at The Saloon, like Charlie Brown and Danni Ross, and they helped her start her career as a drag performer.

During the 1970s, it was illegal to cross-dress or impersonate a female in Nashville. Hummer was arrested while in drag during this time, and she was put in a juvenile detention center where they made her walk naked down the hall in front of the other incarcerated kids. She stayed in the center overnight until her father picked her up the next morning, and he was seemingly unsurprised to learn that Hummer dressed as a girl.

Hummer started her gender transition at 18 years old, when she began taking hormones. She said some doctors would prescribe hormones for transgender people, but she also knew people who got them from friends or a black market. Some drag queens injected each other with hormones. She also got breast surgery and completed an official name change during her life.

Hummer competed in the second Miss Gay America pageant in 1973 held at The Glass Menagerie. Miss Gay America remains the oldest, continuously-run female impersonator competition in the United States and it was founded in Nashville in 1972 by Jerry Peek, manager of The Watch Your Hat and Coat Saloon.

After The Saloon burned down in 1974, drag performers like Hummer moved to other bars and clubs in Nashville. She performed for a few months at the short-lived drag show bar called the Cumberland Delta Queen in downtown Nashville, before moving to Embers' Cabaret Room in Printers Alley. After a little while, she was offered the job of show director at a gay disco called The Other Side located at the corner of 5th and Lea Avenue. She switched back and forth between performing at The Cabaret Room and The Other Side.

Around 1980, Hummer branched out to other gay clubs in the South. She worked at Hollywood Hots in Atlanta, Georgia for several months. She briefly came back to Nashville and fell in love with her first serious partner. Her partner was a closeted gay man and did not want his family to know he was dating a drag queer and a transgender woman, so Hummer and her partner moved to Tampa, Florida in 1980.

It was not long before she was back in Atlanta working at Hollywood Hots and The Answer, but eventually ended up in Nashville again in the early 1980s. She started volunteering for Nashville CARES (Council on AIDS Resources, Education, and Services) in the mid-1980s. Hummer would use her platform as a recognizeable drag performer to draw in crowds for fundraisers that would benefit organizations like Nashville CARES who were helping people diagnosed with AIDS and HIV.

Hummer joined the Nashville Pride committee in the early 1990s to help grow the organization and to add the much-needed transgender perspective when it came to political and social issues within Nashville's queer community.

Tina Louise Hummer continued to perform drag in Nashville under the name "Tina Louise" as late as 2023 with a brief residency at Skull's Rainbow Room in Printers Alley.