June is Pride Month and today we celebrate transgender entertainer The Lady Chablis – she who spills the tea.

John Berendt’s 1994 book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, is known for many things. The bestselling work charts the author’s time in the US Deep South during the 1980s in the lead-up to the death of Danny Hansford and then the murder trials of Jim Williams, an antiques dealer who had shot his sometimes-lover but claimed it was in self-defence.

Its form, a ‘non-fiction novel’, is “99 per cent true and one per cent exaggeration”, according to the author. Many of the events depicted in the book have been shuffled around for clarity, with Berendt inserting himself in the timeline as character John Kelso earlier than he actually appeared in town in real life.

This, he says, was to introduce the many eccentric characters of Savannah, Georgia, to readers before Hansford’s death.

In addition to breaking sales records – more than four years on the New York Times’ bestseller list – it was also made into a movie by Clint Eastwood in 1997 where Kelso is played by John Cusack opposite The Lady Chablis, who plays herself.

The role catapulted the transgender performer into the public eye and she soon became one of the most visible trans artists in pop culture as well as one of the first to be accepted by a mainstream audience.

But did you know she is also the progenitor of the slang term ‘spilling the tea’?

In the book, The Lady Chablis tells Berendt she avoids certain men because they’re prone to violence when they “find out her T” – that’s she’s transgender.

Berendt: “Your T?”

Chablis: “Yeah, my T. My thing, my business, what’s goin’ on in my life.”

In the original transcript, Chablis uses T to stand for truth, but since then the saying has been taken by drag culture and evolved into ‘spilling the tea’, which means gossip. It follows along the lines of ‘spilling the beans’ but with the more apt visual context of people sitting around a table sharing news and tea and then spilling it when they learn something surprising from their fellow sippers.

Berendt’s book and Eastwood’s movie lifted tourism to Savannah, and The Lady Chablis played to packed houses until her death in 2016.

More recently, Berendt spilled some tea of his own when he spoke to magazine editor David DiBenedetto for the 30th anniversary of the book’s publication. Although Williams was acquitted of Hansford’s murder four times, DiBenedetto asks, “Do you think Jim Williams was guilty?” and Berendt replies, “Kind of.”

Read next: Hiding My Candy: The Autobiography of the Grand Empress of Savannah (1996) by The Lady Chablis

This article originally appeared in AUSTCS enews 11 June 2024.