In the soft sunlight of a fading afternoon yesterday, a woman lay in the middle of Broadway at 10th in downtown Oakland. I had just come up from the 12th Street BART and passed her as I was walking home from a tough work week of few successes and several notable dead ends. She was immobilized on stretcher, her neck in a brace and her arms strapped down at her sides, but she could still scream. The shattered glass and crushed hood of her vehicle testified to the force of impact when she slammed into the tree on the median strip. Several EMTs were working on someone who remained inside the van—throwing instruments and wrappers to the ground as they burned through the effort to save a life.
.
With help on the scene and the siren of an ambulance growing ever closer, there was nothing for me to do except be in the way so I walked on, turning toward Washington at the Marriott Convention Center. But I could not out-walk her screaming. It echoed from the sides of buildings and chased at my heels; not the screaming of someone who was injured, though she clearly was, but the banshee wailing of someone who had lost something precious and whose soul had been torn. It was the kind of screaming for which there is no comfort other than the erosion of experience over time. I think she screamed for whoever was left inside that van. I still can’t get it out of my head; not just her screaming, but everything I have seen or experienced since moving here 11 months ago.
.
Oakland is a violent city. It routinely makes the Top Ten list of most dangerous cities in America—we currently occupy the #5 slot. A friend who is an attorney and a seasoned litigator lost an argument with his college-aged daughter, who he did not want moving to Jerusalem for fear that harm would come to her, when she said flatly, “Dad, we already live in Oakland.” True dat. My friends did not have a uniformly positive reaction when I announced I was relocating to Jack London Square on the fringe of West Oakland. One chap, among the coolest of the hip, was sufficiently alarmed to gasp—and this from a man who routinely throws himself into maverick waves in the open ocean and will take any drug handed to him by complete strangers at Burning Man. Thank you for your concern. It is not entirely misplaced.
.
Here’s a quick quiz to test your knowledge of my Oakland neighborhood:
Over what time period did the following events take place—one year, one month, one week, 48-hours?
.
A crowd rampaged through the Civic Center area smashing windows and cars after the verdict in the Oscar Grant murder trial.
.
A vigilante wearing body armor was driving a van packed with weapons and ammunition through the section of 880 that seals my neighborhood from downtown when he opened fire on police taking out a dozen or more bystander vehicles. Approximately 150 rounds were fired during the 12-minute shoot out on the freeway.
.
A sniper in a West Oakland high rise opened fire on police when they made a routine vehicle stop in the neighborhood.
.
Punks at 19th and Broadway shot and killed a man for the $17 he was carrying in his wallet. The man, a Chinese immigrant, was in town for a job interview. He is survived by his wife and three children who are now adrift in a country they do not understand.
.
Police helicopters hovered over the Lake Merritt BART station as officers rushed through the underground chasing down an armed suspect. He was not found.
.
Ok. Answer time. If you guessed one month, you are right. BUT, take away the night of looting and window smashing from the Grant trial and the answer shifts to 48-hours. Welcome to Oakland.
.
Why does Oakland not demand better of its people? Why do we settle for this behavior? Do we show no reaction because we are shell-shocked or are we simply afraid to challenge this deplorable standard lest we attract unwanted attention from the dark forces that appear to have us surrounded?
.
In answer to the question I suspect is floating through your head about now, I stay because this is random violence not aimed at me unlike the christian violence I must routinely deflect as a gay person. I was in San Francisco when Proposition 8 was over-ruled in a federal court of first instance. Shortly after 1 p.m., media vans and gay rights advocates began to gather in Harvey Milk Square at the top of Castro at Market Street in anticipation of a ruling in our favor. As the news came in that we’d won, the crowd quickly rose, leavened by the sweet justice of a victory for basic civil rights. By 5 p.m., we took to the streets and marched down Market toward City Hall.
.
For the first time in my adult life, I held an American flag. We are not citizens in the U.S. We are not protected by the full sweep of the Constitution or state and municipal laws. It has been open season on us all our lives and the degree of violence leveled at gay people in the U.S. is beyond the comprehension of those who have not experienced it directly. I had never before seen an LGBT crowd wave anything but the Gay Pride flag—the standard of our psychic territory. Seeing my tribe, my dispossessed family of choice amid a sea of American flags was over-powering and I could not stop the tears.
.
The Rev. Al Sharpton, responding to a reporter's question about his support for "gay marriage," answered: "Unless you are prepared to say they are not human beings, you have to let these folks have the right to marry." Seven million Californians, whipped into a hate-filled frenzy by the odious catholic and mormon churches, were quite prepared to deny my humanity and voted me to less-then-second class citizen under Prop 8. Carrying my fragile, little flag, I chanted and danced down the street, happy they had been proven wrong; that basic human rights cannot be submitted to a vote. But I was watching, from the corner of my eye, the crowds that lined the avenue—watching for the barrel of a gun and the anger-contorted face of a white christian who wanted to take me out.
.
Thanks, but I’ll stay here in West Oakland amid the dopers and dealers, the snipers and thieves. It is just random violence. They are not looking for me.
Showing posts with label Straight People. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Straight People. Show all posts
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Monday, June 21, 2010
Malcolmina XOX
I am up early and standing at the curb outside my building waiting for a neighbor because we have a date this morning to go to the Laney College flea market—that great, traveling souk that comes to town every Sunday with blaring music, corn roasting on sticks, puppies for sale, and an entire department store complete with cooking demonstrations laid flat on burning asphalt. I am 10 minutes into a large Blue Bottle coffee that has me shaking like a bobble-head Chihuahua in the rear window of a Chevy. But my friend is oblivious because he is putting his makeup on and that takes time as any diva can tell you. I don’t mind waiting. The early morning sunlight spreads across Jack London like butter sliding down a stack of hot, buttermilk pancakes. It’s going to be a great day so it is odd that, waiting for the Age of Transformation to conclude, I should be musing on the nature of revenge.
.
What is the revenge of those without power; the antipodal feet of the human bell curve on which the rest of the world securely rests? Do those without power exact a puny, unseen, unfelt revenge and, if so, is that really revenge? Isn’t the essential nature of revenge that it is felt by its target; felt as deeply as the hurt it is intended to remedy?
.
When I was a child, I spent hours—no, years—plotting revenge against an older brother who baited me as though I were a caged bear. He pestered, poked, bullied, and hit until I cried in helpless rage. He stole from me, broke what was precious to me, and lied to our parents, blaming me for his faults and they believed him. I hated him so thoroughly, I wished he were dead. That is the revenge of an eight year old.
.
As I grew older, I simply gave up, choosing to bide my time under the radar as much as possible until I could break free and escape my cage. Ultimately, it was a good strategy although it left simmering on the back burner feelings of revenge that permanently blackened the pan that cooked them.
.
Leaving home, I never once looked back but kept moving forward into some unknown life that would be, whatever else it might have to offer, better. After an entire decade of distilling in the crucible of university, I emerged in Chicago in the 1980s where I stood on the train platform in $1,500 worth of corporate drag every morning, commuting to a corner office so high up that I could look down on the traffic helicopters. I ran the god-damned world of commerce while my brother became an alcoholic who couldn’t hold a job.
.
It took a long time to grow weary of a business career based mainly on being what my brother couldn’t be—successful—and eventually, I walked out of my corner office to do work that meant something to me. I forgot about revenge but persisted in a hugely damaging need to be right all the time until the day my brother settled the barrel of a shotgun between his teeth and pulled the trigger. Then my seething righteousness was made painfully evident to me and shown to be hollow. As the eighth anniversary of my brother’s suicide approaches, it is no longer possible for me to savor a win when someone else loses so badly. All of this to say that I do not wish ill on the dominant, straight culture; only that they would get their jackbooted foot off my neck.
.
Being an exile in a society that imagines itself progressive is a wound of a thousand daily cuts; rarely a slash, it accretes. I first understood that the world would not be welcoming to me when I was in middle school—that great sorting, when children have their first glimpse of what kind of future they can expect. Children sense the stakes are high and the ethos of elementary school—sharing and mutual respect—give way to social jockeying. I began to hear the boys call each other homo and queer, words that could knock a rival down more surely than a fist; words I’d never heard before growing up in the Eisenhower/Kennedy years.
.
One small freedom we enjoyed in my strict Catholic school was the right to get up at any time and go to the dictionary. It was, in fact, the mark of a dedicated young mind at work. Thus entitled, I walked from the back of the room one day all the way to the front and began to ruffle through the big, unabridged book to find out why the names the boys used on each other had such power to devastate. I knew better than to ask anyone; it would mean losing face for not being hip to the point of jaded. As I read what a homo was, my life as I had known it fell away. I knew my emerging sexuality was going to be problematic. I liked girls. But in that moment, there in front of my known world, I learned I was a pariah, something to be made fun of, and fair game to every bully or worse. I did not think I could turn around and face that class or get back to my seat without fainting. I understood then that I would serve a life sentence for a crime I did not commit.
.
As Malcolmina flounces to the curb to embrace me with a dozen kisses and escort me up the avenue, it is obvious that gay people are lovers not fighters and therein lies both our greatest strength and most debilitating weakness—we have been slow to demand our rights. Like the unwanted girl children in China and south Asia, we have acclimated to gruel while our fat brothers gorge; taking anything they want from a table where there is no seat for us. Instead, we are left sitting in the dirt with sticks and rocks.
.
But wait. Before you collapse weeping, have you seen what we do with sticks and rocks? Using an ancient alchemy, we have ground those rocks against the stone of prejudice and manufactured glitter and eye shadow. We have taken our sticks and pounded them down on packed earth to create the pulsing beat of disco and house. We have taken the vile manure of hatred and created a garden of earthly delights—a culture focused on sensuality and pleasure pulled from the thin air of repression. Any scorn inflicted by the straight majority comes back to them, presto change-o, as something they cannot live without: hair styles, couture, beats, and home décor.
.
Perhaps some readers will complain that I borrow too heavily from the black civil rights movement; that it can’t be that bad, at least not for a middle class white girl from the Midwest. I am not trying to draw parallels—to the extent they occur, they occur naturally because I know what it is like to be hated, to be scorned. I know what it is like to be the object of ignorant, unremitting hatred for something over which I have no control and I know to be harmless. I know what it is like to be interpreted to myself wrongly; to be pushed to the extreme outer limits of society; to have my good life broadcast back to me in a series of lies; to be overlooked, shoved aside, and blamed for the ills of society. I know what it is like to live hidden and unobserved—something people of color cannot do with the exception of the few who “pass” and then they pay a terrible price for their invisibility. I used to wish that one day, all the gay people in the world would wake up to find we were purple or green. So that no one could hide; so that all those Republican Congressmen who are closet fags would be revealed. So that all those ministers whose admiring congregations reward them for outright gay bashing in their churches, would be silenced. But now I am older and I know the world does not work that way.
.
The LGBT people of my generation have had to hide a huge part of our natural selves just to get by in a world that does not want us. I was 40 years old before I could talk to co-workers about my whole, integrated life without fearing the loss of my job. I know now that my generation has paid dearly for being so marginalized. It is in the pit of ever-anger we carry in our stomachs. Until a person has experienced the humiliation of having their basic human dignity put to a popular vote, which is the very essence of Prop 8 in California, they can never understand the unquenchable rage that I must tame every day. It is hidden in the posture I assume when I say I am okay so as to reassure the straight people who are my friends. I am not okay. I am anything but okay.
.
Escorted down the street by Malcolmina XOX, a black drag queen the size of a city bus, I am filled with love for this royal woman who takes not one ounce of shit from anyone. Pink hair flouncing with each step, her yellow skirt blowing in the breezy summer morning, her polka dot handbag swinging like a metronome, she is a monarch butterfly and I her loyal subject. Long may she rule, baby, rule.
.
What is the revenge of those without power; the antipodal feet of the human bell curve on which the rest of the world securely rests? Do those without power exact a puny, unseen, unfelt revenge and, if so, is that really revenge? Isn’t the essential nature of revenge that it is felt by its target; felt as deeply as the hurt it is intended to remedy?
.
When I was a child, I spent hours—no, years—plotting revenge against an older brother who baited me as though I were a caged bear. He pestered, poked, bullied, and hit until I cried in helpless rage. He stole from me, broke what was precious to me, and lied to our parents, blaming me for his faults and they believed him. I hated him so thoroughly, I wished he were dead. That is the revenge of an eight year old.
.
As I grew older, I simply gave up, choosing to bide my time under the radar as much as possible until I could break free and escape my cage. Ultimately, it was a good strategy although it left simmering on the back burner feelings of revenge that permanently blackened the pan that cooked them.
.
Leaving home, I never once looked back but kept moving forward into some unknown life that would be, whatever else it might have to offer, better. After an entire decade of distilling in the crucible of university, I emerged in Chicago in the 1980s where I stood on the train platform in $1,500 worth of corporate drag every morning, commuting to a corner office so high up that I could look down on the traffic helicopters. I ran the god-damned world of commerce while my brother became an alcoholic who couldn’t hold a job.
.
It took a long time to grow weary of a business career based mainly on being what my brother couldn’t be—successful—and eventually, I walked out of my corner office to do work that meant something to me. I forgot about revenge but persisted in a hugely damaging need to be right all the time until the day my brother settled the barrel of a shotgun between his teeth and pulled the trigger. Then my seething righteousness was made painfully evident to me and shown to be hollow. As the eighth anniversary of my brother’s suicide approaches, it is no longer possible for me to savor a win when someone else loses so badly. All of this to say that I do not wish ill on the dominant, straight culture; only that they would get their jackbooted foot off my neck.
.
Being an exile in a society that imagines itself progressive is a wound of a thousand daily cuts; rarely a slash, it accretes. I first understood that the world would not be welcoming to me when I was in middle school—that great sorting, when children have their first glimpse of what kind of future they can expect. Children sense the stakes are high and the ethos of elementary school—sharing and mutual respect—give way to social jockeying. I began to hear the boys call each other homo and queer, words that could knock a rival down more surely than a fist; words I’d never heard before growing up in the Eisenhower/Kennedy years.
.
One small freedom we enjoyed in my strict Catholic school was the right to get up at any time and go to the dictionary. It was, in fact, the mark of a dedicated young mind at work. Thus entitled, I walked from the back of the room one day all the way to the front and began to ruffle through the big, unabridged book to find out why the names the boys used on each other had such power to devastate. I knew better than to ask anyone; it would mean losing face for not being hip to the point of jaded. As I read what a homo was, my life as I had known it fell away. I knew my emerging sexuality was going to be problematic. I liked girls. But in that moment, there in front of my known world, I learned I was a pariah, something to be made fun of, and fair game to every bully or worse. I did not think I could turn around and face that class or get back to my seat without fainting. I understood then that I would serve a life sentence for a crime I did not commit.
.
As Malcolmina flounces to the curb to embrace me with a dozen kisses and escort me up the avenue, it is obvious that gay people are lovers not fighters and therein lies both our greatest strength and most debilitating weakness—we have been slow to demand our rights. Like the unwanted girl children in China and south Asia, we have acclimated to gruel while our fat brothers gorge; taking anything they want from a table where there is no seat for us. Instead, we are left sitting in the dirt with sticks and rocks.
.
But wait. Before you collapse weeping, have you seen what we do with sticks and rocks? Using an ancient alchemy, we have ground those rocks against the stone of prejudice and manufactured glitter and eye shadow. We have taken our sticks and pounded them down on packed earth to create the pulsing beat of disco and house. We have taken the vile manure of hatred and created a garden of earthly delights—a culture focused on sensuality and pleasure pulled from the thin air of repression. Any scorn inflicted by the straight majority comes back to them, presto change-o, as something they cannot live without: hair styles, couture, beats, and home décor.
.
Perhaps some readers will complain that I borrow too heavily from the black civil rights movement; that it can’t be that bad, at least not for a middle class white girl from the Midwest. I am not trying to draw parallels—to the extent they occur, they occur naturally because I know what it is like to be hated, to be scorned. I know what it is like to be the object of ignorant, unremitting hatred for something over which I have no control and I know to be harmless. I know what it is like to be interpreted to myself wrongly; to be pushed to the extreme outer limits of society; to have my good life broadcast back to me in a series of lies; to be overlooked, shoved aside, and blamed for the ills of society. I know what it is like to live hidden and unobserved—something people of color cannot do with the exception of the few who “pass” and then they pay a terrible price for their invisibility. I used to wish that one day, all the gay people in the world would wake up to find we were purple or green. So that no one could hide; so that all those Republican Congressmen who are closet fags would be revealed. So that all those ministers whose admiring congregations reward them for outright gay bashing in their churches, would be silenced. But now I am older and I know the world does not work that way.
.
The LGBT people of my generation have had to hide a huge part of our natural selves just to get by in a world that does not want us. I was 40 years old before I could talk to co-workers about my whole, integrated life without fearing the loss of my job. I know now that my generation has paid dearly for being so marginalized. It is in the pit of ever-anger we carry in our stomachs. Until a person has experienced the humiliation of having their basic human dignity put to a popular vote, which is the very essence of Prop 8 in California, they can never understand the unquenchable rage that I must tame every day. It is hidden in the posture I assume when I say I am okay so as to reassure the straight people who are my friends. I am not okay. I am anything but okay.
.
Escorted down the street by Malcolmina XOX, a black drag queen the size of a city bus, I am filled with love for this royal woman who takes not one ounce of shit from anyone. Pink hair flouncing with each step, her yellow skirt blowing in the breezy summer morning, her polka dot handbag swinging like a metronome, she is a monarch butterfly and I her loyal subject. Long may she rule, baby, rule.
Monday, June 14, 2010
Drag: A Force of Resistance
Whatever the actual etymology of "drag" when used to describe cross-dressing cabaret rooted in the theater of the gay community, the operative origin for me will always lie in the idea of resistance, like the wing flaps that slow a jet plane or, in my case, the need to resist the crushing force of the dominant straight culture that simultaneously surrounds and marginalizes LGBT people.
.
Straight people are wary of drag, as though they sense that it somehow undermines them without quite knowing why. To them, a drag show is cheaper Streisand tickets. What their reduced admission is actually buying them is a seat before a two-way mirror where they are trapped in a fun house they neither control nor understand. I am talking about real drag now as opposed to talented illusionists who offer a believable Diana Ross or Marlene Deitrich for pennies on the dollar.
.
In these popular shows, men expertly made up and practised in every facial expression, posture, gesture, or other nuance of their idol's bearing can be thrilling mimics in an art form aimed at destroying the barrier between reality and artifice. Often as not, the transvestites who perform these Wal-Mart label star reviews are not gay. They are brilliant stage actors whose talent happens to require an evening gown, wig, and the ability to lip synch an entire canon of professional work. Think of Barry Humphries as Dame Edna Everage and you have the gist of the thing--albeit at the very high end of the lot. Such queens of lesser lights than Mr. Humphries typically play to houses packed with bingo players bussed in from a church in Moline and eager to experience the "real" San Francisco by having the safest possible artificial experience.
.
No, no. I am talking about the drag I see in small piano bars and movable clubs that occupy whatever warehouse, bar, or makeshift theater can be rented for an evening or weekend. This is, to me, true drag; of my people, by my people, and for my people as opposed to working for the Yankee (or, as the case may be, tourist) dollar. Here, the Judy, Cher, or Charo you see is more attitude than illusion as evidenced by my favorite drag queen name of the moment: Liza With a P, loosely translated as "I'm gonna stick it in your face whether you like it or not."
.
Straight people do not typically see such reviews and, I surmise, would spurn the offer were it to be made as this drag--intended for a gay audience rather than a bus load of day trippers--falls so beautifully under the banner of "blatant," a gay trait straight people have made clear they do not care for, as in: "I'm okay with gay people and several of my friends are gay. I just take exception to those who are so blatant about it." Straight people say this with such heartfelt sincerity I can only assume they do not know they are making fools of themselves with such idiotic palaver.
.
And I am not referring to oafs in overalls and gimme caps who can spit a stream of brown tabbacky juice as far as a tree frog in the Amazon can flick its tongue to snap up a bug. No, I refer to people like . . . well, like my co-worker, a lovely woman of staggering intelligence and empathy for all who descends from a patrician family educated for generations at the leading universities in the country. Let's call her Maeve for no other reason than it bears not the remotest resemblance to her real name.
.
I shared with Maeve a chapter from a novel I was writing at the time. It included a lesbian sex scene of such decorous modesty that no one under the age of 50 would even recognize it as a sex scene had it not taken place in a bed and referred to a "tangle of arms and legs" from which two women had to recapture their autonomous selves.
.
Maeve enjoyed the chapter; how witty it was, how droll, how acutely observed and rendered in language so vivid that she could see the scene in her mind's eye. And therein lay the trouble (I might have said "rub" but judged it too blatant and self-censored) because the very next phrase that fell from her lips was the lumbering dreadnought of the dominant straight majority pushing gay people down and out and into place: "I'm not a prude when it comes to sex scenes. I just don't appreciate it when gay people are so blatant about their sexuality." Oh, really? You don't care for blatant sexuality?
.
But let's leave Maeve now because she is dear and in every way a kind and loving soul who would be genuinely horrified to learn she'd given any offense whatsoever, and return to the larger straight culture she unwittingly represents.
.
Any admonishment about blatant sexuality aimed at gay people by straight people is as laughably ignorant as it is insulting and, ultimately, enraging. Anyone who has seen a movie, read a book, watched TV, flipped through a magazine, ridden a train, sung along to a tune on the radio, attended a concert, been to the beach on a hot day, looked at a billboard, shopped for clothes, or, to put it succinctly, anyone who has left the house cannot fail to miss that the one rule our standard, straight operating culture uses to advertise who we are, is rampant, vulgar sexuality--hetero, blatant as hell and completely over the top.
.
Straight people seem not to notice this at the same time they participate in it vigorously--walking down the street holding hands and tonguing each other to pass the time away until their destination is reached. Many are even pushing their blatant baby carriages as if to advertise they've had sex at least once about 10 months ago. Or, perhaps they are aware but don't care because they are at the top of the cultural food chain and do not give a shit what anyone else may think. It can, in fact, be argued that runaway heterosexuality--particularly the use of women's bodies to sell consumer products--is a major part of the force marginalizing LGBT people and that, patient reader, brings me back to drag a a force of resistance.
.
African slaves in the American South used everything at their disposal to subvert the authority of the white "master." They used christianity and separate, inferior churches to plan escape and pass down coded language and signs intended to communicate with each other in field songs and hymns. "Follow the Drinking Gourd," a slave song, clued waiting runaways to the Big Dipper and its orientation to North. "Wade in the Water," a song the overseer assumed was about baptism, told runaways to walk in the river where the tracking dogs could not pick up human scent; quilts depicting life on the plantation and handed down through generations were secretly maps to the underground railway and freedom. But as a gay person in racist, sexist, gay-baiting America, my favorite subversion was the Cake Walk.
.
The Cake Walk is a knee wobbling, elbow bending, eye popping, high stepping, ass wiggling, nonsensical dance routinely performed by black slaves on plantations. The white folk enjoyed watching the savage Negro's hilarious dancing never understanding that the slaves were actually mimicking European dances they saw at parties where they were servants. The slaves were making fun of their owners without the southern elite understanding they were being ridiculed. Welcome to drag, my straight friends, welcome to drag.
.
When straight people see this kind of drag, they may smirk at the outrageous makeup and insane wigs or laugh at the farcical camp that spares nothing and no one, but an uncomfortable nagging voice welling up from the subconscious warns, en garde, as it should. Marginalized people who have been pushed down as hard as gay people have in the U.S. are going to pop up somewhere and it won't be pretty. This drag, unlike illusion, is not pretty. It is hideous in its portrayal of women--vicious, abusive, sea hags and crones in fright wigs and makeup like razor slashes are telling you something you don't want to know: that's how the straight world appears to us when we are confronted with the viciousness of a society that hounds and stalks and kills us with no remorse. We are holding a mirror up to the society that devalues and dehumanizes us and punishes us so savagely for an accident of birth.
.
The last weekend in June is, in San Francisco, a major celebration of LGBT culture. I will be joining several of my queen friends at drag shows where we will laugh at the straight idiots who hate us because we refuse to cry.
.
Straight people are wary of drag, as though they sense that it somehow undermines them without quite knowing why. To them, a drag show is cheaper Streisand tickets. What their reduced admission is actually buying them is a seat before a two-way mirror where they are trapped in a fun house they neither control nor understand. I am talking about real drag now as opposed to talented illusionists who offer a believable Diana Ross or Marlene Deitrich for pennies on the dollar.
.
In these popular shows, men expertly made up and practised in every facial expression, posture, gesture, or other nuance of their idol's bearing can be thrilling mimics in an art form aimed at destroying the barrier between reality and artifice. Often as not, the transvestites who perform these Wal-Mart label star reviews are not gay. They are brilliant stage actors whose talent happens to require an evening gown, wig, and the ability to lip synch an entire canon of professional work. Think of Barry Humphries as Dame Edna Everage and you have the gist of the thing--albeit at the very high end of the lot. Such queens of lesser lights than Mr. Humphries typically play to houses packed with bingo players bussed in from a church in Moline and eager to experience the "real" San Francisco by having the safest possible artificial experience.
.
No, no. I am talking about the drag I see in small piano bars and movable clubs that occupy whatever warehouse, bar, or makeshift theater can be rented for an evening or weekend. This is, to me, true drag; of my people, by my people, and for my people as opposed to working for the Yankee (or, as the case may be, tourist) dollar. Here, the Judy, Cher, or Charo you see is more attitude than illusion as evidenced by my favorite drag queen name of the moment: Liza With a P, loosely translated as "I'm gonna stick it in your face whether you like it or not."
.
Straight people do not typically see such reviews and, I surmise, would spurn the offer were it to be made as this drag--intended for a gay audience rather than a bus load of day trippers--falls so beautifully under the banner of "blatant," a gay trait straight people have made clear they do not care for, as in: "I'm okay with gay people and several of my friends are gay. I just take exception to those who are so blatant about it." Straight people say this with such heartfelt sincerity I can only assume they do not know they are making fools of themselves with such idiotic palaver.
.
And I am not referring to oafs in overalls and gimme caps who can spit a stream of brown tabbacky juice as far as a tree frog in the Amazon can flick its tongue to snap up a bug. No, I refer to people like . . . well, like my co-worker, a lovely woman of staggering intelligence and empathy for all who descends from a patrician family educated for generations at the leading universities in the country. Let's call her Maeve for no other reason than it bears not the remotest resemblance to her real name.
.
I shared with Maeve a chapter from a novel I was writing at the time. It included a lesbian sex scene of such decorous modesty that no one under the age of 50 would even recognize it as a sex scene had it not taken place in a bed and referred to a "tangle of arms and legs" from which two women had to recapture their autonomous selves.
.
Maeve enjoyed the chapter; how witty it was, how droll, how acutely observed and rendered in language so vivid that she could see the scene in her mind's eye. And therein lay the trouble (I might have said "rub" but judged it too blatant and self-censored) because the very next phrase that fell from her lips was the lumbering dreadnought of the dominant straight majority pushing gay people down and out and into place: "I'm not a prude when it comes to sex scenes. I just don't appreciate it when gay people are so blatant about their sexuality." Oh, really? You don't care for blatant sexuality?
.
But let's leave Maeve now because she is dear and in every way a kind and loving soul who would be genuinely horrified to learn she'd given any offense whatsoever, and return to the larger straight culture she unwittingly represents.
.
Any admonishment about blatant sexuality aimed at gay people by straight people is as laughably ignorant as it is insulting and, ultimately, enraging. Anyone who has seen a movie, read a book, watched TV, flipped through a magazine, ridden a train, sung along to a tune on the radio, attended a concert, been to the beach on a hot day, looked at a billboard, shopped for clothes, or, to put it succinctly, anyone who has left the house cannot fail to miss that the one rule our standard, straight operating culture uses to advertise who we are, is rampant, vulgar sexuality--hetero, blatant as hell and completely over the top.
.
Straight people seem not to notice this at the same time they participate in it vigorously--walking down the street holding hands and tonguing each other to pass the time away until their destination is reached. Many are even pushing their blatant baby carriages as if to advertise they've had sex at least once about 10 months ago. Or, perhaps they are aware but don't care because they are at the top of the cultural food chain and do not give a shit what anyone else may think. It can, in fact, be argued that runaway heterosexuality--particularly the use of women's bodies to sell consumer products--is a major part of the force marginalizing LGBT people and that, patient reader, brings me back to drag a a force of resistance.
.
African slaves in the American South used everything at their disposal to subvert the authority of the white "master." They used christianity and separate, inferior churches to plan escape and pass down coded language and signs intended to communicate with each other in field songs and hymns. "Follow the Drinking Gourd," a slave song, clued waiting runaways to the Big Dipper and its orientation to North. "Wade in the Water," a song the overseer assumed was about baptism, told runaways to walk in the river where the tracking dogs could not pick up human scent; quilts depicting life on the plantation and handed down through generations were secretly maps to the underground railway and freedom. But as a gay person in racist, sexist, gay-baiting America, my favorite subversion was the Cake Walk.
.
The Cake Walk is a knee wobbling, elbow bending, eye popping, high stepping, ass wiggling, nonsensical dance routinely performed by black slaves on plantations. The white folk enjoyed watching the savage Negro's hilarious dancing never understanding that the slaves were actually mimicking European dances they saw at parties where they were servants. The slaves were making fun of their owners without the southern elite understanding they were being ridiculed. Welcome to drag, my straight friends, welcome to drag.
.
When straight people see this kind of drag, they may smirk at the outrageous makeup and insane wigs or laugh at the farcical camp that spares nothing and no one, but an uncomfortable nagging voice welling up from the subconscious warns, en garde, as it should. Marginalized people who have been pushed down as hard as gay people have in the U.S. are going to pop up somewhere and it won't be pretty. This drag, unlike illusion, is not pretty. It is hideous in its portrayal of women--vicious, abusive, sea hags and crones in fright wigs and makeup like razor slashes are telling you something you don't want to know: that's how the straight world appears to us when we are confronted with the viciousness of a society that hounds and stalks and kills us with no remorse. We are holding a mirror up to the society that devalues and dehumanizes us and punishes us so savagely for an accident of birth.
.
The last weekend in June is, in San Francisco, a major celebration of LGBT culture. I will be joining several of my queen friends at drag shows where we will laugh at the straight idiots who hate us because we refuse to cry.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
