Write here, write now.

To writers (& all artists): don't ever wait to begin. There is no time, ever, that you will be so prepared and inspired as to immediately birth the perfect, complete piece. I just allowed myself to write five incoherent pages and realized that, while I already had the support of my advisor to insert my own narrative into my thesis, to write truthfully about drag, I must totally radicalize the form of scholarly writing. In this moment of artistic & scholastic liberty, I realized that I am writing both a thesis and a one-(wo/hu)man performance piece.  


Drag in the post modern age is about transcending barriers; I cannot tell a new truth inside an old structure. Liberate yourself.  Be spherical instead of linear.  Hold contradictions in your mind and wait for the truth of the paradox to reveal itself.  Be brave.  Be brave with me.  Help me be brave, when I doubt my own voice and think this was all a grandiose, terrible, very bad, very scary idea.  


It probably helps to endlessly re-read the Tao Te Ching.

My friend Mel and I, with props provided by Kings n' Things from Austin, TX, posing in their hotel room at the twelfth annual International Drag King Extravaganza.  After an amazing series of interviews for my thesis (and the upcoming documentary being produced which gave rise to my own studies) they wanted to dress us up and have a photo shoot.  Clearly, we happily obliged.

The Thrill of Queer Scholarship

There is something extremely thrilling about the research I am currently undertaking on drag kings for my thesis, which is the capstone experience of my baccalaureate education in gender studies.  Since returning to school to complete my B.A., all of my research has been relatively trying, primarily because I have consistently chosen to examine the largely unexamined, ie, LGBTQ, non-white, and/or anti-capitalist individuals and communities.

Angela Davis' autobiography is out of print; I had to buy it.  The library didn't have a copy of The Transgender Studies Reader; I borrowed it from a friend.  One of the best queer scholarly journals is British; I've begged access from professors who are also gracious friends and who have access to better resourced libraries than I do.  In other words, my research on queer subjects has necessarily reflected attributes of many queer communities: communal pooling of resources, resilience in the face of frustration, crafting a voice for myself and my communities from a little of this and a dash of that and heaping scoops of moxy, audacity, and pride.

Somehow, this research on drag kings has been easier.  In fact, it's ben so much easier that it's harder:  I have a bumper crop of scholarly articles and theoretical frameworks, so much so that I have to be extremely specific in my focus in order to keep to twenty five to thirty pages.  This is before I have begun logging and transcribing the footage that I captured, with the tireless efforts of my wonderful friend Mel, at the twelfth annual International Drag King Extravaganza.  I have yet to set foot in an archive to unearth historical artifacts; time constraints will not allow me to do so.

In addition, the relatively small of queer communities puts lots of people within my reach whose straight counterparts I would be unlikely to have access to.  What do I mean by unusual access?  I mean that my phone buzzes at a half past midnight and one of the theorists upon whom my work is based has texted me to say we should make a date to discuss my work.  Similarly, the relative youth of a (vaguely) cohesive set of LGBT cultures in America, essentially post-Stonewall, means that many of the founders are still alive or, at least on film and very much remembered by the adults and elders of my communities.

There is another dimension of joy in my scholarship, and that is style in which I am finding some of the articles written.  There is an infusion of personal narrative directly into scholarly examination.  Indeed, it was a suggestion in the feminist research book that accompanied the course that it can be a feminist project to assert new feminist epistemologies and methodologies, including the location of the scholar in the scholarship, rather than posing as an objective observer as in modern scientific experimentation.  I had jokingly asked my Twitter followers whether I could refer to a theorist by first name in my thesis since I knew her personally; the answer was a clear "no."  I further challenged that this was a thesis on drag, that irreverence should reflect in the style of the writing as well as the subject, and that I could turn the paper in with glitter in the cover to make this clear.  Indeed, I believe that a queering of the academic style could be valuable to its overall purpose, which is to amplify the voices of those who are often culturally, and especially legally, voiceless in society.

One final joy: reading about people that I have seen perform as formative in drag communities and culture.  I can take or leave Hollywood stars; boutique celebrities who perform on small stages and are written up in scholarly journals make me swoon.

My photo taken at IDKE XII: Gender Justice by Puppet L'Artist.

Life's a Drag - and I *LOVE* it!

This past Sunday, I was the MC for the 2011 calendar release party for The Liberty City Kings, aka LiCK. They are Philadelphia's only drag king and burlesque queen troupe, and I was extremely excited to be invited by their fabulous leader and co-founder, Heather Coutts, to be the MC for this event. I met Heather two years ago at QFest, and worked with her immediately thereafter on my first ever film set. She is one of my favorite Philadelphians and when she invited me to her favorite playground - gender - I wasn't about to turn her down.

I take my lessons in gender identity and drag from the great post modern theorists and New York performance artists: Kate Bornstein, Justin Bond, http://taylormac.net/TaylorMac.net/Home.html. Each in her/his/hir own way helped explode the binary gender system for me. Each is like an angel or a prophet from a future where sissies are as celebrated as the captain of the football team, a butch diesel dyke is the President of the United States, and nobody has to be anything but what makes them feel safe, loved and happy. They are so beautiful that they're sometimes almost too much to take in.

In truly post modern fashion, it doesn't exactly interest me to be a "man" in "women's" clothing. I think there's still huge value (and just plain fun) in drag queens and drag kings. For many audience members, it's still subversive. For those performing it, it's still a thrill to act in roles that aren't readily available in daily life. However, as Stephen Heath once wisely observed, "the difference inverted is the difference maintained."

Don't take that to mean that I think that drag artists are reinforcing the patriarchy, far from it. But at a certain point it is the destiny for some of us gender warriors to move beyond the binary entirely. Sometimes this looks like painting from both palettes at once; some go so far beyond anything recognizable in culture and fashion as to like more an alien species than another sex. This is what I yearn for in my performances. I'm not interested in being a drag queen exactly; I intend to ascend my throne as genderfuck royalty.

The really magical part, for me at least, is to realize that not every member of the audience lives in the gender fluid world that I do. For some, it is their first drag show. Probably, for many, they have seen many a drag queen belt out (or lip sync) a hundred and ten Liza Minelli songs, but never seen a drag king sing Buddy Holly. Many of our audience members may be gay and lesbian, but may have never considered living too far outside their gender norms. Whether it's the endless gay porn sites fetishizing "real straight men fucking" or another singles ad from a "discrete masc dude" who wants "no fats or fems," so many lesbian, gay, and bisexual people have been so busy telling straight people (and themselves, including a younger version of myself) that our sexuality doesn't make us any different, that we've jumped through gender normative hoops to prove it. In the process we've wounded ourselves and our own, and drag isn't just fun; it's healing.

As binary gender disintegrated practically before my eyes with every chapter of Gender Outlaw and every gender transcended performance I saw in New York, I found new things to love about myself and others. As it turns out, glitter accentuates chest hair, as opposed to somehow tarnishing it with "femininity." Never mind the point that we all come from mothers and are taught to hate femininity expressed pretty much everywhere but straight porn and Swiffer commercials. And let's face it, six inch heels are the only shot I've ever got to be taller than my Dad. (In fact, they make me the tallest man in the whole family! Well, whatever a man is anyway, and assuming, for the moment that I am one.) So there you go. If one more person leaves a show that I've performed in finding new and more beauty in the world, then I've succeeded not just as a performance artist, sassy queen, and hot leather boy, but also as a human being.