by Jeffery Self
“And get this. They’re on their way to a gay bar that’s nearby. They said it’s only, like, a fifteen-minute drive. You guys in?”
A gay bar? None of us had ever been in a gay bar before. We’d all imagined what they were like, how magical they would prove to be, the kind of places where we’d walk in and immediately fit in. However, we were seventeen—no decent establishment would allow three teenagers to simply walk in on a Saturday night.
“Apparently, this place never checks IDs,” Heather went on, clearing up my questions of whether or not this was a decent establishment.
“YES!” Seth shouted, so loud most people in the diner heard him. “Come on, JT. It’ll be fun!”
I was often in this position, the one who needed to be coerced into having fun. I was sick of it. I didn’t want to keep being that guy. Seth didn’t like that guy. I needed to follow his lead—this was an adventure, and adventures meant stepping out of your box. Sure, I’d already done so by leaving Clearwater, but if I expected not to lose my mind once hitting New York, it was high time I started jumping out of my comfort zone.
A gay bar in the middle of South Carolina seemed like a good enough place to start.
WE FOLLOWED OUR NEW FRIENDS from the diner in Seth’s car. I was willing to go outside my box as far as the gay bar was concerned, but I wasn’t going to step as far as getting in a car with strangers. The gay bar, Sugarbaker’s, was more than twenty minutes away, and when we pulled up to the place I was sure we had the wrong address. It was in a small strip mall, sandwiched between a Starbucks and a pet store. The guys from the diner, whose names I still hadn’t learned, were right about IDs not being needed at the door. I wasn’t interested in drinking—as usual, the idea grossed me out—so I was happy to be the designated driver.
Even though it was a run-down pit of a bar, it was our first gay bar, and it immediately felt sorta magical, as much as a place that smelled like bleach and stale beer could. It wasn’t really the place itself but the atmosphere, the little universe housed within its four walls. Outside was a small southern Podunk town with a Bible bookstore connected to an Arby’s, but inside there was a cool little oasis for gay people from all walks of life, to come inside and breathe easy, even just for the night. It looked like a lot of gay bars I’d seen in movies, but smaller, and with fewer glow sticks. A dusty disco ball hung in the center of the room, bathing everything in little white specks. Beer signs made the walls glow, and a few clusters of people were scattered around the bar. This was a Sunday night and I’d venture to guess the place was less than half full. Some old disco song was playing, way too loudly, as I followed Seth and Heather inside to meet our new friends at the bar.
“Hi!” Heather called out to the guys over the music. They introduced themselves back: Alex, the gay one, was the type of guy whose perfect body was likely documented in a plethora of Instagram shirtless selfies, crowned by one of those confident pearly white smiles that make you either a movie star or cult leader, or both. Matt, the straight, cute hipster guy, must have been around our age. From the get-go, he smiled flirtatiously at Heather. I could see her blush and try to cover it up; it was sweet to see Heather like that. Romance avoided Heather almost as much as I avoided going to doll conventions with my mother.
“Guys, this is JT and Seth,” Heather, our go-between, said. Both Matt and Alex shook our hands.
Seth leaned forward and whispered to them, “None of us have ever been in a gay bar before!”
The guys laughed and asked what we wanted to drink. I asked for a Diet Coke while Heather and Seth shrugged.
“I’ll get you two vodka cranberries.” Alex pulled a shiny American Express card out of his wallet. “They’re disgusting but they’re part of the gay bar experience.”
At first I thought the bartender was catching onto Seth being underage, but then I realized he was just checking him out. In fact, every guy in the bar was checking Seth out. The only people who seemed to be immune were the cluster of lesbians playing pool. This wasn’t all that strange—people always noticed Seth’s beauty. But I’d never been in a room where every single guy was staring at him at once. The bartender handed him his drink and, with a wink, told him it was on the house. I could feel my skin crawl.
We made our way to a little booth in the corner. Heather was already talking Matt’s ear off, while Alex had cornered Seth, grilling him about his life.
“You sure do!” I awkwardly chimed in after Seth’s story about his love of the beach. I just wanted to feel included in the conversation, but it was evident that Alex couldn’t have cared less about what I had to say.
How could I be in a gay bar for the first time ever, finally, and still feel like an outsider? Wasn’t the whole point of going to a gay bar to feel not left out? No one was noticing me or giving me strange looks, which made it even worse; they only stared at Seth and Alex, and a handful of the other cute guys in the room. I started to wonder if people thought Alex and Seth were a couple. After all, they looked good together, like the kind of couple you’d see in a movie where people end up kissing in the rain and a dog somehow survives an epic catastrophe. I’d always known I was a weird match for Seth; if he was a ten, I was more of a two, a three maybe if I was wearing my cute hoodie. Seeing a guy as hot as Alex blatantly flirting with him made me feel about as sure of this insecurity as I’d ever felt.
“So, we have to be in New York by Wednesday.” Seth was midway into explaining the reason for our trip as he patted my knee. Heather and Matt had moved to the dance floor. “Come next weekend, JT here is going to be crowned America’s number-one drag teen.”
“So you’re a drag queen?” Alex asked, with a slight but very apparent tone of judgment. I could feel my cheeks getting redder by the second.
“Well, sorta,” I sputtered. “I mean, I’ve only done it once before, but they convinced me to try again because there’s a scholarship. I don’t know what I was thinking. I’m not very good at it.”
“He’s underplaying it,” Seth butted in. “The one time he did it, he actually sang, and he was breathtaking.”
“Yeah, so breathtaking that everyone in the room laughed at me and booed.”
I could tell Seth was getting agitated; nothing bothered him more than when I talked badly about myself, especially in front of strangers. It was his way of showing support, of course, but ultimately it was just really annoying.
“That’s only because you didn’t know how to do all the makeup and costuming routines. Which I’ve told you we’re going to figure out before we get to New York. There are YouTube tutorials for that.” Seth looked back at Alex with a guilty grin. “Let’s just say, neither JT nor I understood the importance of tucking.”
Alex wasn’t paying a bit of attention; he was too busy looking Seth up and down, like he was shopping for a new sofa.
“Do you swim? You look like you probably swim,” Alex asked.
“Not really. I run track, though.” Seth shrugged, seeming not to pick up on how longingly Alex was looking at him.
“Hm. Yeah. I see that.”
I tried not to get jealous because Seth hated it when I did, but it was getting a little difficult to pretend I wasn’t noticing the way this guy was smiling at my boyfriend. Plus, even I knew that swimmer was a gay code word for hot body. Had he learned how to flirt from some sort of advice book, How to Be a Douchebag in One Easy Step? I took a deep breath to calm down.
“Hey.” Alex flicked his pretty brown hair over his ear as he glanced over at me. “Sorry, man. What was your name again?”
“JT.”
“Right. See her over there?” He pointed at an old drag queen in the corner of the room who was setting up a microphone on a little stage. “That’s Bambi. She’s been around forever. She’s drag royalty around here. If you give her twenty bucks, she’d probably teach you everything you need to know. To be honest, for twenty bucks I’m pretty sure Bambi would do anything you asked her to do.”
Bambi looked a lot older than my parents; she wasn
’t fat, but she was nowhere near thin. She wore an unflattering hot-pink pantsuit with a blond wig that was so much bigger than her head that I genuinely wondered how she was able to keep it up there, gravity being what it is. One thing was clear, though—she knew drag inside and out, and it showed. Her makeup was flawless, the contouring and shading giving her face a striking movie-star look. Plus, she maneuvered on heels like they were a pair of Crocs.
“Oh, I don’t want to bother her,” I said. “It looks like she’s getting ready to do a show or something.”
I’ve always sucked at talking to strangers, especially when they’re in fifty-pound blond wigs.
“Oh, don’t be silly, JT!” Seth started pushing me over to her. “You should talk to her about the pageant. Ask her about how to do the makeup shading and stuff. Look at her—she clearly knows what she’s doing. Seriously, go over there!”
Now I was embarrassed, since I was beginning to look like a clingy weirdo in front of this Alex guy if I didn’t go over there. Besides, I wasn’t sure how much longer I could listen to him ask my boyfriend about his athletic prowess anyway, so I awkwardly wandered over.
Bambi was focused on the sound equipment and I was immediately impressed to notice she could do all this manual labor in press-on pink nails. As I walked over, she glanced up at me.
“Sorry. Karaoke doesn’t start for another thirty minutes, hon.”
“Oh. No. I just wanted to say hi. I’m sorry, you’re busy.” I began stuttering. “I-I’ll leave you alone.”
“Darling, I’m a forty-year-old drag queen in the dregs of South Carolina—how busy do you actually think I am?” she asked, throwing me quite a curveball with the “forty-year-old” part. The last time Bambi would have passed for forty very well might have been forty years ago.
“Um. Alex, that guy over there, said you might show me how to do proper drag makeup if I give you twenty bucks.” I began vomiting up my life story. “We’re visiting from Florida. See, I’m driving up to New York for this pageant … it’s a drag pageant, for teens, the Miss Drag Teen Pageant. He said I should talk to you because you’re drag royalty. Last time I tried drag, I was so excited, but then it went really badly. I didn’t know how to do the makeup and my wig sucked and I—”
Bambi held up her hand for me to stop.
“If I show you what to do, will you shut up?”
I motioned zipping my lips, which when you really think about it would be horrific and unforgettably painful.
“Fine. Follow me.”
She parted the curtain behind the makeshift stage and I followed her into the tiny backstage area. The room was clearly meant to be a janitor’s closet, but Bambi had turned it into a star dressing room, or as close to a star dressing room as a janitor’s closet could get. The walls were covered in old glamour shots of actresses, models, and a much younger-looking Bambi. A small vanity was wedged in the corner, the counter of which was covered in makeup pencils, brushes, sponges, and endless rows of fake eyelashes. Towering over us were three shelves filled with wigs in a rainbow of colors on Styrofoam heads. The whole place smelled like hair spray, cigarettes, bleach, and showbiz. I was home.
Bambi turned the knob on a box of wine wedged between two impressively tall go-go boots, filling a coffee cup to the brim.
“Want a drink?” she offered.
“I’m seventeen.”
“And your point is?”
“Naw, I don’t drink.”
She squinted her eyes at me and shook her head. “Kids these days. Sit down.”
She directed me to the little stool in front of the vanity. As I sat down, she clicked on the little lightbulbs surrounding the mirror, nearly blinding me. Then she leaned down to stretch a wig cap onto my head.
“You’ve got a nice shape to your face, so that’s a good first step.”
“Thanks.”
She held her palm in front of my eyebrows and looked at me from varying angles, like an artist surveying her blank canvas. She muttered something to herself, then picked up a tube of white makeup and a brush. She began to paint the white over my eyebrows, making them slowly disappear like grass under snow. I’ve always had thick eyebrows, and the last time I’d tried to do my own makeup, I just left them there, which made me look like a very pretty garden gnome.
“See what I’m doing here, darling? In order to create a face, you’ve got to start over entirely, and the first thing to go should always be the eyebrows. Some queens pluck theirs, but that crap looks just too damn weird for me in the daylight, so I cover mine up. I’m old school like that.”
She began covering my face with a really pale foundation, turning the entire thing into one shade, on which she began using a darker color to make me look like I had cheekbones.
“Shading and contouring are your new favorite words. They’re the most important part of conquering your face.”
The dark lines and shadows were transforming my face into something entirely unrecognizable. Something glamorous.
“Drag is armor, darling. No matter how you look at it. Once I become Bambi, nobody can hurt me. Not my family, not the drunk assholes at the bar, nobody. A good lace-front wig and the right contouring are as strong a bulletproof vest as I’ve ever needed.”
I’d never thought about that before, but it made sense. I had always felt more beautiful when I put on a wig and sang a song from Wicked in my bedroom than I did in regular everyday life.
“I never liked myself, darling. Ever. Always felt like the outsider, but you know what? It took me until I was already middle-aged to build the courage to do it, but the minute I put on a wig and dress and got onstage for the first time? I felt like I could be president of the United States if I wanted to be.”
“But when you’re not in drag, when you go back to just being everyday you, does it all go away?” I had to ask. “The good feelings you have about yourself?”
She had moved on to putting on my eye shadow, a greenish blue that made my eyes look less gray than normal.
“Maybe it did a long time ago. But now? Going up onstage in front of people, dressed like this, feeling this fabulous? I’ve fallen madly in love with myself, and nowadays I feel just as in love with myself out of my wig as I do in it. But I also know that I’ll make better tips if I’m in it.”
It was quiet for a while as she began covering the extreme contouring shapes with powder. I tried not to sneeze.
“Hey, how do you come up with a name? A drag name, I mean.”
“Every queen has her own theory. First pet’s name, street you grew up on, or some crap like that. All that’s silly, if you ask me. When you’re ready for your drag name, it just plain finds you.” She showed me the foundation she was using and told me how much was too much, muttering something about how some queens turn out looking like they just came from Sherwin-Williams.
“What about yours?” I asked. “What does Bambi mean?”
She laughed. “It’s stupid. Bambi is short for Bambi’s Mother. You know, like the cartoon? That bitch was a survivor. I mean, she died in the end, but damn, she put up a fight to stick around as long as she did. I guess I saw a lot of myself in her, and one day it just hit me.”
“Do you have any ideas for mine?”
Bambi stepped away from the chair and looked at me sternly. “I’m not your fairy godmother, darling. Like I said, when the time is right, it’ll find you.” She sounded a lot more like a fairy godmother than she had probably intended.
“So.” She picked up her cup, taking a large gulp. “That pretty-looking boy I saw you sitting with out there? Is he your boyfriend or what?”
“Uh-huh, he is.”
“So what do you have to feel bad about? You’re young, you’ve got a cute boyfriend, and by the time I’m finished, you’re going to look marvelous.”
“Well, you saw him.”
Bambi began drawing on my new thin eyebrows. “I did. And your point is?”
“Well, he’s really hot. Like epically hot. Everyone in the
bar stared at him when he came in. I feel like it’s only a matter of time before he wakes up and realizes he could do way better than me. My friend says nobody ends up with his or her first boyfriend, and she’s probably right. Right?”
Bambi looked at me through the mirror. “Self-pity is an ugly color on you, darling. It’s an ugly color on all of us, except maybe Joni Mitchell. Tilt your head back, look at the ceiling, and don’t blink.” She began tracing my eyelids with the pencil. Not blinking was proving to be quite a challenge. “Until I met my husband five years ago, I’d been single since, well, most of my life. And I used to blame it on this or that, but it wasn’t until I started performing in drag and letting myself feel as free as I feel now that I realized why.”
“Why?” I asked, accidentally blinking. “Sorry!”
“It’s like RuPaul says: If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you going to love somebody else?”
She finished with the eyeliner and moved on to fake eyelashes, meticulously dabbing on small strips of glue.
“I know what it’s like to be a seventeen-year-old gay boy who can only feel confident in a pair of heels, darling, but all that talk from those famous gay people saying it gets better is horseshit unless you put in the effort. Understand?”
“Yes, but—”
“Close your lips and keep them closed so I can finish my wise old fabulous queen speech, and also so I can put your lipstick on. Everything is temporary, darling—the bad stuff, sure, but the good stuff too, and you won’t come close to really living and enjoying what you’ve got in front of you until you accept that annoying little truth. Life is short. Don’t be like I was. Don’t take until you’re middle-aged to enjoy it. You’re seventeen—make mistakes, get your heart broken, get booed at, humiliate yourself, get jealous of guys you think are more handsome than you flirting with your boyfriend in bars … but remember that even your worst feeling, or meanest thought about yourself? It’s all temporary, so just enjoy it.”
“But the good stuff is too?”
“Yep. And sometimes? That’s going to really suck.”
