“Chablis opens opportunities for investigating the complex and often ambiguous nature of gender variability in the South, particularly during periods before the widespread usage of stable identity classifiers like ‘transgender.’”

The Lady Chablis (1957–2016) was a Black trans southerner whose style made her legend. Born in Quincy, Florida, Chablis worked as a drag performer across the Deep South for much of her life. She garnered widespread fame after John Berendt featured her as a character in his 1994 nonfiction novel Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. The work dramatizes Berendt’s experience documenting a series of murder trials in Savannah, Georgia, where Chablis was a prominent fixture of the city’s nightclub scene. She appears alongside an ensemble of other semifictionalized Savannah locals, who signal the novel’s generic continuity with a Southern Gothic literary tradition typified by eccentric characters enlivening grotesque or otherwise morally ambiguous scenes. Upon release, Midnight captivated an expansive readership and maintained a continuous position on the New York Times bestseller list for more than four years—the persisting record for hardcover fiction.