Sometimes, You Just Need to Escape.

      Blessed little lambs that you are who read this blog, know that drag is a recently cultivated little obsession of ours. If you want to bail out now, go ahead. No hard feelings. This is part 2 of my foray into drag. You’ve been warned.

     Last Friday, Gina and I went to our first live drag show. It was, to quote the lingo the kids these days are using, epic.  Not only was it our first live drag show, it took place in Northampton Massachusetts, which is quite possibly one of our most favorite places in the world. It’s where the coffee is strong, and so are the women. And not only was it in Northampton Massachusetts, it starred two of our favorite drag queens ever. We got our picture taken with them. They signed our t-shirts. The spoke to us. We’re in love, officially.

            Though I would submit that there is never not a good time to get to see Raven or Jujubee in person (forgive me, o gods of syntax for that one), our virginal drag show experience proved to be a small but restorative oasis in a sea of roiling reality. Sometimes, a person just needs to escape. And drag provides an escape, both for the performer and also for the (willing) audience.  I am still learning about drag, its culture within the gay world, and its different forms of expression, but the more I learn about it as an art form, the more enamored of it I become. Drag shows and the drag pageant circuit are sort of offshoots of the gay ballroom scene, which in turn formed out of a need for the gay community to create their own havens of safe realities. In the 1990 documentary about New York City's ball scene, Paris is Burning, one person describes entering into a ball venue as“crossing into the looking glass. Into Wonderland. It is the only place where it feels 100% right being gay.”

            For those in the ball world, and also for those who do drag, both forms of expression are a way to escape the feelings of powerlessness, self-hatred, vulnerability, and real danger that exist on a daily basis for queers. By participating in balls, and by doing drag the contestants and performers get to rewrite the rules of reality. They make a world where the reviled are instead revered, where losers are winners, and where the voiceless have voice. In my last post, I wrote about failure. About feeling like a failure and about how failure can rapidly consume. What I love about drag is that I see how it provides for those who do it, a way to escape feeling like a failure (the failure of being gay in a hetero-normative world), by creating a persona that empowers.

            Drag queens are characters. They have personalities, likes, interests, and tastes that are separate from their male counterparts. In that sense, drag is like writing. Both are a way to fiddle with truths and make up different realities and then invite audiences into their crafted worlds. The power of fiction is its ability to model reality without having to submit claims of actually being reality. Sometimes, I just want to escape. And so I create worlds and characters and stories that are my own. I can lose myself in them, and I can also tweak reality to my liking. Writing is my venue. E.L Doctorow writes in the opening paragraph of his essay, “False Documents” that “by a ritual transaction between reader and writer, instructive emotion is generated in the reader from the illusion of suffering an experience not his own.”  Just as I can feel real empowerment or understanding or sorrow or love in the novels that I read, so too can similar instructive emotion be generated in other forms of art. I feel empowerment and love and voice from drag. Not in all drag, not from all performers. But my favorite drag queens are like my beloved authors.  When they invite me into their worlds, I eagerly accept.   

        

I never knew how small Gina and I actually are.