By Gisela Factora
ASSISTANT EDITORIAL EDITOR
In the days leading up to the drag show, I binge-watched season 9 of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” again because Brooklyn-based queen and season nine competitor Aja was going to be headlining and I was beyond excited.
Last year’s drag show was insanely cool, even though I was just there as a photographer. I got to watch my friends and the drag queens we idolize transform and hang out backstage with Drag Race alum Latrice Royale and future Drag Race contestant Yuhua Hamasaki (you didn’t hear that from me though). I was also able to experience the power of a community coming together to mourn the recent Pulse shooting and celebrate how beautiful it was to be alive and openly, bravely queer.
This year I still took pictures as Pride Network’s semi-unofficial photographer, but I also was playing another role: performing. In drag. For the first time.
Yeah, I was beyond excited, but I was also just the slightest bit terrified.
The day of the drag show arrived and doing everyday things like going to class seemed even more boring than usual. I went because I’m a “good student,” but I couldn’t stop thinking about the difference between my classmates’ perceived image of me versus who I am outside of class. Like, we’re quietly discussing the inverted pyramid writing structure now, but do they know that in a few hours I’m transforming into a genderfuck ‘80s glam rock star?
The time to transform into said genderfuck comes, and I went straight home from class to slip into something a little more uncomfortable. Tight white jeans, a belt borrowed from my girlfriend (I really have to get some of my own), a white binder that makes my chest appear flat and a torn leather jacket I picked up from a consignment store in San Francisco my sophomore year of high school. I was going to put on a shirt over the binder, but I cast a glance at myself in the mirror with just the jacket over the binder. I sent a pic to my queer group chat inquiring whether I should just go for it and was met with a resounding “YES,” all caps included, so I decided to.
After the drag show, I was going to leave for Boston for the long weekend and hadn’t packed. I had barely rehearsed what I was doing and was a little nervous about singing in a binder because of the whole chest compression thing. I multitasked and went through my song one more time as I threw whatever clean clothes I could find into my suitcase. To my relief, singing wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. Granted, it was a lot different from singing while moving around in an auditorium packed with more than 300 people, but I pushed that concern to the back of my head for a later time. Like, in half an hour, when I was due for sound check.
In classic drag fashion, the show was running very late. I arrived at Monroe about 10 minutes after my call time, only to find that they hadn’t even started doing sound check. Eventually I ran sound for my solo number and my duet with my friend Matt.
After that, we headed to the basement of Berliner where our dressing room awaited. I chuckled to myself because this was the first time I’d ever even been in Berliner, a science hall, and of course it was for a drag show.
I sat my makeup bag and guitar case down and complained about how uncomfortable my binder was.
“I didn’t even realize you were binding,” said a freshman with bright teal hair that I had seen around a few times. I asked him if he was, and he replied that he used to, lifting up his shirt to show me the scars from top surgery. I congratulated him, impressed that a freshman is achieving his transition goals at such a young age.
We all chatted as we did our makeup, most of us familiar with one another, and those who were not, quickly became acquainted. I learned that the teal-haired freshman’s name is Dallon, and I borrowed a foundation that was too dark for him, a pale white boy, as undereye concealer. I did my friend Serena’s makeup and borrowed a lot of Matt’s makeup. This sharing felt almost like some abstracted version of the teen girl ritual of getting ready to go out together.
“My mom doesn’t understand why I do drag,” Dallon said. “’Why would you transition if you’re just going to be dressing up like a girl anyway?’”
We all laughed and rolled our eyes at the ignorance. So often people who aren’t familiar with drag culture assume that the point of drag is to be as “passable” as possible, that all drag queens are cisgender white gay men or that drag is inherently transphobic. But as I looked around the dressing room, I noticed that literally none of us fit that bill. We are butch lesbians, straight women, trans men, trans women, nonbinary folks and intersex folks – and some of us are more than one at the same time. What we have in common is that we are all there to mess with people’s idea of what gender is and what it can be.
Me, for example, I’m a brown butch lesbian. I often pass for male in my everyday life. Contrary to popular belief, that’s not why I’m butch. I hate being perceived as a man and I hate that people’s idea of womanhood cannot extend beyond a woman in a dress and heels . But that night, I left that world behind; the world where I am harassed in the bathroom for not conforming enough to femininity. That night, I was intentionally transforming myself from a gender nonconforming woman to a gender nonconforming man a la Freddie Mercury and David Bowie . That night, I performed in a world where small town girls could be dominatrices, boys from the hood could be glamorous idols and I could be one of those sexually ambiguous ‘80s glam rock stars I idolized as a kid. That night, I was Jimmy Stardust.
