by Noah Sebourn
Our LGBTQ history is something we inherit, and something we have a responsibility to carry forward.
The freedoms we enjoy today have people’s lives behind them. People who challenged laws, risked their livelihoods, cared for their communities, and insisted on being seen when visibility came at a cost. People who created art, built relationships, and imagined possibilities that the world around them had not yet learned to accept.
I think we owe them more than our gratitude. We owe them our attention. We should know their names, understand their contributions, and celebrate what they made possible while being honest about how much work remains.
That responsibility feels especially urgent under the current administration. In February 2025, references to transgender and queer people were removed from National Park Service webpages about Stonewall and other historic sites. The American Association for State and Local History condemned those changes as a distortion of the historical record. When an administration edits people out of the history institutions are supposed to preserve, it limits both our understanding of the past and our ability to honor it.
I have a difficult time accepting that anyone gets to make our history smaller because they are uncomfortable with who was there.
We should feel a responsibility to tell those stories more fully. To celebrate the people who broke ground, challenged expectations, and created something that allowed the next person to go further. To remember that progress has many contributors, including people whose names never became famous.
Some fought for the legal right to live openly. Some helped make an openly queer life imaginable. Artists belong in that history, too. Their work gave people recognition, confidence, laughter, and somewhere to put the parts of themselves they had been encouraged to hide.
That is why I want to celebrate Bob Mackie.
There are plenty of ways to leave your mark on American history. Bob Mackie did it with a curtain rod.
If you have seen Carol Burnett come down those stairs in her Gone with the Wind parody, you already know. The green drapes. The hat. The curtain rod still sitting across her shoulders. The absolute confidence of a woman who has decided that whatever is happening here is perfectly reasonable.
“I saw it in a window, and I just couldn’t resist it.”
That costume is now in the Smithsonian. As it should be. Making an entire country laugh is an accomplishment. Making people laugh at the same joke fifty years later deserves a little glass and climate control.
I love that this is one of the ways we get to remember Bob Mackie. For all the glamour, all the famous women, all the gowns that required their own transportation plan, there was someone who understood how much joy could come from a truly ridiculous idea executed beautifully.
Mackie died on September 14 at 87. His work leaves us with so much to celebrate, and I want to do that celebration justice. Because when someone gives us this much, a list of accomplishments can tell us what they did without quite explaining what we have lost.
For me, the question is larger than fashion.
What do we call someone whose contribution helps move us forward? Someone whose imagination makes room for other people’s imagination? Someone who helps create the visibility that later generations grow up assuming was always there?
We call a lot of people gay icons. We are very generous with the title, particularly if there is a good entrance involved. And I understand why. We find ourselves in the performers we love. Their confidence becomes something we borrow. Their heartbreak gives us somewhere to put our own. Their comebacks remind us that maybe we are allowed another act, too.
But Bob Mackie’s place in that story deserves a closer look.
He was a gay man who helped create the images that became part of our collective imagination. He helped shape what glamour looked like, what a performer could communicate, and how far an entrance could go before anyone had sung a note.
I keep coming back to the phrase an architect of queer visibility.
It gives me a way to describe someone who helped build a world we continue to live in. Someone whose work made certain kinds of expression more recognizable, more desirable, more possible.
And in Mackie’s case, considerably more beaded.
His career began in Hollywood in 1961, sketching for established costume designers, including Edith Head and Jean Louis. In 1966, Mitzi Gaynor hired him to create costumes for her Las Vegas show and television specials. That work helped bring him to Carol Burnett’s attention, and he went on to design for all eleven years of The Carol Burnett Show.
Think about the range of that assignment. Beautiful gowns. Dancers. Guest stars. Characters whose clothes needed to help explain who they were. Comedy that required the audience to understand the joke the moment someone walked onstage.
There is something wonderful about an artist who could make you gasp at how beautiful something was and then make you laugh just as hard at the next thing he sent out.
As a director, I find that part of his work especially exciting. A costume can change how an actor stands. It can give them a walk, a rhythm, a little piece of the character they have been trying to find. Sometimes a fitting answers a question that days of rehearsal could not.
Mackie understood that relationship between the performer and the clothes. He understood that a beautiful drawing still had to become something a person could inhabit.
“You can’t make these crazy-ass clothes unless they’re beautifully made,” he told Vogue.
Honestly, I would put that on the wall of a rehearsal room.
There is a lesson in it for anyone trying to make art. The more ambitious the idea, the more care it requires. You can dream as big as you want, but somebody still has to figure out how it works. Somebody has to make it fit. Somebody has to make sure the performer can get through the number without spending the entire time worrying about what might fall off.
That is where my appreciation for Mackie goes beyond the finished photograph. I think about the work. The fittings, the changes, the people making something by hand. The moment when an idea that seemed impossible starts becoming real.
I am back in the theatre after six years away, and I am being reminded constantly of how much it takes to create one moment that an audience might never question. When it works, they get to enjoy it. They do not have to know how many conversations, adjustments, or small acts of patience it took to get there.
Mackie’s work makes me appreciate that effort. It also makes me want to do mine better.
The accomplishments were extraordinary. Nine Emmy Awards. Three Academy Award nominations. A Tony in 2019 for The Cher Show, a production for which the CFDA reported more than 600 costumes. His work reached Broadway, concert stages, opera, ballet, and television.
More than 600 costumes. I would like everyone involved in that wardrobe department to have had a very nice vacation.
In Las Vegas, Mackie and Pete Menefee designed costumes for Donn Arden’s Jubilee!. Mackie’s drawings are preserved in UNLV’s Special Collections, allowing us to see the ideas before they became a stage full of spectacle.
In 2019, the CFDA recognized his contribution with its Geoffrey Beene Lifetime Achievement Award. Even Barbie had been wearing Mackie since their first collector collaboration in 1990. Apparently, being eleven and a half inches tall was no reason to miss an opportunity.
And then, of course, there was Cher.
Their collaboration gave us some of the most recognizable images in entertainment, including the towering black feathered headdress she wore to the 1986 Academy Awards.
What I love about that kind of glamour is the personality in it. The humor. The willingness to be looked at. The sense that someone has considered the expectations of the room and decided she has a better idea.
Mackie also knew that a look had to belong to its wearer. When other actresses asked for something like Cher’s, he had a very simple response.
“You’re not Cher.”
A complete sentence. An entire consultation.
There is generosity in the principle behind it, though. Why spend all that effort trying to turn someone into somebody else? Look at the person in front of you. Find what is interesting about them. Help them bring that forward.
That instinct kept his work alive across generations. When Miley Cyrus performed “Flowers” at the 2024 Grammys, she wore a Mackie dress from his 2002 collection. Asked about the renewed attention to his archives, he told Vogue, “Sometimes it makes me feel very old.”
His design director, Joe McFate, offered another useful observation: “And God knows a little sparkle will do that.”
Mackie had lived long enough to see the things that once shocked people become the things younger performers wanted to wear. Remembering the controversy over Cher’s sheer dress on the cover of Time, he remarked in 2024, “Today, you’re lucky if you can keep everybody covered.”
I appreciate a man who can recognize his influence and still find the whole situation funny.
For queer performers, that influence was personal. RuPaul told Vogue that when he became famous, his first call was to Mackie. He understood “the mark of a superstar was to have Bob Mackie costumes.” Mackie went on to design for his first Las Vegas revue.
That is the connection I do not want us to miss.
A young person watches television and sees something that captures their imagination. Years later, they become a performer and call the artist who helped create it. What they once admired becomes part of what they are now making.
That is how a creative legacy moves.
Drag understands this beautifully. It knows the power of a silhouette, an exaggeration, a reference that an audience recognizes. It knows that glamour can be funny and that something funny can still be magnificent. It knows how much can happen when someone decides to make themselves visible on their own terms.
For anyone who has been told they are too much, there is something moving about watching “too much” become the reason an audience cannot look away.
I cannot tell you what every queer viewer found in Mackie’s work. But I can understand the appeal of a world in which extravagance was a talent, where the thing someone might ask you to tone down could become the thing worth celebrating.
That matters.
So does the man behind it.
In a 2025 interview with LGBTQ&A, Mackie discussed being gay in a time when it could be understood within a circle of people without being openly discussed.
“I never really discussed it, but I didn’t pretend not to be,” he said.
Asked how long he and his partner, fellow designer Ray Aghayan, had been together, Mackie answered, “One month under 50.”
That answer stays with me.
Nearly fifty years. A whole shared life. Work, dinners, disagreements, ordinary days, the comfort of someone who understands what you do and who you are. I do not want that relationship to become a sentence we hurry through on the way to another famous dress.
Aghayan was an accomplished designer himself. Their relationship belongs in the history of queer creativity, and it belongs in the history of queer people loving one another and building lives together.
Mackie also knew devastating loss. His son Robin died of AIDS in 1993. That grief belongs in an honest account of his life, even as we celebrate the joy he gave other people.
Sometimes we become so familiar with someone’s public contribution that we forget the person had to live through everything else, too. The work we love came from someone who loved people, lost people, and continued making things.
Remembering that makes the tribute more meaningful to me.
We have a history that includes organizing, protest, legal battles, caregiving, loss, and survival. It also includes the art we made, the laughter we shared, the performances we could not stop watching, and the people who helped us imagine a life beyond the one we had been told to accept.
There is room to honor all of it.
Mackie’s cultural contribution deserves its own place alongside the work of those who fought directly for our rights. A costume and a court case accomplish different things. But people also need images, stories, and possibilities. They need something that helps them recognize themselves and something that makes them excited about who they might become.
When we celebrate Mackie, we can celebrate a gay man’s excellence without making his identity incidental to the story. We can admire the women he dressed and learn about the partner he loved. We can enjoy the spectacle and give credit to the artists and craftspeople who made it happen.
We can also pass that knowledge on.
Credit the designer when you share the photograph. Watch the performance. Read the interview. Support the archive. Ask the older artist how they did it. Find out who helped them. There is so much history in the people around us, and I would hate for us to keep discovering its value only after we lose the opportunity to hear it firsthand.
Mackie’s official biography notes more than two decades of mentoring students at Otis College of Art and Design. That is another part of his contribution worth celebrating. Imagine what it means to be a young designer and have access to someone who has spent a lifetime turning ideas into work people remember.
Someone believed he had something to offer early in his career. He helped make that opportunity available to other people.
That, to me, is part of moving us forward.
And through all of this, I want to keep the joy in view. Because Mackie’s life gave us plenty of it.
Remembering his early work on The Judy Garland Show, surrounded by extraordinary performers, he recalled thinking, “This is fabulous, look where I am.”
What a lovely thing to carry through a career. The ability to stop, look around, and appreciate that you get to be there.
I think about that as I find my way back into the theatre. It is easy to become consumed by what needs fixing, what’s running behind, what you still have not figured out. Sometimes you have to remind yourself to look at the people in the room and remember why you wanted to do this in the first place.
Mackie’s work reminds me. The care, the imagination, the humor, the belief that an audience deserves something wonderful.
I want us to remember him with that same care. I want younger queer artists to know his name and see what he made. I want us to understand that the visibility we enjoy has a history, and that we have a part in deciding how well that history is carried forward.
And I want us to laugh.
Go watch Carol Burnett come down those stairs. Look at the dress. Look at how proudly she wears it. Wait for the line you already know is coming.
After everything we have discussed, there is still a woman wearing a curtain rod across her shoulders, and it is still very funny.
That is a contribution worth celebrating.
Bob Mackie gave us so much to celebrate. Now it is our turn to make sure the gay man behind all that beauty is remembered as vividly as the work he left us.
The changes are intentionally light: I corrected the grammatical issues we identified and smoothed a few phrases without stripping out the fragments, punch lines, or personal tone that make the piece sound like you.
