A difficult challenge

I attended my first drag show when I was 18 during the fall of my first semester of college.  My sister and I went because a woman in our writing class would be performing and was trying to round up a crowd.  We were not particularly close to this student, and I will say that a large part of attending the drag show was because it fit the image of the liberal, open-minded woman I intended to embody.  The drag shows at my university were put on by the campus LGBTQ group and were a major revenue source for the organization...and I was such an awesome ally, I wanted to support whatever their community sponsored.  Of course I was down with drag!  At the time, I was still heterosexual, and I approached the show with an outsider's voyeuristic curiosity.

The show itself started out being what I thought it was going to be, with large, outlandish costumes and singing and dancing to disco and pop beats.  After the established queens had started us off, amateur acts began to entertain the crowd.  That was when it began to get raunchy and, for my sister and me, quite uncomfortable.  In a drag show, you show your appreciation for acts by tipping the performers, very much like how dancers are tipped at a strip club.  That night, the line between 'drag show' and 'strip club' seemed to blur to me.  Several of the subsequent acts included stripping and simulating sex, often with a cheering crowd lining up to tip the acts.  The more nakedness, the more the (mostly straight, although with a sizable population of queer folks) crowd ate it up.  I was uncomfortable, but I did not want to seem like I wasn't open-minded or accepting.  At the time, I was afraid that was what my discomfort meant.  Either way, I was too invested in being a devoted ally to suggest otherwise.

But my comfort was further challenged when the woman from my writing class took the stage.  She performed as Tom, the only king in the line-up (indeed, even though the drag world is a very marginalized and underpaid entertainment sector, queens dominate the scene).  Tom had on vinyl leather pants, a men's white tank-top undershirt, a loose, open collared shirt, and boots.  He had spiked his hair and painted the stubble of a beard on his chin.  Although the queens had no trouble getting a line-up of folks willing to fling dollar bills on stage, Tom was strutting back and forth to some 90s rock song without anyone offering a bill for several minutes.  This was Tom's inaugural drag experience.  My sister and I watched Tom, all alone on stage as the time ticked by, and felt Tom's isolation...how terrifying to be up on stage, your first time in drag in front of a packed auditorium, and have no one tip you?

In a bold and bewildering moment, I decided I would break the ice for Tom and be the first to give him a bill.  I had intended, of course, to just hand Tom a dollar, but Tom had different ideas.  He saw me approach and started to make a seductive, 'come hither' gesture with his pointer finger.  Oblivious, I thought this meant 'yeah! Bring me that dollar bill!,' but when I held up the bill, Tom skipped the bill and grabbed my wrist.  My knee-jerk reaction was to try to wrench my wrist away, but Tom was quite strong.  For a few moments there was an awkward, spotlit tussle as he tried to pull me closer and I, shaking my head with a fixed smile on my face, tried to pull back.  "Come here," said Tom.  "No, no, no," I said through that tight grin.

Tom won.  He increased the force of his grip and knelt closer.  I closed my eyes and turned away.  His lips brushed across my forehead for a moment.  Then he took the dollar and released me. 

Although I have attended drag shows since that first, uncomfortably memorable experience, I determined some time ago that they were not for me.  Choosing not to attend drag shows is not meant to be a direct affront to drag itself as a performance art.  I think drag queens are brave and fierce and dare to show themselves to a world that marginalizes them.  Drag shows just left me feeling too saddened and conflicted to find them entertaining...perhaps the expectation that they were 'entertainment' was part of the problem.  I knew the political underpinnings were in there somewhere, but amid the giant fake breasts and Brittany Spears numbers, it was getting hard to find them.  Watching them, I couldn't help but wonder, where is this supposed to be taking us?

I say all of this because, in reading Taylor and Rupp's (2005) "When the Girls are Men: Negotiating Gender and Sexual Dynamics in a Study of Drag Queens," these memories came back to me, crystallized and poignant and as freshly painful as they once were. Taylor and Rupp, both lesbians, share how their identities affected their participatory research of the queens from the infamous drag revue in Key West.  I found this article saddening and angering to read.  It has taken me some time to sort out what of it saddens me and what of it angers me, and why it is that my reaction has been so visceral.  I have also been contending with whether I am entitled to such a reaction at all.  I venture my critique with this hesitation in mind.

My first observation was that Taylor and Rupp spend a lot of time talking about gender and sexuality, but none talking about race.  Such a conversation is sorely lacking, both in their reflection on their methodology and in the drag acts themselves.  In Taylor and Rupp's description of the Queens, for example, the ones who are 'other' are racialized or noted for their difference (i.e. Puerto Rican, Black, Jewish, Swedish), but the WASP queen is not identified as white.  Since Taylor and Rupp's own race isn't mentioned, I assume that they are white...it is likely that they would have been more inclined to discuss the role race played in their study if they were women of color.  Furthermore, it is clear that the racial and ethnic identities of the Queens are incorporated into their act - "Sushi" is half Japanese and runs "Gook Productions;" "Gugi" is Puerto Rican.  Even though Gugi is Puerto Rican, she performs as a Cuban, hosting "A Night in Havana."  In other words, these gay men of color play up racial stereotypes of women of color in their drag acts.  It may be subversive that they are 'really' men parodying overtly racist women of color stereotypes, but in the end, the stereotypes remain intact, if not reinforced.

Second, Taylor and Rupp seem overly congratulatory about how the queens challenge gender and sexual norms.  For example, Scabola Feces' acts are described as "outrageous critiques of conventional gender and sexual norms," but these acts included "Karen Carpenter as a vomiting bulimic, a scorned woman wearing a ripped-up bridal gown in "Wedding Bell Blues," and Monica Lewinsky clutching a photo of Bill Clinton."  Maybe there is more nuance to the acts than these descriptors suggest, but these acts don't sound outrageous or critical.  These are mainstream parodies of these particular women (Carpenter, who died from her disordered eating, and Lewinsky, who is widely mocked for her affair with Clinton) and are already how women as a social group are perceived (as scorned brides and mistresses).

What Taylor and Rupp call "outrageous critiques" seem to just be essentializing and reinforcing.  This is most obvious in the Queens' treatment of Taylor and Rupp.  They refer to Taylor and Rupp "the lesbians" or "lesbo one" and "lesbo two."  On many nights, they have them get on stage and announce that they are "the professors of lesbian love," or, more overtly, announce "I love to lick pussy."  The researchers note that their breasts and pubic areas were often grabbed or touched as Sushi came around with the tip bucket.  Most shockingly, the Queens routinely exposed Taylor's breasts onstage by pulling down her shirt.  Taylor and Rupp write: "We let them do these things that we as feminists would never allow other men to do, even as we realized that these were, in part, expressions of male dominance.  Without quite knowing it, we accepted these actions as part of a leveling process, even though they also made us angry."

I want to focus on that last part.  Even though they also made us angry.  This is the sole mention Taylor and Rupp provide in the entire article about any particularly negative reaction to the violation they experience by the Queens.  Although Taylor and Rupp chalk this up to the "politics of vulgarity" of drag, they conclude that the Queens were shifting a power imbalance to suggest "as queer people we are all in the same boat."  I cannot theorize my way into seeing this as the case.  To grab the researchers' breasts or crotch, or to publicly expose their breasts to an audience, seems instead to be a way of ensuring there is yet another space in which women do not have full access or control over their bodies.  Yet another space in which we are not safe from invasion.  And while yes, the Queens that Taylor and Rupp study are survivors of incredible hardship and they too have been violated, to pass this violation on to the female-bodied researchers means not only does the female body remain a site of invasion and violation, but the Queens ensure the world does not become safe for them to perform or live as women, either.

The mainstream perception of gays and lesbians is always already reduced to a sexual act.  To have lesbians announce on stage that they are "pussy lickers" does not "provoke a rethinking of what those categories mean."  It seems to just reduce Taylor and Rupp to the sexual act that everyone is already thinking of when they identify as 'lesbian.'  To make visible what everyone is already thinking is not the same as "rethinking," challenging, or changing it.  That distinction is easily overlooked, but it is a crucial one to make.

There are clear tensions between feminism and drag, as indicated by the feminists Taylor and Rupp spoke to who found drag queens to be "demeaning" and did not want the Queens to visit the California campus.  Taylor and Rupp insinuate that the perception of drag as "demeaning" is one of theoretical conclusions.  I feel stuck, then, between being another feminist who calls drag performance 'demeaning' (and is therefore written off for not being aware of the "feminist project in drag") and simply letting drag off the hook entirely.  This is the danger of critiquing a marginalized practice.  There is such a push for protection from further marginalization that it leaves us very little room to talk about the ways in which it is problematic.

In that sense, Taylor and Rupp seem to over emphasize the social change the revue produces.  Although the audience members in the focus groups seem to be moved to a broader notion of gender performance, their understanding of gender as a binary framework does not seem challenged, nor do their lives beyond the revue.  In the researcher's focus groups, they say that "it was evident that heterosexual members had never conversed with a gay man or lesbian about the kinds of issues that came up in the discussion."    Attending the drag shows doesn't, for example, lead to the audience members to have gay or lesbian friends, or at least it certainly doesn't lead to them processing the drag experience with gays or lesbians (or, it seems, anyone at all besides the researchers).  Taylor and Rupp write that the focus groups often ended up conversing about "whether they thought of the drag queens as women or men, which girls were most attractive, and whether they enjoyed the performances more or were made uncomfortable when the drag queens deliberately broke the illusion of femininity by accentuating their identities as gay men."  These conversations indicate a very nascent understanding of challenges to gender and sexual norms - are they men or women?  Which one is the hottest?  And do I prefer it when they don't stray from the illusion of femininity or when they reveal that they are 'really' male after all? 

I do not want to dismiss the very tangible challenges drag poses to norms.  I am suggesting, however, that Taylor and Rupp could be more reflexive about their anger, less congratulatory of "foregrounding" the tensions they faced as lesbians researching gay men, less certain that the Queen are deconstructing gender and sexuality, and more careful about noting the ways in which the Queens perpetuate the forces that contribute to their own marginalization.  Accountability is not the same as blame.

Looking back at my first exposure to drag, I did feel violated by Tom, even though I did not (and do not) consider that experience as an assault.  Like Taylor and Rupp, I permitted an incident that would I would not have permitted with an "actual" man, despite the reality that it was still a play of male dominance.  In my mind, Tom was, after all, a woman.  A woman who I would have to face the next day in class and twice a week for the rest of the semester.  I was more embarrassed and confused than anything else.  I can reflect now with a much sharper sense of what happened.  In that scene, Tom and I performed a conventional heterosexual ritual of man-demanding-intimacy and woman-resisting-intimacy.  The point was, however, that I was not performing.  My "no" was not recognized, just as it hasn't been by other men.  And while some would say that I should have known better, that to offer a dollar was to accept the drag show conventions and whatever the performer willed of me, I argue otherwise.  The greatest challenge to gender and sexual norms would have been for Tom to hear and accept my "no."

The greatest challenge to gender and sexual norms would be a space in which all people have full determination over their own bodies.