Toronto drag queen Michelle Ross was a legend — but kept it a secret from her family

Michelle Ross defined Toronto's drag scene. 

An icon and community builder, she began performing in the 1970s and inspired generations of Black drag queens, who followed in her footsteps. 

Ross was a bold, commanding and magnetic presence on stages in the city and around the world. Yet the whole time, she kept it secret from her family.

It was only in 2021, after Ross's death, that they learned the truth.

The documentary Michelle Ross: Unknown Icon explores her layered legacy and how her sudden death revealed a person who lived between two worlds. 

Michelle Ross was born Earl Barrington Shaw in Kingston, Jamaica. 

To her family, she was Earl or Barry — quiet, private and deeply reserved. But to her close friends and the wider 2SLGBTQ+ community, she was larger than life. 

Ross got her start in Toronto in 1974, long before drag was mainstream and at a time when it was rare to see a Black performer on stage. She paved the way for many of today's racialized drag queens. 

"There isn't one queen that does not know who Michelle Ross is, in the city, past or present," performer Jeanette Dupree said in the documentary. "She was a force of drag."

For over 45 years, Ross toured North America and Europe. She acted in movies. And it was all without her family's knowledge. 

"My family don't know what I do," Ross told an audience in an archival clip. "They think I'm a designer somewhere else."

"He work at Le Château — it was a clothing store in [Toronto's] Eaton Centre," said Ross's older brother, Errol Shaw. "He was an alterationist … and he was there for, what, 28 years. 

"And that's about the only job I know he had."

An astonishing discovery

Ross died at home in 2021, and Shaw was called to identify her body. 

That's when the coroner told him something surprising. 

"He said, 'Do you know what's upstairs? That's royalty.… This is a big star. That's Michelle Ross,'" Shaw said in the film. 

Ross's family soon discovered wigs, shoes and dresses — hundreds of dresses — in the attic of her house. 

"They were so beautiful," Shaw's ex-wife, Ann, said. "They were like gowns that you would see on the award shows that these big stars wear."

The discovery upended what the family thought they knew about Ross and left them with feelings of guilt and grief and trying to understand a version of him they never got to meet. 

Michelle Ross: Unknown Icon brings together the people who knew her best to reveal a full picture of her life. It also looks at the social and cultural forces that shaped Ross's life — including the enduring stigma attached to the 2SLGBTQ+ community in Jamaica and other Caribbean countries — and it explores the tension between private identity and public performance. 

Rather than a tidy biography, the film is a layered portrait of someone who defied definition, but also felt the need to keep a central part of her life hidden from those closest to her.

Watch Michelle Ross: Unknown Icon on CBC Gem and the CBC Docs YouTube channel.