If I Die at My First Drag Show
If I Die at My First Drag Show
Reflections from My Debut as Mx Underworld
Dear reader,
Below is an essay I wrote before my debut drag performance. It was one week before the Club Q shooting and I truly feared for my life. It’s now been four months since my debut and I want to celebrate my artistic development while also urging all of us to continue to fight against drag bans and trans genocide.
Thank you for reading. Peace, love, and resistance <3
If I Die at My First Drag Show
Tomorrow night will be my first drag performance. I’m writing this in case it’s my last. It’s been one week since the Club Q shooting. I don’t know when or where the next anti-LGBTQ+ massacre will take place, but I know it will happen again. Even while living comfortably in my liberal East Coast city, I’m terrified of the near future.
I’ve been doing drag for about four months now. Realistically, it’s been at least five years now, but I’ve been doing brows and lashes more actively for the past several months. I wear intricate colorful eyeshadow three days a week and have been consistently since coming out as nonbinary at the age of 25 (thanks to the support and encouragement of my fellow queer grad students!). Every weekend for the past three of four years, I’ve worn heels and dresses to clubs and social gatherings. I feel well-prepared for my performance, in terms of looks and style. Stage fright is the least of my worries. My biggest fear is an invasion of Club Q copycat killers. It’s a fear shared among queer people throughout the states.
American drag is an art of survival and rebellion against the Christian right, pioneered by queer and trans trailblazers like William Dorsey Swann, Gladys Bentley, Crystal Lebejia, Vaginal Creme Davis, and (the frequently referenced, but still vastly unappreciated) Divine. It’s an artform the queer community has championed for centuries now. Risking incarceration, institutionalization, and sexual and physical abuse, drag artists use their performances to challenge the status quo. Putting on the face and heels, I feel like a warrior entering a battlefield with an army of fellow sissies, butches, and ferocious fruits.
My armor is: a leather jacket, a black wig (stylistically, a mix between an Elvira and Morticia hairdo), a MeUndies Halloween bra, leather booty shorts, fishnet stockings, and suede thigh high boots. Everything except the bra has been gifted to me from the queer friends and mentors I’ve made since living in the city. Some of them are seasoned drag performers, while others are aspiring to be. All of us are inspired by local performers, as well as those we see on social media, Drag Race, and Dragula–though, we also recognize how mainstream media gentrifies QTBIPOC drag and ball culture.
Boston drag is just as beautifully strange and spectacular as anything I’ve seen on any televised drag series. From bearded queens to burlesque fairy goths to 70s inspired drag kings, the drag scene here is a community of queer people uplifting each other. That’s why I feel comfortable enough to get on stage. For far too long I’ve been a solitary, depressed gay yearning for a community of survivors. It took me years to realize that drag is the artform that brings so many of us queer people together. And now that I’m finally over the rainbow, I fear my time here will be cut short by some wicked witch of the Westboro Baptist Church.
Over the past several years, I’ve seen my city become infiltrated by transphobic white supremacists. Three years ago, the Straight Pride Parade was held during the summer of the 50th anniversary of Stonewall. Two years ago, a collective of trans and queer activists formed Trans Resistance MA in response to trans-exclusion on the Boston Pride board and an overall lack of QTBIPOC representation in the parade. Last summer, a group of masked neo-Nazis protested a drag queen story hour at my local library, waving a banner that read “Pedo Scum Off Our Streets.” A week after this event, I was personally attacked in broad daylight at a subway station by a group of teen boys who called me the f slur. All this is happening in one of the “world’s most accepting cities for LGBTQ+ people,” according to GayTimes.
So, if I die after my first drag performance, my first public outing as my authentic self, I have some last words to my murderer and the people who continue to support queer genocide. In typical gay fashion, I leave you with musical lyrics from the 1987 Sondheim masterpiece Into the Woods: children will listen. I’ve been listening to this song for months now, hoping it may be part of my witch-inspired drag act in the near future…if I ever see that future.
Haunted by a recent interview with the Club Q terrorist’s father, who openly admits feeling relieved his child was a shooter and not gay, I can’t stop thinking of these lyrics: “Children will look to you for which way to turn/To learn what to be/Careful before you say, listen to me/Children will listen.”
While conservative extremists continue to accuse us of being groomers and “scum,” children listen and learn to hate themselves and everyone around them. Children are listening and watching. They have witnessed our complicity in the eradication of queer people. They are learning how to maintain a straight white empire.
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