Initial Themes from Beginning of Fieldwork
Drag as Inclusion/celebration:
Sandy Beach: book newer queens to work with more experienced queens. The mentor thing, it is what we do. Mimi caused a bit of a stir…drag exploded. At the same time, Ru Paul has shoved drag into the mainstream. Its exploded now. Is Ru Paul’s drag race now setting the standard? Will it go back to being cookie cutter…marketting yourself for television instead of entertainment and performance.
Cleophatra: Drag is a celebration of everything, life, unity, inclusion…it should never be something that excludes. The only label I need is my name.
Gender queer punk rock aret comedy, dance, camp, queens. Drag queens do not have to conform to a mold. The performance art community is very gender fluid in Philadelophia, in drag, burlesque everywhere. Drag can be cookie cutter or open. In AC, it is open
Farrah: Its our second high school…we were bullied in high school and now the drag community is like our cheer learders and the drag bars our schools. Its where we learn to be confident gay men. …The girls will rally the troops. Like if you are having a bad day…instead of being afraid, we go to our clubs and support each other, and believing in ourselves….
Stasha: We can use our drag to influence people for good reason. We support the gay youth. When I was 15 I was kicked out and now I like kids to come out and be there for them and tell em not to be a fraid if their family kicks them out. We can be your family. I feel like I can use that. Drag makes a gay acceptable. Feel comfortable, smile, be entertained. Take a break from your not so easy life. I use it as an opener…for comfotability and acceptability. Here, everyone is welcome.
Drag Families:
SS “drag mother in the southern states…kinda collectivelty a family, you two or three, you have one someone who is more the show queen, you have another someone who is more the pageant queen, and then there are some that mother you and guide you, like any mother would give you life lessons”
Roxxy Star (31) gogo dancer for a hip hop troupe at a lesbian bar. Needed know know how to paint my face, so I went to the only one I would ever want to be my drap mother in Tuscon, Jenney Starr…she showed me everything. ..Drag mother is someone who mentors you and shows you how to be in the drag community, the oerson who paints your face first”.
Jackie: In this day and age it is mainstream…I don’t have a drag mother, but my one drag daughter, I inspired a lot, but bob, a biological woamn with huge breasts, she does drag, and I will tell her!...shes a CIS woman…she wore this little wig once, she has big boobs, and im like listen bitch! This does not work!
Stasha.: drag mother took me under her wing. She teached me everything she had went through..luckily, she took me in. She schooled me, and got me off the negativity I was into
Sherry Vine
In NYC, I got a drag mother, it is like a family, and Raven would critique my act and dress…she would help me with my act….now I have a millio drag daughters…
Quinn Matthew:
Stasha is the drag daughter of my best friend, the baby queens that get mentored and they get shown the way…they become family. We fight like brother and sister. We rely each other in the worst of times and celebrate with each other in thebest of times. I do male pageants, as a amna, But I help the girls as a mentor. I like to nurture and give them that snese of…
Sheqeela lee-used to work through the Miss USA ans Miss teen USA as a dance choreographer. (52 years old).
“I have over 40 some kids that call me “mother Lee”, ummm…not all of them do drag, most of them are heterosexual or homosexual males, black males, who look up to what I do as being successful in my career…we all have familes dinners and stuff like that, and mostly, we use it as an outlet, where people don’t have familes that accept them for their lifestyleso they have a place of comfort that they can come and be around, other gays or other people who accept them for being who they are.
Freedom to define what feminine is:
(SS) we do have a more realistic view of what our bodies are…if you were a woman of that size, how would you do it…we get to be not a cookie cutter, we control the amount of femininity that we are presenting to the audience…”The miss america has become so blocked. When they are in swim suits they all have the same set of hips, and they go ahead and get breast implants to make sure they is the right cup size…we don’t have to do that…we can be one thing one day or even one act, and another thing the other” “In Missed America, I can do what I likes…I can serve up rack of lamb in swinsuit and come back serving lamb bites in evening gown (laughs)”
farrah: The way that I act on stage or present myself on stage, when I get dressed, put on things, it just takes over instinctively. The costume draws something out of me which is already there. It is natural. My male persona is more of a performance…I have had to practice being a man, lower my voice on the phone, for example, shake the hand a little more firm, masculine up. Probably my day to day life is more than a performance…Farrah is easy.
Why do drag?—freedom of expression
Miles: cosmetologist. I like the confidence that drag requires. When I put on a wig or a certain outfit I feel so confident. I go to the gay club here, I m in full get up and you are just free to be you. That’s what our community provides anyway.
Shaquilalee “It brings out the inner person that you always wanted to be…its larger than life, stuff I can do as shaqueeda, I can never do as Jerry…When I am in drag, I am looking at the straight guys, I love that attention…”
“I feel like a barbie doll that I never got to play with, and now I get to dress up and play with it”
Its very empowering, you can dominate the room (SL)
Savannah:It has empacted me on a level of sexiness, I am very thin…I can never…it allows me to be more sexy and bold than I get to be in my every day life….they have to look at me, I am powerful, I am 7 feet tall.”
Jackie Beat: drag used to be a rite of passage in the 70s and 80s, you would all get together for certain occassions in drag and I jus took it a little more seriouysly. There is something about a voice you discover when you are simultaneously not a man or a woman. You can pretty much say and do anything and people cut you slack (liminal)
…this is nirvavana..and hearing people laugh at my horrible jokes.
Savanah S- got into drag to pay for college from a military family, gotten so many opportunities through drag. “ every person is unique, just like stones…as drag queens we are that more rare jewel, because we can live as men or women…we know what women go through, to an extent, yet we are men.” (Savanah)
Roxxy…theater junkie, performer, one other kind of performance, but have severe nerves and anxiety and when it comes to doing that in front of other people, I freeze.”I have no desire to be a female in any sense, Roxxy is a character that comes out and expresses a whole nother side of me that IS me, but that is…that helped to break some barriers in the world and learn WHO I WAS….I think Roxxy has always been in there…it is a really liberating experience…”
CLEOphatra: I am a musical theater actor and I have been told because I am heavy that I wont be taken seriously until my 40s, and…it was devastating, because to be so inlove with something and so good at something and be told you have to wait 20 years…I was always hated drag…never thought it was for me…but I did costumes for Mark and then mimi contacted me, and I was hooked, weve talked on the phone everyday since, started making all her clothes and eventually dragged me in hsahaha to do the show…all of a sudden, drag became the artistic oulet I had been denied for the 5 years post college and then through being a drag queen I got my first off broadway role…I didn’t look like an actor is supposed to look like, but through drag I am able to accept the way that I am, that I am ok as I am…
NOAH “its an extension of ones being…it just sparkles.
…It celebrates everything that I was ever made fun of when I was a kid. ..I was always made fun of for being feminine, I was over the top and it kind of celebrates that…So it makes me feel like I can be myself and other people are that way too.
Chacha: Now I do it because it keeps me alive. It gets me out of depression, out of trouble. My mom and my sisiter passed a year and a half ago….repression…it was destrying me…so I went back to drag…I needde to put my energy into creating something. And…here I am…I ll be doing it until I am 90.
BDC: …the history of queer performance…gay people were forced to be underground, and this campy performance is a mockery of that society that is pushing them into the shadows…self knowleged and self referencing is so a part of camp…a character and and a commentary on the character all at. the same time.
Farrah: Make up costume and wig…when you act, people think they know who you are, but when you are in drag it is like you are wearing a mask, no one knows who you are…its like I am guarded behind the make up…its someone who takes the wheel for a couple of hours and lets me sit on the passenger side and relax and when I get home I can just…take the wig off and I am back to normal…like having a split personality and letting it take over.
Drag and Subversion:
MimI: I have always thought of my drag of being very brechtian, not trying to fool anyone, trapping them in the story, I never tried to convince you that I am a woman, I don’t really care…I want to get to the heart of the performance…camp. Its about this over the top…drag mocks identity and perceptions of identity. What is the idea of a woman, and then we just like crank it up, beyond barbie…its not even uber femme, it not even femme, its like, beyong the expectations of what is realistic for any living thing. Or simply what hair can do…the purpose of it is that it kind of solves the human need to be able toimagine what you want to be…not forgetting to play or imagine…we get so ingrained in yes no yes no, and…it lets us quesytion all of that drag is the antithessis of that. It gives you the ability to challenges and question whatever you like, drag is a political act, punk rock, activism, a fuck you to societiy’s rules…it is subversive in ots nature. It lives in that zone.
Cleophatra: Gender as a device for performance is one thing. Drag elevates itself beyond the specific gender binary and it allows itself to becomes a starting point for discussion gender and we see gender and speak about gender and a good diffuser for being able to discuss trans issues and the idea of sex…a lot of Trans females use drag as a vehicle to explore their gender.
Mimi: It would lose something if it was comepletely mainstream. There is something sexy about breakiung the rules.That is the reason why women who dress as men, that does not get the same attention. It is interesting to me…its not taboo for a woman to assume the roles of a mna, for a woman to wear a mans clothing…for a man, how dare you, you give up your male privledge and your male power to be a woamn…its seen as criminal. No one blinks an eye if a woman does it. There is something a little perverse about it…
BDLC:Painting drag with a broad brush..is like talking about art generally, there are many styles …drag is similar…camp sensisbility that I like so much …theres a way in which youre presenting something that is so…naïve to a situation, but in the way thatnthey perform it is clear that the actor is in on the joke with theaudience. The character highlights my positive qualities and my flaws but also a reflection of what I see around me in society…my character has a short attention span for instance..i see my character as a cultural commentary, but how that looks always shifts…it may with an audience, or what I am trying to talk about.
Farrah: If you think gender is all a performance, I would invite you to do it…to put of a pair of high heels and a wig and select a song…everything is real..and everything is a performasnce from the moment we get up and brush our teeth…I don’t understand…at one point we are all acting…for me EVERYTHING is real. EVERYTHING. I feel it. I feel that character…sometimes it takes me a while to get it out of me…ive become it. It could take hours…a shower. (embodiment-method acting) Its all in you…you have to borrow things from your personality to make it beilevable.
Mimi:It’s a really valid arguent…appropriation…but, you cant dress uplike that because you are not from that world…when is the point when you cant be anything but what you are? …Is all blackface wrong? It’s a good question. Ive seen it work. It’s the performance that matter, not the blackface. As long as it comes from a place of respect and love….it comes from an admiration of women and things that are feminine…and the other part is that…its an escape from the oppression that gay men have had for so long, because if you think about…growing up, gay men are picked on when they are growing up and stigmatized, not because they are gay, but because we are feminine. Its because he has femineine qualities…giving up his male power to be feminine. In some ways drag is not about protraying a WOMAN, it is about protraying femininity…its not what a woman does…it is a fantasy…its about gay men and their oppression.
Jackie: There needs to be affection in a performance…that judement does coem from the audience…we see that in black face in drag…palying diana ross…
Drag & Embodiing Femininity
Cleo is an extension of me, my personality doesn’t change, I tell dirtier jokes, but…I need that person to be an extension of me…there is something real in that. She is real. I cant play another person without being myself…
Ben de la creeme:Embodiying her on the stage has changed me, I feel much more aware and comfortable in my life about the way that evereything is a performance, and certainly the way I…can embody a character that comes natural…It has shifted my relationship to my gender presentation over the years in a way that when I was very young, I sortof was like,,,do I want to be a woman or…and I realized no, and..then I wanted to understand about misogyny in drag, I really wanted to understand the history and perspective…more often it’s a real container for qualities that exist in the people who perform it. Push the boundaries…I went through a period when I was way butcher in my daily life, like it let me let go of femininity in a way that I had not, and now I feel really comfortable in my skin with my femininity.
Chacha: People think that we are mocking women, but in my case it is a tribute, not a mocking…I know that women say that…how could you do that when you are not a woman? But you do not need to have a vagina to feel like a woman or a penis, you don’t, to feel or behave like a man, its all in you and how you feel.
Chacha: Females inspire me. I try to replicate the beauty I see in that women. The feamle members in mexico inspire me because they show me what real beauty is…it has nothing to do with the outside, but it’s the inside, and when you can show that…everyone is beautiful…I copy mannerisms and them I put them on the performance. I play six characters…from one to the other…now I put it all in performnace.
Farrah: We go between the two genders and stay in the same body…its had an interesting impact on my body. Sometimes I catch myself walking like farrah…
Farrah: Taking command of a room…they walk into a room and everyone stops and pays attention. My talent is being funny and charismatic. I do a 5 minute meal routine. I love making people laugh and smile.
FARRAH: our own way of taking our creativity, an illustion and play around with the insecurities I have had before, or I get to embrace the fact that I have always been a
feminine boy and that femininity can be very powerful….all the positive role models I have had in my life have always been women. Strong women like my mother and my boss. I was raised by a lot of women. I have always been attracted to women’s power and what they are and what they can do.
Stasha: When Im stasha, they think im a full on woman. I love that. Im the poochie glam dance queen.
Manilla Luzon: women get so many liberties to be creative…I love being creative and I love pretty things…and it is fun to do it for yourself, instead of your girlfriends, I always loved fashion. I was forced out of the closet, I wasn’t ready, but…since everyone knew…I did what I wanted…when I was playig straight…I mean playing straight, that was the acting. If Ia ma coming out of the closet, I am taking all the dresses with me (laughs).
It all comes from within, but it is so influenced by so many women, my mother, actresses, pop starts, always drawing inspiration from women, all women. I don’t want to physically be a woman, but I love the powr they have. Drag is the perfect place for me to express myself…drag is about no boundaries, I don’t know where it is going to go, conchita wurst, the bearded drag queen…she is hot, always evloving working with what you have…to express yourself… sickening eye makeup and a beard, no boobs, not tucked, you don’t have to wera haels anymopre as long as you are dressing up…drag is about making sure that people look at you and say yes, this is who ai am , this is how I am expressing ourselves…we can present ourselves any way we want…
Partner sahara davenport died of heart failure at 27, as a result of using designer drugs like ketamine, she got off them with the help of her drag mother before she entered the world of entertainment.
Sherry…And drag is like turning the volume up … we are not playing women…its heightened…its an other. I see it as a character…I don’t see it as a woman or acting feminine.
Jackie B: We grew up watching carol burnett…we wanted it to be campy!
Women are allowed to express themselves…fashionably, hairstyles, emotionally…when you hear a torch song by some woman, its all over the place!...thats not what the male side of the world is…so when I see drag kings, it always shocks me a little bit because what they are really doing..is putting a wayy up and truning the emotions off..women can be so much more…
I don’t really appreciste the draggs that look like real girls…if I want to see real girls, ill hang out at the mall, I want to see a monster…shock value does not work though…
Jackie: Women are allowed to express themselves…fashionably, hairstyles, emotionally…when you hear a torch song by some woman, its all over the place!...thats not what the male side of the world is…so when I see drag kings, it always shocks me a little bit because what they are really doing..is putting a wayy up and truning the emotions off..women can be so much more…
I don’t really appreciste the draggs that look like real girls…if I want to see real girls, ill hang out at the mall, I want to see a monster…shock value does not work though…
Comments
Post a Comment