It was the early 1970s, a few years after Stonewall. At the intersection of the gay liberation and the glam rock scene, seven disaffected gay men came together to recreate themselves as queer celebrities devoted to social disruption.
Eventually, Les Petites Bon Bons became all-access insiders in the Los Angeles music scene, socializing with everyone from David Bowie to the New York Dolls to Marlon Brando and gracing international magazines including Andy Warhol’s Interview, Melody Maker and Newsweek. The Bon Bons were “it kids,” influencers who made their own social media, writing their own self-made mythologies. Ultimately, they became famous simply for being famous.
And they were nearly all from Milwaukee’s blue-collar South Shore suburbs.
Yet somehow, 50 years later, nobody in Milwaukee seems to remember them at all.
It’s time to pick your Milwaukee favorites for the year!
Radical Roots
I began piecing the story of the Bon Bons together late in 2023, a cruel year that took many long lights from Milwaukee’s LGBTQ community – none greater than 72-year-old Chuckie Betz, who died after an extended hospitalization on Sept. 12.
As defiant as he was devious, Chuckie packed more living into each of his decades than most people have in their entire lives. Born and raised in Cudahy, Chuckie later attended the Layton School of Art on Milwaukee’s East Side, where he found his “tribe” of queer troublemakers.
He and his friends practiced “street drag” – a disruptive form of gender expression that wasn’t exactly female impersonation. In fact, it was anything but pretty.
“Milwaukee was so sensible, so serious,” Betz told Our Lives Magazine in July 2022. “We just had to shake that up. Our [recipe for] street drag was one dash man, one dash woman, some jewelry, and a lot of dime store makeup. We were doing drag as confrontation, drag as terrorism. … We were so out there; we must have looked like aliens.
“The older gay crowd didn’t like us because we weren’t the right kind of gay. And the hippies didn’t like us because we weren’t the right kind of gay. Older drag queens thought we were making fun of them. But we weren’t afraid of anything or anyone. Gay people had been scared long enough. It was time for straight people to be scared of us.”
Betz co-founded multiple local organizations, including Gay Liberation Front, Radical Queens and New Gay Underground. However, he’s remembered most for one iconic moment in Milwaukee history. On Sept. 5, 1971, nine months after the city’s first gay liberation march, Betz decided to hijack an anti-war parade as a publicity stunt. His single-car “gay power” float snuck into the procession, featuring Betz dressed in pedal pushers, a tightly wrapped sleeveless top, ostrich feather eyelashes, enormous hoop earrings and a shawl. When the car broke down, he famously refused to help his friends push, keeping his place on top of the car. “I’m the hood ornament, and my only job is to be pretty,” he said.
The Milwaukee Journal ran a photo on the front page the next morning, a moment that was a call to action for a generation: no more closets. It’s time to be seen.
I’d come to know Chuckie in the last decade of his life, as he contributed photos, memories and memorabilia to the Wisconsin LGBTQ History Project and I told his story – what I knew of it. I came to revere him as a wacky gay uncle, someone who could help piece together history’s mysteries with context, color and story.
He would continue to do so after his death, as his family donated a massive collection of photography, artwork and media to the Wisconsin LGBTQ History Project. Most of it I knew: His framed drag photo shoot with influential Milwaukee-born photographer Francis Ford. His original illustrations for Kaleidoscope magazine. His award-winning poster for The Stud in San Francisco.
But there was also a massive collection of professional black and white photos from 1971, along with media clippings and handmade postcards. The collection felt significant, as if it were revealing a moment in time never seen before. Who were these people? Why were these photographs taken? What was I looking at here?
I reached out to his lifelong friend, Meg Holzhauer, who knew immediately what the photos were. “Les Petites Bon Bons!” she said. “Get ready to go down the rabbit hole.”
The Bon Bons Bassinet
Within one year of the Stonewall Uprising in New York in June 1969, more than 200 gay organizations had formed around the United States.
The Milwaukee Journal noticed, and in February 1972 took stock of the phenomenon in Milwaukee with a story by reporter Neil D. Rosenberg under the headline “The Gay Revolution.” The article mentioned four groups operating in the city. “Some were moderate, some radical, some social and some nonsensical,” Rosenberg wrote.
It was the first reference in Milwaukee media to Les Petites Bon Bons, and they checked all of those boxes.
In January 1971, Gay Liberation Front took over local counterculture magazine Kaleidoscope to celebrate the first Milwaukee Gay Pride Week and March. The centerfold was a double-page fashion blow-up of Chuckie Betz, John “JP” Pelikonis and Gary Pietrzak as the Radical Queens.
Street drag was an intentional attack on the longstanding but unofficial “three-piece rule,” which authorities used to police gender expression, prescribing that people who were not wearing three pieces of “gender appropriate” clothing could be arrested for “gender deception.”
The Radical Queens were already known for their disruptive antics: hosting a walk across town on stilts, staging a Mad Hatter tea party complete with silver service stolen from a local museum, throwing a mock gay wedding where the attendants were monkeys, breaking into an East Side pharmacy but consuming the loot and passing out on the floor, taking over city bus lines and department store escalators in full drag.
Despite a 1971 legal victory that ended the gender policing of the three-piece rule in Milwaukee, police still harassed anyone not “appropriately” dressed. And the new generation was over it.
“A lot of anger expressed itself … because we realized society is all just a sham,” says Bobby Lambert, 75, co-founder of the Bon Bons. “If they’re wrong about this, who knows what else they’re wrong about. And that meant all kinds of things were starting to be exposed as being false.
“We realized you can’t change laws until you change minds, and you don’t do that by boring people to death. The problem with manifestoes is that few read them that didn’t write them. And as gay people, we had so many better tools at our disposal – creativity, humor, irony, sarcasm, wit, foolishness and the ability to put on a great show. And so, we did.”
In fall 1971, Lambert and Jerry Dreva – Lambert described themselves as “veterans of a slightly stale, local civil rights/anti-war/gay lib counterculture” – formed a queer collective of revolutionary guerrillas, including Radical Queens Betz and Pietrzak as well as Jim “Sully” Sullivan, Dick Varga and Mark Slizewski at their core.
The name Les Petites Bon Bons was originally christened by Varga, as the name of a stage show hosted by the Radical Queens. Like many of the Bon Bons’ grand plans, this show was never actually produced.
The Journal story quoted from the Bon Bons’ “anti-manifesto”: “Our lives are our art. Our art is our politics. Our politics is the way we make love. We believe … gay people have a responsibility to sabotage seriousness. We demand not just the end of our oppression as gay people, not just happiness, but ecstasy, which is eternal delight. Les Petit Bon-Bons [sic] are alive and at play in the Milwaukee area today. We’ll be visiting your neighborhood soon. You can’t miss us.”
Self-described as a “group of gay life artists who live and play in and around Milwaukee, Hollywood and the world,” Les Petites Bon Bons invited America to “imagine a gay universe.” But what were the Bon Bons supposed to be, exactly? Nobody was quite sure, including the Bon Bons. “We are poets, and we are dancers. Les Petites Bon Bons is the name of the play, a group of rock musicians, a gay twirling corps, a traveling circus,” they said.
“From the beginning,” Lambert says, “we didn’t want anyone to be sure of who or what we were.”
A Break, A Rise
The Bon Bons were powered by public attention, commanded by a distinctive aesthetic. “Thrift shop hippie glamour met classic drag on an acid trip and took it from there,” Lambert says. “It became like childhood dress-up play.” Some members were into scare drag, others fully committed to extreme and transgressive looks, and some never did drag in their lives.
In early 1971, Ford read a Rolling Stone article about The Cockettes and sought to photograph drag queens of his own. Through mutual friends from the national scene, Ford connected with … the Bon Bons. “It was so ironic. I wanted drag queens, and they found me drag queens – in Cudahy,” Ford says. “I thought that was crazy. Cudahy?”
Ford’s photos became legendary – and were later displayed at a Milwaukee Art Museum juried competition.
“The museum allowed me two tickets, so I brought my mother and told the Bon Bons to come anyway,” Ford recalls. “When confronted with half a dozen guests in bizarre costumes, including Chuckie Bon Bon in a diaphanous gown that lit up when plugged in, the matron at the ticket table turned them away. I told her that if she didn’t let them in, I’d take all my work and leave. She backed down.
“My favorite moment: a guy in a Green Bay Packer sweatshirt took one look at Chuckie, and said to my mom, ‘What in the world was that?’ and she deadpan replied, ‘That’s my son.’”
The Ford photos elevated the Bon Bons to new heights.
“They sent out postcards to all these people, inviting them to events that simply didn’t exist, building up a brand for themselves,” Ford says. “Their drag was outrageous, outlandish, confrontational.”
The Bon Bons had been sending hand-crafted, artistic gifts to people they admired, including journalists, artists, musicians and authors. Their artwork incorporated gay camp, glam rock and street art to create a unique alternative to the mainstream gay liberation movement. Using photocopied text and images, they created a compelling new brand of visual counterculture. Their mailings, including posters, toys, candy and glitter, became legendary.
“Addresses were easy to come by,” Lambert says. “Everyone was in the phone book except the very few who had unlisted numbers. The entire United States Postal Service was at our disposal. Andy Warhol. William Burroughs. Christopher Isherwood. Rona Barrett. Bette Midler. David Cassidy. And why not? Even when we didn’t get replies, it didn’t diminish the secret thrill that we had reached them.”
California Calling
Lambert and Dreva had traveled to Europe, briefly lived in New York, and intersected with cultural icons of their era. They were fascinated with the Warhol Factory scene. Eventually, their aspirations for the Bon Bons transcended Milwaukee.
It was Dreva who went to Hollywood first – at the urging of Richard Cromelin, a friend of a friend who was an established rock critic with an impressive personal network and had been regaled by stories of the Bon Bons. Dreva headed to Los Angeles on May 29, 1972, followed by Lambert the next January. The Milwaukee-based members remained involved from a distance, with misadventures around the country and visits to Los Angeles at times. But, really, anyone – from LA, Milwaukee or just hangers-on – could be a Bon Bon if they walked the Bon Bons walk.
In LA, the Bon Bons were at Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco, which attracted glitter rock groupies in scene-defining fashions with a polysexual/pansexual vibe far ahead of its time.
“I’m just smack in the middle of the whole rock and roll scene and it’s just maddeningly fantastic,” Dreva wrote in a letter to Lambert just weeks after he arrived in LA. “Everyone just presumes that everyone else here is famous in some way or another. Everyone here is a groupie to someone else. The rock establishment, for all its apparent power and size, is a small little clique. Richard has given me complete entrée into that world. It’s all too crazy for me, I don’t know what I’m doing, and I don’t know how I’ll stand it.”
Dreva, who suffered from bipolar disorder and died in 1997, was alternatively repulsed and seduced by the Hollywood scene. A month later, he wrote: “I want to be famous; I would be miserable being famous. The lights, glitter and glamour only mask the sores, pimples and scars. It’s no different than Bucyrus Erie where my father spent his life working. You just die from an overdose or cirrhosis instead of lead poisoning. It’s a grim sort of glamour, Hollywood.”
Dreva attended the Jesus Christ Superstar premiere shirtless in gold satin pants, a mink coat, a heart on each cheek, a $2.98 Hollywood Boulevard wig and a bandolier of 25 lollipops across his chest. He made it on LA TV, alongside Zsa Zsa Gabor, Davey Jones, Alfred Hitchcock and angry picketers screaming “God will not be mocked!”
“Through Richard’s interviews, we knew where our targets would be staying,” Lambert recalls. “On some occasions, Les Petites Bon Bons went along; in other cases, we sent packages filled with jewelry, plastic toys, diverted comics, collages, quotes and T-shirts with our logo. The New York Dolls, for example, received cut-outs of paper dolls with their heads glued on them, while David Bowie was the recipient of a set of works composed with a quote from Antonin Artaud.”
Within four hours of arriving in Los Angeles, David Bowie called Jerry Dreva on Oct. 20, 1972. Hanging out with Ziggy Stardust himself – and forging a short-term friendship – was the “ultimate response” to a Bon Bons package ever.
“It was world-changing to find that other people were doing this too. We had no idea that correspondence art was a thing. We just hatched this on our own,” says Lambert.
Dreva’s mailings to Bowie were so influential that they inspired the cover of his 1980 single “Ashes to Ashes.” The first 100,000 copies were covered with stamps, and the word “Bon Bon” appears on one of the stamps.
“The door opened, we came in,” says Lambert. “The only thing you really must do is be there and make yourself indispensable for the camera. I had always told friends in Milwaukee that if you wanted to be famous, all you had to do was look like you were, and it shocked me to find out how true that was, even in Los Angeles.”
“When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground,” says an old West African proverb, an allusion to the experiences and stories lost when a person is lost. Nowhere is this more true than in the LGBTQ community, where survivors rarely understand or value what’s left behind – often priceless photographs, media and memorabilia. Most families are not aware of the option to donate these memorial objects to the collection of the Wisconsin LGBTQ History Project, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. To find out more about donating materials to the Project and to learn more about the golden age of gay liberation, visit wislgbthistory.com.
Within 96 hours of Lambert’s arrival, a photo of the Bon Bons outside the English Disco was printed in a rock magazine, with the caption “This is Los Angeles.” The photo and the Bon Bons look caused a worldwide fashion sensation through UPI syndication. They’d arrived at exactly the right moment.
Cromelin’s connections allowed the Bon Bons to meet and interview visiting musicians. Writing for Phonograph Record Magazine under the pen name Lisa Rococo, Cromelin carefully planted Bon Bons stories that triggered a serious fear of missing out for Sunset Strip youth. Everyone wanted to know the latest sensation. “To hundreds of thousands who saw our photos in Newsweek, People and other publications, the Bon Bons became the personification of the glitter era and later the proto-punk era,” Lambert says.
Many assumed them to be a high-concept glam rock band, although they had no musical abilities, had never played a concert and never claimed to be musicians. The assumption served them well, though, as they hobnobbed with the heavy hitters of the era, including Sylvester, Mott the Hoople, the New York Dolls, Three Dog Night and Led Zeppelin.
“We were coloring and defining an era,” Lambert says, “holding up a mirror to culture and seeing the reflection materialize. We collaged ourselves into the cultural landscape. We weren’t trying to invade the musician market, fuck the stars or get into the movies. We were starring in our own fantasies, and they were already the best.”
A Peak and an End
The golden age of the Bon Bons soon reached fantastical heights. “Our proudest moments were those filled with pure, decadent fandom,” Lambert recalls. Elton John’s star-studded “Yellow Brick Road” party at the Roxy after his show at the Hollywood Bowl. Throwing a party for Iggy Pop and 200 of his closest friends – and a record company president. Attending the Decca Dance in downtown LA, where they met Oingo Boingo and hundreds of correspondence artists from all over the world – Dreva as “El Bon Bon” in cholo drag, Betz as “Edible Bon Bon” in an outfit made of real candy, and Lambert shirtless in a leather-denim-chains outfit with a fresh beef kidney around his neck with which he later beat himself onstage.
The July 1973 premiere of American Graffiti was considered a “fitting farewell to the glory that was Bon Bons. The next morning, they woke up on their way home, young boys with quite an adventure behind them,” wrote the Bon Bons in their diary, which they called The Grand Tore of 73.
A month later, four more Bon Bons – including Betz – joined Dreva and Lambert full time in Los Angeles. Their journey was described as “wind-borne lace curtains trailing behind an aging El Camino, wearing satin scarves that would have put Priscilla, that other Queen of the Desert, to shame.”
The new Bon Bons arrived just in time to see the New York Dolls at the Whiskey A-Go-Go. They couldn’t possibly all live with Lambert and Dreva, so they settled into a hillside pagoda in Highland Park surrounded by wild monkeys.
In some ways, their long-awaited arrival was too little, too late. While Dreva and Lambert enjoyed their company and collaboration, they now felt expected to carry an ever-growing collective. “Fame was not something we could easily provide for others,” says Lambert. “It was easy for one to tag along to an interview or get into a show or party, more difficult for two, and impossible for six.
“We were both beginning to feel we were fast coming to an end of our interest in this phase of our work. We’d created an identity. As soon as people thought they knew us, we wanted nothing more than to destroy that notion. Our core philosophy had always been fluid identity.
“We had become static,” Lambert recalls, “and it had to change.”
In October 1973, Lambert wrote to a friend in Wisconsin: “Strange things have been happening in my life and my head since I’ve been back in California. I have become totally disinterested in the Bon Bons. To me, the era is completely over, dead of natural causes, and there is nothing that restores its inspirational effect on my creativity.”
And some of the Bon Bons’ choices back home were catching up with them.
“There was this whole complicated scheme with check kiting and credit cards,” Lambert says, “and it followed them all the way to Los Angeles. And then, there was the costume shop heist. They’d rented a bunch of theatrical costumes, loaded up the vintage El Camino, and took off to California with them. And then, someone was even accused of kidnapping. The Bon Bons went to a high school basketball game and one of their acquaintances seduced a player right off the [court]. When they arrived in Los Angeles, they’d brought this guy with them. Eventually, the FBI came looking for him.
“One morning an FBI agent showed up at my door,” Lambert says. “I answered wearing a hooded red devil robe and having just smoked a joint. It was not a comfortable conversation.”
Dreva was arrested on fraud charges for one of his hoaxes, but the rap didn’t stick, as defrauding people of the truth with no financial gain wasn’t exactly a crime.
In late 1973, they were interviewed by artist and zine writer Count Fanzini on a sunny, smog-free day. Little did they know it would be their final interview.
“We started using ‘Yesterday’s Bon Bons,’” Lambert says. “The whole scene was punk by then. Within two weeks, I completely changed, and you can see it in the photos looking very, very different. I cut off all my hair, changed my clothes and started going to leather bars.
“People thought they knew who we were, and we had to change that, because we never wanted anyone to be right about what they thought we were.”
“It was a great time, but it was over,” Dreva reflected in 1980. “Great eras can come and go in five years.”
After the Bons
With the Bon Bons era over, most of the crew eventually relocated to San Francisco. Gary Pietrzak died in a house fire in Wisconsin in 1996. The whereabouts of Mark Slizewski are unknown. Dick Varga relocated to Palm Springs. Sully still lives in San Francisco with his husband of 47 years. Jerry Dreva returned to South Milwaukee in the 1970s, doubled back to Los Angeles in the 1980s, spent time in Central and South America, and eventually came home to care for his ailing mother in the 1990s. He died at age 52 in 1997.
After five years in San Francisco, Chuckie Betz moved to St. Louis in 1980 and later returned to South Milwaukee, where he lived until his death last September. Bobby Lambert lived in California for 50 years before coming back to Wisconsin last year.
Milwaukee may have largely forgotten about the Bon Bons, but the world did not. Their work has graced a New Museum exhibit on queer art in 1982, as well as a traveling exhibition from 2017-22 and a zine show in Brooklyn that concluded this year. A new exhibit in LA is in planning. “Jerry would always write, ‘for future art historians,’” Lambert recalls. “Now, our things are in museums, and it’s so funny, because we half-expected this might happen. We just didn’t think it would take 50 years.”
In April, legendary synthpop duo Pet Shop Boys released an album with a track, “A New Bohemia,” inspired by the Bon Bons. The refrain: “Where have they gone, Les Petites Bon Bons? Who dances now to their sweet old song?”
The Bon Bons influence can be seen on the New Romantic scene of the 1980s and the Club Kids scene of the 1990s. But, looking back across the decades, what would the surviving Bon Bons want to be remembered for?
“Overall, for creating access,” Lambert says. “For the average person, there was no access to media, nor any expectation of ever earning access. … We created access to self-representation, to self-mythologizing, to creating a sense of self. You’re not one person, you can be anything, you can be a dozen different people, you can change, you can adapt, you can explore different personalities and images endlessly.
“What we did was more interesting than today’s reality shows, because we were aware of the artificiality of what we were doing,” he adds. “We were playing it; we didn’t take it seriously.”
“I think we still stand out. And I don’t think anyone has ever approached what we achieved.”
