Queer Intentions

by Amelia Abraham

  I approached a family called the Smiths from Fairfax, California. The mom, Erica, dad, David, and nineteen-year-old son, Miles, were all in drag. Miles told me they’d been watching Drag Race as a family since it started, and this was their second DragCon together. Miles was fifteen when he started dressing like a woman, with the inspiration coming from Drag Race along with a couple of his parents’ friends who were part of the gay community of San Francisco. ‘He’s been wearing dresses since he was one and a half years old,’ said Erica of her son proudly. ‘We’ve always been theatre people too, so I taught him how to sew and do make-up. He learned a lot from YouTube tutorials. Now he’s styling his own wigs and making his own costumes. He made everything he’s wearing.’ Miles was too young to do drag in bars or clubs, and therefore too young to make money from it, he explained. It was really just a hobby. He had done it at the local town parade though, and in ‘school drag shows’ at his college up in Oregon. But DragCon was something else entirely: ‘It’s super hectic and super amazing,’ he gushed. ‘It’s such a love fest, really, people complimenting each other – “I love your earrings” or “I love your wig”.’

  Alix interrupted: ‘No one has complimented me yet.’

  Not only was this a family affair, it was also as kid-friendly as the website had promised. I saw a child dressed as Baby Jane within ten minutes of being there. There was a children’s area with a bouncy castle and face painting, where they were holding Drag Queen Story Hour, which involved drag queens such as fourteen-year-old Amber Jacobs, Panda Dulce, Lil Miss Hot Mess and Pickle reading to the kids. It reminded me of Amrou saying they loved performing at kids’ birthday parties and bar mitzvahs. The Kid Zone was included to ‘publicly advocate the importance of instilling acceptance for all at a very early age, especially in our nation’s most current political climate’. Drag Queen Story Hour was part of a wider initiative started by LA author Michelle Tea, whereby drag queens read to kids at local bookstores and libraries across America.

  Elsewhere at the event was a stage for young people to perform in drag. It was covered in branding for Gilead, a global pharmaceutical company that produces HIV-prevention drugs and hepatitis C medication, but price-hikes them to the extent that they aren’t actually affordable to the UK healthcare system. MJ’s words about ‘not giving back’ and capitalism rang in my ears.

  The publicist for DragCon, the cheerful Kelli, later explained that the Gilead branding was on the Men’s Health Foundation stage, and that the Men’s Health Foundation was one of the sponsors, but Gilead wasn’t. The other official sponsors were World of Wonder, VH1 and Jeffree Star Cosmetics. The brands and companies that could have a stand were also carefully selected; some were for non-profit organizations like the Human Rights Campaign, others were vendors like Boy Butter Lubricants or the offensively titled Obsessive Compulsive Cosmetics, which has since shut down. In 2016, $2.3 million was spent on the floor of DragCon, via the two hundred vendors and exhibitors selling ‘DragCon exclusive merchandise’. One drag queen I talked to – Alma Bitches, thirty-six, from Seattle, who’d been doing drag for seven years and was wearing a T-shirt that said ‘Pizza and Anal’ on it – said that, besides coming to see the queens from the show, she came for the shopping opportunities: ‘I bought some one-of-a-kind shoulder pads – they’re like $400 but silver-studded and fierce as hell.’ She also bought some shirts, and some make-up. All in all, she spent about $700.

  I wandered the hall and met Ronaldo, a sweet, earnest guy running a stall for his online kink store Torso and Trunks. Formally a dog walker, he’d had the idea for the brand to promote safe sex at gay men’s underwear parties, by making underwear with pockets so you could carry lube and condoms with you. Then he branched out to what he called everyday kink wear. ‘You can’t always wear your leather harness, puppy mask or tail in public, so we’re building a brand so that community can stand out and see each other,’ he explained, reaching for one of the products. ‘Like this pup hat – you could wear this in the street and only other pups would recognize it. Anyone else would think you’re just a guy that loves dogs!’ I pointed to a trucker hat that said ‘Help: bottoms wanted’ and suggested that maybe it wasn’t as subtle. ‘That actually sells a lot in New York because there are no “bottoms” there,’ said Ronaldo enthusiastically. ‘Everyone in New York is a “top” and everyone in LA is a “bottom”.’ Ronaldo told me that if you booked early as a vendor, it cost $800 for the stall, and later $1,000, which he found reasonable. He wasn’t just here for the business opportunity, though. ‘I love Drag Race. Drag is a fun way to express yourself – and that thing where RuPaul says we’re born naked and the rest is drag, well, I really believe that. Businessmen are wearing drag – those are their power suits. For the gay community, the wigs, the dress, that’s a power suit for them as well.’

  You didn’t have to be a vendor at DragCon to be there for the business opportunity. Vivien Gabor, a tall drag queen from Seattle, told me that the first year she came as a fan, but this year she meant business – she was primarily here for ‘hardcore networking’ and to get new ideas and inspirations. At twenty-six years old, and with two years in the business, she considered herself semi-professional. She still had a day job, working in the back room at a Goodwill thrift store, but by night and on weekends she hosted and produced drag shows. While Seattle has a pretty eclectic drag scene made up of activists, people with musical theatre backgrounds and queens that are more punk rock, Vivien placed herself at the ‘pretty girl’ end of the spectrum. This surprised me, since she was dressed in leather with an executioner-style hooded headpiece. ‘I like to make people laugh, give people a break from having to think about bad things, but at the same time use it to raise money for charities,’ she said.

  She told me that a lot of her drag work came about from personal connections, and since she was a producer as well as a performer, she was there looking for sponsors – underwear, make-up or alcohol companies that would financially back her events in return for dressing dancers in branded underwear or promoting their alcohol. Vivien wanted to make drag her full-time job, but said for now that seemed pretty difficult to accomplish without going on Drag Race. ‘It’s what I like to call a side art,’ she said. ‘It’s not a typical visual art; it’s not mainstream at this point, mostly in bars or concert halls rather than big venues. That makes it harder for people to see us. To get your name out you have to work real hard.’

  Alma Bitches told me that she thought Drag Race was catapulting drag from a side art to a mainstream art and that this was a good thing. ‘I’m of a mind where I want it to get big because I love doing my shows, but I need people to come to them. The more people that love drag, the better it is for all of us,’ she said. For her it was about getting bums on seats. Vivien thought the popularity of drag was pushing drag queens further – a positive, yes – but explained that it also led to what she called a backlash. ‘We’re shown a lot of perfection and so now we’re getting comments from fans saying, “You don’t look the same as you do on Instagram,” or you’re not what they know of. It changes the game. It is a lot about pleasing ourselves, but now it’s also about remembering that we have audiences who know what drag is to them and we’re having to tailor it more towards that audience.’ I asked for an example. ‘Well, I can’t really do a song because it’s something that really touched my heart recently; or I can do that number but if I do it I have to do two more numbers that are on Top 40 lists . . . like Lady Gaga or Katy Perry. As soon as one of their songs drops, you’re learning it so that two nights later you’re performing it. The audience is gonna be expecting you to know it already.’

  ‘That sounds stressful,’ I said.

  ‘It isn’t necessarily bad,’ said Vivien. ‘It’s just a change in the game. And a lot of queens don’t know how to make that change.’

  I thought of MJ, and how he’d been told he was at risk of getting ‘left behind’, an anachronism in a world of overly made-up, Barbie-pink young drag stars who
learned everything they knew from YouTube and Drag Race. That first night we met he stood out to me because he didn’t dress like the other queens, because he sang a song that meant something to him – it was what made his show feel personal, touching, authentic.

  As I walked around talking to people – the two lesbian teenagers who’d saved up money from working extra jobs to come from New York, the older Israeli woman who had brought her gay son all the way from Tel Aviv to show that she supported him doing drag – the more it felt like a melting pot. And one that everyone I spoke to agreed felt safe. So what if it was hyper-capitalist? People can spend their money on what they want, within reason. Why shouldn’t they spend it on a plane ticket to America to buy merchandise with a man dressed as a woman on it? Going back to their hometowns wearing that was bound to raise eyebrows in precisely the right ways.

  For all the money spent at DragCon, the event wasn’t only about shopping. Throughout the course of the weekend there was a tight programme of panels. Forty-seven, to be precise. Alix and I scanned the schedule. Some were more political than others. Some were political without seeming it. ‘Tucking 101’, for example, dedicated an hour to discussing how and why drag queens tuck their genitals. We opted for ‘The Art of Resistance’, a panel about drag as a political art form. Admittedly the event happening in the conference room next door – a meet and greet with Drag Race contestants Trixie Mattel and Katya – was much busier, and admittedly it was jarring to hear a compère read out a list of the brand sponsors at the beginning of a talk on political resistance, but the panel was touching. Sasha Velour, a drag queen on Season 9 of Drag Race, explained what the political importance of drag was to her. It was about redefining beauty (she shaved her head bald when her mother was diagnosed with cancer and had to undergo chemotherapy) and it was about how being unafraid to gather and celebrate your value was a form of resistance in a climate of politics that doesn’t value you. In her eyes, drag was the ultimate queer form of activism because it melded tears and pathos with extravagant drama and the challenging of norms.

  Next, Alix and I went to a similar talk on ‘Drag in Trump’s America’, hosted by the magazine Teen Vogue. The panel featured three queens from Drag Race – Bob the Drag Queen (who’d entered on the chariot), Alaska Thunderfuck and Eureka O’Hara. The room was full. ‘Fuck yeah, it’s fucking good that drag has gone mainstream,’ said Bob – or gone from ‘being referential to being referenced’, as she put it. She believed that, paradoxically, drag was something real in a world of fakeness, a world that tried to erase certain identities. ‘Drag Race,’ she said, ‘is the most important show on television because it shows trans women and trans women of colour, and it’s not CSI or I Am Cait.’ And with that, the whole room booed Caitlyn Jenner. Whenever Donald Trump was mentioned, he got a good heckling too. ‘Trump is just a symptom of the problem,’ said Bob the Drag Queen solemnly. ‘It’s not the first time we’ve had people like Trump against us, it’s just white, straight people’s first taste of discrimination.’

  I was surprised at the directness of the panel. Perhaps because of what MJ had said, or because the various series of Drag Race I’d seen seemed to keep things politically non-partisan – possibly so as not to offend viewers, possibly because the show just didn’t feel like the place for such discussions. But DragCon was the place; here were three drag queens from three different parts of America with three different experiences mouthing off about the Trumps and the Jenners on stage. The atmosphere in the room was one of defiance and solidarity. Suddenly paying $50 for a weekend ticket felt like it might have been worth it. Changing my flight to attend definitely felt worth it. Even Alix was having a good time. She had stopped saying ‘Welcome to America’ because in this throbbing mass of silicone breast plates and skinny-jeaned homosexuals, there was clearly no one homogeneous America to joke about.

  At the end of DragCon each year, ringleader RuPaul gives a keynote speech to the lucky VIPs and traders from the conference who are given access. That year, he took to the stage in a turquoise suit and lilac shirt, and kicked off by announcing there would soon be a New York version of DragCon. I suddenly felt bad for the young lesbians from New York who’d saved up to travel all the way to LA, though I had an inkling that they would probably save up to go to the New York version too. Ru told the crowd that DragCon had once again captured the ethos he wanted it to – it was all about showing young people how to live their lives without worrying about being judged. He walked the crowd through his life as a queen in Atlanta and New York, explaining that experiences good and bad had come to be his currency. His speech was packed with self-help jargon like ‘say that you love yourself all the time’ and ‘clear out blockages in your life’ and ‘deactivate the ego’. Despite this, it felt surprisingly ad-libbed, unrehearsed. I guess it needed to be, in a room of LGBTQ+ people feeling precarious about their future in Trump’s America. When Ru brought up the US President, he was adamant: ‘We’re not going back in time,’ he said. ‘A problem cannot be solved on the same conscious level it was created on.’ The whole thing was like a church sermon crossed with a group therapy session. I felt a long way from home, but I didn’t feel altogether cynical; after all, the adoration for Ru was palpable. He might have been very wealthy, and at times transphobic, but the levels of acceptance that he preached now seemed to match those in the room; I’d never seen so many people who’d otherwise be outcasts smiling together in one place.

  As we shuffled out of the LA Convention Center that Sunday evening, Alix went to make a phone call, so I sat on the carpeted floor of DragCon, bedraggled queens pushing past me to their respective homes, some in faraway cities and countries. There was a man sitting next to me and we got talking. He was white, in his thirties, wearing an orange polo shirt and cargo trousers. His name was Eric. I assumed he was a gay man but just as I asked whether I could interview him, a neat, Waspy woman came over and joined him. ‘This is my wife, Susan,’ he said. They were lawyers, newly married – Eric from Wisconsin, Susan from Mississippi. Now they lived together in Las Vegas, and had come to LA specifically for DragCon because they adored RuPaul and the show. They had met at a drag night by accident in St Louis, so watching the show felt like a way of keeping that alive – then they fell in love with it. ‘We found it a very positive concept, hilarious and beautiful, affirming on so many levels,’ said Susan earnestly. ‘It’s not hard to be excited about something like that when you hear the opposite messages so much more.’ For her, RuPaul embodied a political statement that said ‘everyone is welcome’, but exerted his power subtly, using laughter to turn the world onto drag. Eric agreed. Ten years earlier he had represented a high-school student who was charged with disorderly conduct and cited quasi-criminally for wearing a dress to the prom. He’d been thinking about it a lot at DragCon: ‘There’s still hate and bigotry to fight and probably always will be, but this atmosphere is beautiful because it’s so body positive and positive to wherever one is on the sexual spectrum,’ he said.

  When I’d asked the teenage lesbians from New York why they thought DragCon was a good thing, they said it was not just because it fostered a community and culture for queer people, but also because it allowed straight people into that community. Their answer bowled me over. It wasn’t what I’d expected to be a priority for gay nineteen-year-olds, but like DragCon, they existed in a time and place where apparently gay culture no longer needed to stay separate. I figured now I was face to face with the straight people that they were talking about. Eric and Susan might not have been Republicans, but they were Anglican Christians who went to church every week. I found this pretty amazing. Especially when they told me that their two weekly rituals were church service and watching RuPaul’s Drag Race when a season was on. ‘We’re not so lucky to get DragCon every week of the year,’ joked Susan. Eric looked pensive. ‘For me . . . well, I identify as straight so it’s kind of easy street for me. But for a lot of people in a lot of parts of America and parts of the world, it’s a constant
fight. They’re dealing with bullying that doesn’t end in junior high or high school. I was thinking, there’s people flying back to parts of the United States to places that aren’t nearly as welcoming as the West Coast. The US Supreme Court can move when the public allows them to move; LGBTQ+ rights in this country are very fragile. So when DragCon helps say, “We’re not gonna go back in time”? It’s very cool.’

  chapter three

  IN THE BEGINNING, THERE WERE GAY BARS

  A few weeks after I returned from LA, I found myself sitting in a circle of people in a draughty London warehouse. We started by going around the group, sharing our name, our pronouns, and why we were there. Some were first-timers who had read about the campaign online and explained that they were ‘looking to do more activism’. Then there were the core members, who’d been going to the meetings for three years. I was there as a journalist, I said, who was thinking of writing an article to raise awareness about the campaign. Which was true, but I was also short on work.

  Things had been looking up for me in my personal life since Iceland and LA; I was still dating Emily the lawyer, crying less while she was asleep next to me, and although I wasn’t totally sure that I was ready for anything as serious as what I’d had with Salka, we’d continued hanging out. Something about the relationship just felt promising. But work-wise, I was listless, and still out of a full-time job, so I had decided to throw myself into writing about LGBTQ+ issues again. Only now I was regretting it: sitting across from me was someone I’d ended things with on the third date four years ago, her eyes boring into my soul.