We sat down for dinner. Bea placed herself between Christina and Patty, jumping around in her chair. Patty later told me that Bea had been conceived with Christina’s egg and her brother Larry’s sperm through insemination (saving them money they might have otherwise spent on donated sperm and IVF), so she was related to them both. You could see the likeness: Christina’s nose; Patty’s ginger hair, strawberry blonde on Bea.
‘Are many of your friends married?’ I asked Christina.
‘Most,’ said Christina, explaining that the ones who weren’t had been actively taking a stance against heteronormativity, but when Trump had been elected they’d started expressing more of an interest in marriage.
‘I suppose a lot of people want to have the choice, but don’t want to actually take it,’ I said, thinking of myself. ‘But when the choice might be taken away from you, you suddenly want to take it.’
Then I asked about what it was like when Prop 8 was passed, and they said they didn’t feel upset, or take it too personally, they just felt enraged. They boycotted businesses with signs that said ‘Yes on 8’ and they went out to protest.
‘There were a whole bunch of us at this one protest and on the other side they kept saying, “We just don’t want our children to know about this,”’ remembered Christina. I thought about the advert Steve had shown me. ‘I just kept saying over and over again, “But I still love you, even though you don’t love me!” And this woman was so mad at me!’ Christina laughed. ‘That whole fear of the gay agenda . . . it’s just two gay guys sat at a table reading newspapers with their breakfast. It’s so boring . . . you know what I mean? We’re literally eating our dinner at 6 p.m. What is so scary?’
We were indeed eating our dinner at 6 p.m. The sun was still shining, Bea was playing with her food. It was all quite idyllic, as far as my only first-hand experience of what married lesbian family life looked like.
‘Do you ever face discrimination here?’ I asked.
‘I think the only time I ever did was in that Prop 8 rally. I don’t feel like I ever have,’ Christina responded.
‘We talk about it, Christina and I,’ said Patty. ‘How we couldn’t really move to Bozeman, Montana. We still think about how we can’t really go and live in some suburb like straight people do, because it would be a little bit scary to move there. For Bea too. She’s never had a day when people are like, hmm’ – she mimed craning her head to stare – ‘because here we hang with people that are like-minded.’
‘But isn’t that a bubble?’ I asked.
‘Yes. Totally. When Trump was elected I was like: my God, I’ve been stuck in a vegan, lesbian, preschool bubble. It’s crazy. But you relax into it, you stay where it’s safe. I feel like I have to do more now – now that Trump is president and there’s all this hatred for minorities, lesbian and gay men. I just want to say, “Fuck you! This is my family, you can’t tell me I’m not allowed to be married, you can’t do that.”’
‘How would you feel if your right to marriage got taken away again?’
‘Shit would go down. I’m fifty, I’m married, I’m middle-aged, but I think the threat of something like that would make me get the fuck up off the couch and get back to the roots of being that ACT UP punk rock activist, but this time it’s gonna be with my wife and my child.’
‘It sounds like you used to do a lot of activism and you don’t any more. Is that cause you’ve got what you want?’
Patty seemed startled by my question, so I backtracked before she could answer. ‘I just mean, oppression is what makes people go and protest, so if you’re not experiencing any, why would you? I don’t think that makes you a bad person.’
‘Maybe it is that bubble. It’s scary . . . I don’t wanna just sit around and be like, “Well, it’s not totally at my front door yet!” But then what does it take? The threat of . . . I don’t know . . .’ Patty looked slightly wounded.
I apologized for coming to her house and asking such serious questions. She graciously told me they were the right ones. We finished dinner, and then I left.
As I walked down Patty’s street back towards the main drag in Silver Lake, I figured that Sean and Sinclair, Steve, and Patty and Christina, they were all what I thought of as heteronormative, but talking to them had highlighted the bottom line for me: that to ban same-sex marriage was to discriminate against us. I’d never been so sure of why same-sex marriage was fair as in that moment, especially as all the couples I’d met looked so happy. But on the way back to Alix’s house, I thought about something Steve had said before I left the LA LGBT Center: while marriage had meant a lot to him personally (not least changing his tax status) and had gone some way to putting an end to the public lie that a lot of being gay was just about sex (as Sean and Sinclair had hoped it would), it had also created a problem. Donor money for LGBTQ+ activist work had dried up, even though the work wasn’t yet done, even though the political climate was precarious. This of course spoke to the difficult dilemma that Patty’s situation presented: were LGBTQ+ people allowed to sit back and actually enjoy the rights they’d been granted? Or was same-sex marriage the opiate of the gay masses?
On a personal level, it occurred to me that maybe if I’d ever been exposed to a life like Patty’s sooner, it might not have taken until I met Salka to ask myself if marriage was something I wanted. At Alix’s, I told her I was still on the fence about whether getting married was a choice I would make. She kindly pointed out that it probably didn’t matter anyway, since people weren’t exactly queuing up to marry me.
My trip was coming to an end, and I was meant to go back to London in a couple of days. Then something much more pressing happened: we found out DragCon was in town, and I decided to stick around.
chapter two
THE BUSINESS OF DRAG
For the past five years, a drag queen convention has descended on the 720,000 square foot halls of the LA Convention Center. It started off with 13,000 guests, and has now surpassed 50,000. As Comic-Con does for comic book fans, the two-day event brings together drag enthusiasts from all over America and the rest of the world to dress up in platform shoes and flammable wigs, spend a load of money on merchandise, and attend talks or panel debates hosted by their heroes.
The biggest festival on the planet celebrating drag culture, DragCon is based around a cult TV series called RuPaul’s Drag Race, which is a lot like America’s Next Top Model, only the contestants are drag queens. On the show, host and drag expert RuPaul dishes out critiques and mottoes of empowerment to a cast of ‘young hopefuls’, who must compete in weekly challenges that involve everything from glamorous photo shoots to creating costumes out of debris found in a dumpster. The contestants ‘throw shade’ (catty but hilarious comments) at one another, and those who aren’t tough enough inevitably crack – heightening their chances of getting sentenced to ‘lip-sync for their life’, a battle between the week’s two lowest-ranking contestants, resulting in one getting thrown off the show. It’s extravagant, it’s tacky, and at the end of the series, there’s a winner – America’s Next Drag Superstar, who lands fame and a great big make-up sponsorship deal.
The convention is ostensibly for fans of the show, but anyone looking for a novel way to spend a weekend could go. Alix and I first heard about it from an American drag queen I’m friends with on Facebook, and immediately logged onto the website to find out more. A quick browse promised us a weekend of acceptance and celebrity. ‘At RuPaul’s DragCon, we celebrate all the colors of the rainbow. We have an orange president that wraps himself in red, white and blue. How are you going to make America great again if you can’t love all the colors of the rainbow?’
There was also a list of drag queens from the show that would be in attendance – seventy-eight in total, including names like Alaska Thunderfuck, Bob the Drag Queen, Jinkx Monsoon and Kim Chi. Day tickets to the convention cost $30, or $50 for the whole weekend, and $100 for VIP tickets that let you cut the queues. Kids, I noticed, were admitted for free. Suddenly it wa
sn’t the idea that seventy-eight drag queens would be there that made me want to go to DragCon, it was the idea of meeting families with drag-loving children.
In recent years, drag has moved from being a staple of seedy gay bars – an art form littered with rude jokes and niche nods to queer culture – to something arguably much more palatable and commercial, but its history goes back further. Men have been performing on stage as women for thousands of years: in Ancient Greek tragedies, Shakespeare plays and baroque operas. In seventeenth-century Britain, women started to play men on stage, but the phrase ‘drag queen’ was first used to describe men appearing in women’s clothing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in a type of British slang called Polari, used by gay men in London’s theatre community. In the seventies and eighties, drag permeated club culture in London, New York and LA – still the drag capitals of the world today – with figures like Leigh Bowery and Lady Bunny straddling the roles of performance artist and drag queen. In 1984 Lady Bunny invented Wigstock, a drag festival that took place in New York’s East Village. RuPaul, originally from Atlanta but newly relocated to New York, used to perform at Wigstock as well as the nearby Pyramid Club, which was famous for nurturing drag culture in all its glory; raw, garish, and definitively camp.
RuPaul’s CV made him the perfect person to package drag and sell it as prime time TV, and although that wouldn’t happen until decades after Wigstock, it was in the Pyramid Club era that he had befriended Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey, whose company World of Wonder produces the show. Before Drag Race they produced a series that followed Pamela Anderson around her daily life, another where Perez Hilton dished out gossip, and the documentary film and ensuing TV show Becoming Chaz, which followed Cher’s son, Chaz Bono, through transition. Between 1996 and 1998, they also produced RuPaul’s hugely successful VH1 talk show with co-host Michele Visage, which featured guests from Cher to Debbie Harry to the Backstreet Boys. Despite all this, when they took the idea for a reality show about finding the next big drag queen to the newly launched LGBTQ+ channel Logo TV in the mid-2000s, it was initially rejected. ‘Early Logo TV did not want to frighten the neighbours. It wanted to present the idea of gays as the guys next door. Regular suburban folk,’ wrote Bailey and Barbato in their book, The World According to Wonder. These were the George Bush Jr years, which might have had something to do with it, they added. ‘Every Gay Pride you hear the same complaints that the drag queens and fisters just ruin it for everyone. So in the end we just gave up pitching them.’ However, as the West became more accepting of LGBTQ+ people more generally, so did it become more accepting to drag queens.
After Drag Race was eventually greenlit by Logo in 2008, it became an overnight success. Now in its eleventh season, it has moved to the bigger US channel VH1, and is shown around the world from Australia to Latin America. The audience is varied; it’s watched by straight and gay people alike, and as all good camp does, seems to straddle high and low culture. In 2017, perhaps surprisingly to a lot of people, the show’s dedication to helping people ‘foster a true you’ was named as the key influence in the curation of the Whitney Biennial art fair. But its reach and influence do not stop there.
The queens on the show each have hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers, even millions. Some make appearances on Drag Race spin-off shows, such as Drag U, in which drag queens make over regular American women, or Untucked, which is a behind-the-scenes look at Drag Race. And massively successful Drag Race viewing parties have sprung up everywhere, bringing together fans to watch the show en masse in gay bars and clubs. The single time I went to one, I felt as if I’d stepped onto another planet. Being in a club to watch something on TV at 8 p.m. was bizarre, not to mention the fact that everyone was screaming at the screen and cheering. It was like watching a football match in a British pub, except the noises were totally different – everyone was shouting ‘yass’ while clicking their fingers in the air. Finally, a sport for gay people, I thought. And yet drag clearly wasn’t just for gay people any more: straight people around the world were watching from their living rooms.
If marriage offered gay people a slice of straight culture, then Drag Race, DragCon and RuPaul were surely doing the opposite: giving straight people a gateway into gay culture, by taking the individuality and creativity of LGBTQ+ people and encouraging it to be celebrated within the mainstream. Yes, in many ways marriage and drag couldn’t be more different – drag was a subversive practice that mocked and transgressed the boundaries of gender, while marriage was institutional and traditionally based around gender-certain roles – and yet, if marriage was a site of our institutional assimilation, wasn’t the popularity of drag where this was happening culturally?
I thought of Amrou, and their desire for legitimacy and acceptance through success in drag. I understood why Amrou wanted – even needed – it. But when I considered what was happening to drag more broadly, its commercialization, its corporatization, its moment in the spotlight, I wasn’t totally sure that it was a positive thing.
Every night of the week leading up to DragCon there is an event at which queens hawk their talents. A friend suggested we go to a spot in Downtown LA called Redline, where some queens they knew would be performing. It was a dingy corner bar, half full, and as we walked in the compère, Heklina, a San Francisco drag legend, was yelling ‘FUCK ART, I WANT MONEY’ into the crowd, as people padded up to her with their dollar bills. To find out more about the changing face of drag I wanted to meet someone who was on the outside looking in, a drag purist, someone who would be objective about how RuPaul’s show had changed the industry first-hand. A queen who yelled ‘fuck art, I want money’ didn’t seem the right choice.
I chatted to two queens outside and it turned out one of them had been on Drag Race. After so many seasons, it was as though I couldn’t avoid its stars; I figured she’d be no good to me because she’d have her Drag Race PR patter down. About an hour later, it turned out I was wrong: I caught the pair going into the toilet together and asked them what they were up to. ‘COCAINE!’ one of them yelled at me. ‘Put THAT in your book,’ screamed the other, letting the bathroom door slam behind them.
Alix and I stood at the back of the room while other queens performed. A trans woman in a green-sequined pantsuit did a Whitney Houston mash-up; a big guy in a leather jacket and high-rise thong did an energetic rendition of Cher. I felt like RuPaul, waiting for my own Drag Superstar to present herself to me, lip-syncing for her life. And then it happened. Miss Barbie-Q walked on stage wearing a cute paisley dress, red stockings and a demure brown wig that could have been her real hair. The music started playing and she began to lip-sync to a soul song that I recognized from a film called Hidden Figures, the untold story of three black female engineers working for NASA during the Cold War. She got the audience to clap along. It felt like a classic performance; Barbie had a Dionne Warwick or Shirley Bassey kind of class to her. She wasn’t like the other girls. Or actually any other drag act I’d seen.
After she’d finished, we went outside for a cigarette and I told Barbie that I liked her red shoes and matching red stockings.
‘Are you going to DragCon this year?’ I asked. She looked cynical.
‘No. I only went one time. And I only went because I didn’t wanna shit-talk something I hadn’t seen.’
‘I’m going this weekend,’ I said. ‘What should I expect?’
‘You pay for everything,’ she said, putting her cigarette out. ‘People come with their families and buy cotton candy and take pictures with us? This is what we’ve allowed it to become? We’ve allowed a corporation – World of Wonder, gay owned – to sweep in, take who we are and make it into a commodity.’
‘I see your point,’ I said. ‘That’s what I’m interested in, though. What it’s done to drag, and why it’s so popular. Would you talk to me more about it? Somewhere quieter?’
She thought about it for a second before getting her phone out. Her calendar was blocked out for different activit
ies in different colours. Meditation had a ten-minute slot, a colonoscopy another. ‘You wanna come for breakfast at my house tomorrow?’ she said. ‘I have to go to the DMV at two.’
I asked what I could bring.
‘Hmmm. Meat,’ she said. ‘Bring sausages.’
The next morning I arrived at MJ’s small, cream-coloured house downtown. There was no answer when I rang the bell. I hovered awkwardly on the porch, holding my sausages in the sun. Eventually MJ answered; he’d overslept. I didn’t recognize him in what he called his ‘boy clothes’, or daywear. ‘Boy clothes’ didn’t seem the right term. He explained that he thought of himself as gender non-conforming – or ‘GNC’, he said, pronouncing it like ‘G&T’. He alternated between the pronouns ‘they’, ‘he’ and ‘she’; he said he doesn’t mind which people use.
‘I’ll wear perfume and women’s jeans with combat boots and a baseball hat,’ he told me, unpacking a clothing delivery we’d picked up off his porch.
‘Like a lesbian?’ I suggested.
MJ laughed. ‘Uh huh. That’s me. Queen Latifah.’
As MJ started making us eggs, he told me his story. He was born in 1971 in Toledo, a small town on a lake near Ohio. The oldest of six kids, MJ grew up ‘poor, but happy’; it was a ‘we’re all in this together kind of deal’, he said. ‘I read books like crazy, that was my escape,’ he remembered, putting the sausages in a pan on the hob. ‘I used to read Danielle Steel,’ he laughed. ‘Y’all would hear all this “riding a horse to a villa in Tuscany”. I had to look it up in my encyclopedia! “Where the hell’s Tuscany!”’ I liked the way MJ’s voice got more high-pitched when he was excited, like a stand-up comic reaching the punchline. ‘They’d go to the French Riviera and be tanning in Monte Carlo – I thought, “Someone buy me a drink at a bar in Monte Carlo!”’
Queer Intentions Page 5
