Diary of a Drag Queen, page 7
As Ace drifted off, I went to the loo and had a wank about Sivan. Best orgasm of my day. I went to sleep disappointed I never got his number, but elated that I got to spend one night sleeping next to Ace. I think I might have to start getting over him tomorrow.
12th February / le 12 février
Today is my mum’s birthday. Happy birthday, Mum! I am proud of you, and grateful for you. You are, more than any man, the love of my life.
I called her to wish her happy birthday, but of course I didn’t tell her this.
It’s also just over a decade since I came out to her. I hear other stories of people’s parents saying, ‘We know, and we love you.’ But as I stood in my fluffy polka-dot dressing gown holding a mug that read I love shoes!, revealing my homosexuality to my mum couldn’t have felt further from that. Her exact words were, ‘We’ll see,’ in a stroke negating any agency I had harnessed in deciding to de-closet myself at age thirteen.
For years thereafter, we undulated between subtle disapproving digs to monumental fights because I’d wanted to wear a decorative Venetian mask to a masquerade party and she’d hated the idea that I might ‘parade’ it around. ‘It’ being my gayness. These things may seem innocuous, but when they’re really about who you are, the slightest disapproval from someone who should love you unconditionally burns like a hot poker searing into pig’s skin, a brand of shame for life.
For all those years I was full of blame toward my mum: bitching behind her back about her confusing disapproval of my sexuality and gender identities. I held things back and built things up. She in turn misjudged and angered and grew frustrated with this kid of hers who wasn’t exactly what she’d expected, especially after she’d dedicated so much energy and all the money she could muster to making me happy, safe, protected, empowered and intelligent in the ways she knew how.
One of our biggest arguments ever, brought about by something unmemorable now like her not wanting me to wear skinny jeans, erupted in a statement I still believe to be true today: ‘If you’re going to have a child you’d best love it for who and what it is. Any other shit is on you and your judgments.’ Enough of these stories of people kicking out and disowning their children because they’re gay or trans or queer or something which doesn’t fit neatly into a suffocating plan laid out for a child by a parent: the number of friends and LGBTQIA+ siblings I have who still have gaping hang-ups and constant therapy because of their parental disapproval is appalling.
The other day I was telling a friend, Jessie, about all of this, explaining the details of those painful memories. She couldn’t believe it because my mum and dad are now exemplary parents, and even better allies. I would, in a heartbeat, call them for anything: an HIV scare, a bad date, a particularly homophobic comment made, a question about work or love or sex or anything else that I wasn’t sure of. I would tell them anything, pushing them to understand ever more about what it means to live as queer.
‘Sometimes I have group sex with loads of people’ gets less than a batted eyelid from a mother once so disapproving.
‘How did you get here though?’ Jessie asked.
‘Hard fucking work,’ I replied, sipping a cosmopolitan like the wealthy city slicker I am.
The work is different for each person, and it doesn’t always pay off. There are some instances where blame is justified and the effort isn’t worth it for an undeserving loved one or relative. But for me it was about being uncompromising about aspects of my life that Mum might have me change: ‘I am a drag queen, I am wearing these clothes, I am having sex in this way and if you want to be a part of it then I will tell you it all. If you don’t, then I will tell you nothing; I won’t even be in your life.’ My siblings roll their eyes at my honesty with her, but I can’t understand the harm in telling her: she has lived a life longer and fuller than mine in many ways, and her understanding of my experience only seems to proffer even more acceptance.
I worked hard early on to recognise that she really owed me nothing, and that a lot of her hurtful actions and words were because of fear and miseducation, and mine were because I was hurting and scared. It’s a weird moment when you realise your parents are flawed humans whose knowledge doesn’t encompass everything, whose opinions aren’t always right. After all, I was the first gay person they’d ever met. Where I’m from nobody really talks about it.
From my mum’s perspective, getting over her hurtful behaviour came when she let go of the desperation to protect me, learning to see my world as something blossoming with culture and love and not as something that would bring violence and judgment. She doesn’t ‘feel pride, because that’s somewhat patronising’ – a quote I always remember her saying as she was getting the shopping in Aldi, looking after my poorly grandma and doing another hundred things at once. Instead she feels ‘grateful’, grateful that me and my friends have opened up a whole culture to her and my dad and welcomed them in. It makes her excited and moved. It makes her feel full.
In Catholicism you pay penance for your sins by action. I fucking hate Catholicism, bar the campy visuals, but if anyone has paid penance it’s my mum. There’s no need for forgiveness on either side because we both worked hard to move beyond what was there before. We burned down our relationship and built a new, greener one on the ground that was left. Both of us have learned how to blossom together, with much hard work and mutual education.
She’s taught me so much, as any true love does. But mostly she’s taught me the power of learning and unlearning, and working hard to do it.
13th February / le 13 février
People think drag queens are stupid.
This is misogyny in action: they think that because we feminise ourselves, because we spend a lot of time on make-up and hair and getting exactly the right look, we are vapid, bitchy and stupid.
People are wrong to think drag queens are stupid.
We get fluffed off: called ‘darling’, ‘fabulous’, coded as frippery before foxy or smart. We get underpaid and exploited, but we’re aware; we’re just too broke to lose the gig. We make a living off laughing at you laughing at us. We know exactly what we’re laughing at, what structures we’re punching at, what strings to pluck at to make you gasp with shock or huff with laughter.
We created a culture which the world marvels at, wishes for, sponges off. We know how to navigate cities and spaces in the smartest of ways, mapping out routes to escape people’s stupid, ailing masculinities. We know how to wear heels all night and not feel the burn. We know how to make a mockery not of women, but of what you (men) think women should be, whereas you (men) just, simply, mock women.
It’s stupid to think drag queens are stupid.
14th February / le 14 février
It’s now become the kooky, intelligent position to be anti-Valentine’s Day, right? Every year there are viral tweets, memes, think-pieces about how Valentine’s Day is for sucky assholes who are obsessed with capitalism and single-shaming.
I agree, in some ways, that needing a day to celebrate being coupled up with someone is stupid, because I want a man who celebrates me every single day! Amirite ladies?!
But it twigged to me this morning that, like all things, a queer reading of this idea of couplings might be more productive than another year of hurling anti-couple propaganda at people on Facebook all day. No, queen, that was last year. This year, alternatively, I’ve decided to dedicate Valentine’s Day to my genitals.
Strange choice, perhaps, but that’s a subject that hasn’t always been so easy for me.
I don’t remember much about being a young child, like an astoundingly small amount actually, but I remember growing my first armpit hair. I remember seeing it and feeling jubilant as, ever since I could remember, I had courted a feeling that my insides were ill matched to my outside. But, here was puberty: and I was jubilant because I was becoming male. Finally the confusion would stop. I would like girls. I would hate dresses. I would play football. I would be normal. Now that word sends shivers down my spine. Then, desperate hope for normality kept me alive.
And in pushing out this tiny armpit hair, my body confirmed my maleness, my normality, and herein I would be free of all of these doubts and dysphorias. I willed more to grow – every day I used shampoo and conditioner on my one armpit pube in the hope that such brilliant care would coax more of these sticky little hairs to prick out.
Eventually more grew, and I hated them.
More grew on my chest, and I hated them.
More grew on my face, my ass, my legs, my arms, and I hated them.
Then the worst happened – not only did my hair grow, the other thing, the other piece of conformation that confirmed my maleness grew. And I hated it.
I toyed with changing it; I hid it between my legs and stared in the mirror for hours, pulling sleek fabrics over my body as if I were a wealthy woman with fine taste, who had lots of time for preening herself and saying ‘oooh-la-la’, and, most crucially, who had a stunning vagina.
I did drag in my bedroom and, eventually, drag on stage. I had sex in the receiving position – for years ignoring the urge to have my genitals touched, pleasured. I felt they weren’t mine; my penis an appendage that got in the way of my role as pleasure-giver in the bedroom. When I think about that I feel disappointed that I thought the ‘femme’ position in bed meant to receive no pleasure.
Last summer I gained a lot of weight. This isn’t unusual for me: and what usually follows is a usually winding spiral of self-loathing, crash dieting, and painful punishment on my body that has always seemed to fail me.
In the same summer I also came out as non-binary. For the first time I had said what I really felt about my body – and it wasn’t how much I hated it, how much I wanted to change it, how much I wanted to hide it – no, for the first time I was offering it the care it had always deserved. For the first time I had really seen it.
Through starting to accept a gender I’d always been, looking back on those forgotten years as a child, I finally gave my mind the tools to reframe the way I thought about my body. A body that had previously felt like a lost cause, like a wreckage built of cigarettes, blisters from heels, years of violent homophobia; one constructed of all the ways I’d failed being male, and all the ways society had punished me for that.
But being non-binary offered a place to depart the pains of maleness and masculinity, and look at my body – penis included – and see it first as mine, and not as society’s.
I don’t see my hair as man, my fatty-boobs as woman, I don’t see my small feet as female and my cock and bollocks as a big lumbering justification for structural dominance. My body is just mine. It belongs to me. My penis is femme, my penis is masc, my penis is an alien, it’s soft, a flower, it’s hard, it’s anything I wish it to be. It is a site for pleasure. Pleasure that I deserve, that I am learning to receive. I don’t have to make my pleasure smaller for someone else’s to be bigger.
So, this year Valentine’s Day is dedicated to my penis, my flower, my junk, my thing that doesn’t make me male or female because it’s mine and I am neither. And thus ends my queering of Valentine’s Day. I’ll take a table for two at Carluccio’s – one for me, and one for Brenda, my penis.
17th February / le 17 février
Last night I had dinner with Ace, Lara, who was on iconic form, and his godmother who is a living icon. She’s perhaps the most cutting person I’ve ever met, and routinely throws boulders mid-conversation, things like: ‘Aren’t you a little fat for that top?’ or ‘This story’s offensively dull.’ It sounds vicious, but once you allow yourself to bathe in those acidic waters it’s remarkably refreshing.
Naturally, as is often the way of these drunk dinners when there’s a drag queen present, things progressed to talk of drag.
‘It’s misogynist,’ Ace’s godmother rattled. ‘You’re allowed to do so many things that women aren’t allowed to do because you’re “brave” enough to sacrifice your maleness and put on a dress.’
It’s a difficult question – the one about drag being anti-feminist. Sure, a lot of cis male drag queens do exploit femininity and femaleness in ways women wouldn’t be allowed to. The most common portrayal of drag in mainstream culture is of one which is by and for cis men only – look at RuPaul’s Drag Race.
But labelling all drag misogynist – and don’t get me wrong, a lot of it is – reduces gender and identity down to a deeply boring and limiting binary in which men are men and women are women and any transgression from these oppressive posts is misogynist. It leaves no room for exploration.
‘I disagree,’ Ace responded to his godmother. ‘I’m not a woman so I can’t know what it feels like, but do you not think drag, when done cleverly, smartly, can actually undermine the way femininity is loaded with so many expectations from society?’
We all swilled back our red wine. It was all frightfully middle class, the kind of dinner I shamefully revel in.
‘For me, all I know is that drag saved my life,’ I piped up. ‘When I put on drag I’m never thinking about becoming a woman, I’m always thinking about disentangling myself from the concept of maleness that has always brought me pain – both from the outside and inside – because I was too feminine for it.’ Ace agreed.
And yes, it’s likely that most drag queens and kings have at some point done something offensive, said something offensive, worn something offensive. Most queer people have, too, and probably most minorities, because we aren’t born as the beacon of political brilliance we might be now. Sitting at society’s fringes doesn’t make you instantly a human rights specialist/oracle. But I have noticed within queer communities people are more often ready to learn their wrongdoings, apologise and move on than those who have more privilege. ‘My drag definitely started as misogynist – empowering me to act slutty while women around me were shamed for it. But I think a lot of us, whatever gender, are having these conversations now,’ I said.
We’re all learning. Well, everyone except the powerful, stuffy men who go on and on about Political Correctness Gone Mad (such a nineties debate, literally get over it). But while they drone on, we’re here spending time learning how to get it right, do it better, fight for inclusion and as broad a range of nuanced viewpoints and opinions as possible. We are, simply, progressing beyond the tiny minds of the tiny men who, for centuries, made us feel tiny. The picture is shifting, albeit slowly.
We talked all of this through over, like, three more bottles of wine; I lost count. ‘I think I was wrong actually, perhaps drag isn’t always misogynist, just most of the time,’ Ace’s godmother retracted. Even she was a little shocked at herself.
Then we had Viennetta and talked about whether football was homophobic.
It defo is.
21st February / le 21 février
This morning I woke up to find this guy from high schoolfn2 had gone through every Facebook profile picture of mine and commented ‘fagget’ [sic], which I found weirdly funny. This random guy, one I literally forgot existed, took the time to misspell faggot under 267 of my profile pictures, one of which he’s actually in (!). It’s truly comical to imagine someone sitting in their bedroom obsessively copy-pasting such a non-insult beneath every image. It should be noted I’m not laughing at him for misspelling—that’s just classist.
I am a faggot; I got the memo way back when I watched Christina Aguilera’s ‘Beautiful’ video and saw those two men being stared at for kissing, realising to my terror (and eventual joy) that they were me. Being a faggot is not a problem for me.
I find it oddly validating for two reasons though, and both of them make me laugh somewhat smugly. One – if you’ve got this much time on your hands your life is certainly not as exciting as mine. Two – if you think this is something that will offend me, because you obviously think it will, I’m glad I don’t fit inside your worldview. It’s way better where I’m standing.
Anyway, off to the dry cleaners to pick up three sequinned gowns that had started to really stink. I love being a faggot.
22nd February / le 22 février
Today was all about Denim. We had our first meeting in ages, now we’ve all taken time to try different things, subsequently failed, and are committing to the original girlband.
So, there we were, pulled back together and in need of the nourishment that is our drag family. I like to think of drag and queer families like quilts: all patched together from different places, offering different things. We all play roles of mothers and children, make-up artists and cash machines: each stepping up when another might be in need. It’s reciprocity in the most beautiful way. It’s fighting, and forgiving, the way you do with siblings.
We spent the day excited, talking about the things we want to say and do and portray, and who Denim are now (now we’re in London and not at university, where it all began). We agreed that the way forward was to launch a full-scale attack of delusion: ‘From now we are the biggest band in the world,’ Glamrou explained.
Fake it till you make it.
We spent a while budgeting and came to the realisation that it’s no good budgeting if the money doesn’t exist. Glamrou decided they could afford a grand on their credit card – an offer we all softly protested but eventually took because we all knew it was the only option. Bless her.
As for the show: we’ve decided it will be about gentrification and Soho losing its queer spaces because of a strange life cycle it seems that only queer places undergo, a life cycle that seems particularly accelerated right now, which looks something like this:
It opens.
Queers have it for about a month, in which time it becomes a little pop-up utopia.
A subculture magazine writes an article about how amazing it is.
