In honor of Pride Month, BET.com’s “How ‘They’ Built This” series is delving into the unsung heroes of the LGBTQIA+ community, who’ve both shifted culture and built a lasting legacy in the process. This week, we’re digging into the impact and life of the first self-proclaimed queen of drag.

In the history of grand parties, masquerade balls, and ceremonies meant for peacocking, nothing has withstood the test of time like a drag ball, and we may have William Dorsey Swann to thank.

Swann is a formerly enslaved Black Washingtonian who became one of the earliest documented drag figures in American history and a pioneering LGBTQ+ activist. He’s widely recognized as the first known person in the United States to call himself the “queen of drag,” and later as the first American on record to challenge anti-queer repression through the legal system

Swann was born into slavery in Maryland around 1858, the fifth of 13 children and managed to endure slavery, the Civil War, and the backlash of the Reconstruction-era. After emancipation, he moved to Washington, D.C., where he became part of a Black community that held private social gatherings and drag balls.

In the late 1880s, Swann hosted secret drag balls in Washington, D.C., where guests gathered, dressed in formal women’s attire, and defiantly bucked social norms. He was known to friends as “the Queen,” and historical accounts say he embraced that title publicly, making him the first documented person in the U.S. to self-identify as a drag queen.

A particularly important moment came on April 12, 1888, when police raided one of Swann’s birthday celebrations and arrested attendees. Some reports have said that it was the first documented case of an arrest for a female impersonation in the country. Reports of that raid describe Swann resisting arrest, an early act now seen as part of LGBTQ+ resistance history.

In 1895, on New Year’s Eve, he and several other guests were arrested under similar circumstances, as reported by The Evening Star (and unearthed in recent years by his esteemed biographer Channing Gerard Joseph). Soon after, Swann was sentenced to 10-months in jail. “I would like to send you where you would never again see a man’s face and would then like to rid the city of all other disreputable persons of the same kind,” said the judge. “Thieving and petty assaults amount to nothing as compared with the conduct of these people.”

Of course, Swann’s life predates LGBTQIA+ labels, and we’ll never know whether he’d identify as such. Though his impact is undeniable. In 1896, after spending 10 months in jail, he asked President Grover Cleveland for a pardon. That pardon was denied, but the effort is still regarded as the earliest recorded instance of a person in the U.S. using legal and political channels to defend queer community organizing.

Historians and cultural institutions now frame Swann as a foundational figure in both drag and queer liberation history. Smithsonian Magazine calls him the nation’s “first self-proclaimed drag queen,” while PBS describes him as the first known American activist to lead a queer resistance group.

Swann’s story is an early example of Black queer resistance: He was organizing private gatherings, facing police surveillance, and pushing back against criminalization decades before Stonewall and modern LGBTQ+ rights movements.

Swann died in Maryland in 1925, but his legacy continues to grow as researchers recover the history of his life and activism.