Honeysuckle Divine (born Betty Jane Allsup; January 21, 1938) is a retired American stripper, erotic performance artist, and sexual columnist.
Born in Rock Island, Illinois, Divine was the tenth in a family of fourteen children.
Religion was not a significant part of her upbringing, but when she reached her teens it started to dominate her every thought.
At 21, bored with life in Rock Island, she departed for Philadelphia, where she became a postulant (novice) at the Grey Nuns of the Sacred Heart convent.
After three months, unable to "understand the spiritual lessons they tried to teach me," she left the convent, climbing out of a window in the night, and went to the police, who assisted her in returning to Rock Island.
[1] Unsuccessful in nursing school, she got a job as a waitress, but soon found out that she could make much more money as a stripper.
[4] The night I spent with the President at the Statler Hilton might have blossomed into a more lasting relationship if not for the Viet Nam war.
Fortunately, the times I went to bed with important people in Washington, D.C., it was strictly on a play-for-pay basis, and no mistress-type emotional affairs.
[5] In the late 1960s, Divine also began performing regularly in New York, usually staying at the Edison Hotel, appearing at various emporia of gynecomania such as the Roxy, the Psychedelic Burlesk Theater ("not a popular working spot because the men's room is located backstage and when the girls leave the stage at the end of their acts, guys are usually there waiting to ambush them—I was attacked three times in one day there"), and the Forty-second Street Playhouse ("the last sign of life before a desolate stretch of parking lots leading toward the Hudson River").
She was not a great dancer and she did not have a particularly suggestive stage routine, but it was an era when the clubs were often being busted by cops on the lookout for anything resembling lewd behavior.
Around 1970, by accident stumbling on a description of the famous flatulist Le Pétomane, she decided that she could spice up her act.
I first saw Honeysuckle as I walked into Jim Buckley's office, and there was this girl standing on her head shooting Jergens Lotion across the room—ejaculating it from her pussy onto the wall 19 feet away.
[9] In the mid-1970s Divine took a hiatus from her bawdy act after she was arrested several times for obscenity in Philadelphia, Boston, and both Syracuse and Albany, New York.
"[10] Charged with open lewdness, the case was quashed and that decision was upheld by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court because her acts were performed before a consenting audience.
[11] In late 1976, Divine began writing a regular column called "The Beehive" for Cheri magazine.
In January 1979, Divine performed one of her best received shows at the Mitchell Brothers O'Farrell Theatre in San Francisco.
In June 1983, Divine performed as part of a show called "Portable Vaudeville" at a theater in Amsterdam.