This profile is part of “We Create SF” — a series of essays highlighting artists, performers, small businesses and anyone else that makes San Francisco iconic and irreplaceable.
Tom LeNoble owns a gown you might recognize from Rita Hayworth in Gilda. Hayworth made hers famous in 1946; LeNoble took a little longer to fully embrace the spotlight.
His dress belongs to Rita Dayworth, the drag persona LeNoble first performed as a college student in Gainesville, Florida, in the 1970s. Rita mostly went quiet after that, while LeNoble built a career in business suits: customer service at MCI and Walmart.com, global service operations at Palm, and a job at early Facebook, where he was employee No. 57.
Last November he published a memoir, My Life in Business Suits, Hospital Gowns, and High Heels, and the gown came back out. So did everything else he’d kept from colleagues, including that he has lived with HIV since 1989. Rita made an entrance at his book launch, and she has walked in Runway of Pride…