Fabulous Visions and Joyful Inventions

13 Oct, 2024

In the mid-nineties, I lived in a part of Madrid where movie premiers meant unofficial drag shows around the theaters, the divas coming out to put the shabby rest of us to shame. From what I remember, no one ever had a problem with it; it was something you looked forward to. I didn’t think much else about it until a couple of weeks ago, when a friend and I accidentally ended up at a drag brunch—where I finally realized what the point (at least one) of drag is, and one that probably underpins why the phenomenon’s would-be banners really don’t like it.

Here’s my proposal, one I was glad to see confirmed in a Slate article: drag is just about fantasy—not, as Moms for Liberty would have it, about seduction or live porn or turning impressionable youth into depraved socialist evangelists for the anti-Christ.¹ From what I can tell, it’s just about good play, the sort of imaginative foray that, like any mainstream acting or dress-up experience, gives you the chance to be someone else for a while, however preposterous the prospect might sound in everyday life. And more importantly, it’s about having a whole group of people come along for, join in, and support you on the ride.

The setup on this particular occasion? A normally staid, quiet, wood-paneled restaurant on a high floor of a tony department store, more fitted for tea and ladies’ lunches than anything else, packed with speakers and a sound system determined to destroy the last shred of your hearing. An emcee and three or four stars, each making a few appearances in different outfits for lip-syncing performances that lasted a couple of hours in total. And throughout it all and essentially, the diners: ladies of a certain age out celebrating someone’s birthday, mixed groups of friends, couples of all varieties, a four-top with two hijabis in attendance, and a table of about eight guys having the absolute time of their lives. Everyone was required for the performance to work: the drag stars who believed in the personas they were creating, and the audience ready to believe. There wasn’t a grumpy or frightened face in the room, and that included the wait and kitchen staff, who at one point were all dancing together near a swing door. I’ve never seen so many people so joyfully offering dollar bills to the tip bucket.

In some sense, then, it was both about and not concerned with what anyone was wearing—and to the disappointment of those who would’ve shut the whole thing down, a good portion of the outfits couldn’t even be considered cross-dressing, just dressing up. To adapt one of Susan Sontag’s observations about camp, whether they recognize it or not, it’s not the decoration itself that really gets the naysayers in knots; it’s the absence of anything like real, directive content underneath that decoration that’s the problem.² All those changes of outfit, of character to make them work: the problem here is that adaptable joy in openness to the mere fact that something else might be possible. And you dive into those possibilities not in order to impose whatever you find on anyone else; at most, you’re inviting people to come along with you and see what they find and how you and they feel about it. You’re welcoming people into your world, not making rules about who can enter it. (This is also why drag story hour makes so much sense: who better to lead a roomful of strangers into that necessary suspension of disbelief than a gloriously outrageous presenter of that world?)

There’s the key: that simple thought that things could be otherwise. Even if that otherwise doesn’t mean everyone has to drop their preferred tastes or beliefs or way of doing things to fall in line with your discovery. For those afraid of that mere possibility, the fear brings with it the prospect that you’ve been misguided up to this point, duped or wrong—and that if that’s the case, that surely doesn’t reflect well on your intelligence. There’s a potential condemnation in that prospect of otherwise, the terror that if one jot or tittle of an established way of being is off, then the whole thing will crumble, and we will have been wrong. We’ll be revealed as flush with stupidity, at which everyone can laugh, and laugh with intent to harm. Instead of exploring it, then, we have to shut it down.

You can see this concern running through certain conservative persuasions, the fear of invention in general and of where it may lead. Back before J. K. Rowling went off on her own bizarre anti-trans crusade and Harry Potter was the greatest thing around, I was left speechless when a relative’s mom jumped in to correct her response to my question about whether she was reading the series, and how she liked it. The pre-teen was indeed reading it, but was only allowed to, as her mother admonished her, because “we remember that magic ____?” “Isn’t real,” came the downcast reply.

The fear that shuts out invention is, has to be, an attitude that’s purposeful about holding onto its seriousness, because once you start laughing—once you let joy in—things can’t avoid looking less settled. It’s how Sontag talked about camp functioning, as “a sensibility that, among other things, converts the serious into the frivolous”—things which, she continued, “are grave matters.”³ I’m probably not off in saying that drag qualifies, or can, as camp, and I also feel pretty comfortable about using Sontag’s assertion about camp to apply specifically to drag—that it “sees everything in quotation marks.” And that, as many a variety of conservative recognizes all too well, means that if you see yourself as comedically fallible or provisional, you can also apply that skepticism to others, to their convictions and their rules. It’s just that for these conservatives, that recognition doesn’t come with an understanding of the playfulness there; used as they are to acting without (being threatened by) humor, they assume the humor (here and everywhere, maybe) is meant to be hateful. They’re unable to see how in contrast to something that entails “contempt for one’s themes and one’s materials…. Successful Camp… even when it reveals self-parody, reeks of self-love.” And if drag is anything, it’s about loving yourself, however you are at a given moment, and loving others who are with you.

Drag-deriders also don’t recognize, clinging as they do to their own seriousness, what Sontag identified as camp’s detachment. Play is possible, extravagant dress and impersonation and performance are possible, immersion in fiction is possible, without the admonition that magic and fantasy aren’t real, because you have enough distance, even in your involvement in and acceptance of the moment, to recognize that the world (and even drag) does have its rules—but also that that world is always changing, that fashions and customs will come and go.⁴

It’s also why you’ll find the Proud Boys threatening libraries with semi-automatics, but engaged in zero campaigning to close down strip joints. Because the books in those libraries encourage you to figure out how the world actually works, and whether there are multiple ways of working within it, fostering if not detachment, then a loosened grip on one right answer—while women who dance around and bare it all for men’s pleasure are part of what we’ve declared is and ever shall be. The logical extreme of how the notion of gender functions in our world is the strip club, which in its serious encouragement of godless prurience, isn’t meant to change a damn thing about who we’re supposed to be, for ourselves or each other. If the ladies at the XXX Palace did nothing but suddenly turn their dances into comedy—took a little less seriously the arrangements they were helping maintain—the illusion (the fantasy!) would be destroyed; the show would be over, assuming that burst bubble didn’t lead to the customers’ frightening means of retaliation for having their desires shown up as silly.

The drag that I’ve seen, at least, is a form of escapism from that sort of frightening seriousness; of course it is. But it’s also of the sort that, in thinking otherwise—as opposed to losing yourself in dreams of happiness within the world as is, as in any number of rom-coms—offers that glimmer that casts such fear into the hearts of many varieties of social conservators. It at first seems odd that speculations about drag would plop me down into memory of a scene from Barbra Ehrenreich’s Nickel & Dimed, but there it is, suddenly making sense.⁵ In the break room at her job at Wal-Mart, where the employees are continually told about how bad unions are, news on TV of a strike somewhere else has a coworker silently and excitedly pointing to the set as if saying, “We could do that here!” What was on TV was a fantasy vision, something that wasn’t going to happen in the conditions the Wal-Mart workers were facing—but it was a vision, and it was suddenly imaginable in a way it hadn’t been before, in a way the Wal-Mart managers would have hated. At the drag brunch, I ended up spending more time watching the diners than the performers—people miraculously comfortable with themselves, with their position all along the spectrum from square to fabulous. And I always kept coming back to the dancing staff, who for two hours of their probably low-paid work week seemed convinced that they were just as much an essential part of this fun as everyone else. Glimmers all over the place of possibility; I can’t help but wonder where it could all lead.

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