Diary of a Drag Queen Read online

  Contents

  Prologue

  December/Décembre 18th December / Le 18 Décembre

  21st December / le 21 Décembre

  22nd December / le 22 décembre

  23rd December / le 23 décembre

  24th December / le 24 décembre

  25th December / le 25th décembre

  26th December / le 26th décembre

  27th December / le 27 décembre

  28th December / le 28 décembre

  29th December / le 29 décembre

  30th December / le 30 décembre

  31st December / le 31 décembre

  January/Janvier 1st January / Le 1 Janvier

  2nd January / le 2 janvier

  3rd January / le 3 janvier

  4th January / le 4 janvier

  6th January / le 6 janvier

  7th January / le 7 janvier

  8th January / le 8 janvier

  13th January / le 13 janvier

  14th January / le 14 janvier

  17th January / le 17 janvier

  18th January / le 18 janvier

  19th January / le 19 janvier

  24th January / le 24 janvier

  28th January / le 28 janvier

  February/Février 2nd February / Le 2 Février

  6th February / le 6 février

  9th February / le 9 février

  12th February / le 12 février

  13th February / le 13 février

  14th February / le 14 février

  17th February / le 17 février

  21st February / le 21 février

  22nd February / le 22 février

  25th February / le 25 février

  27th February / le 27 février

  28th February / le 28 février

  29th February / le 29 février

  March/Mars 1st March / Le 1 Mars

  2nd March / le 2 mars

  3rd March / le 3 mars

  5th March / le 5 mars

  6th March / le 6 mars

  12th March / le 12 mars

  15th March / le 15 mars

  16th March / le 16 mars

  18th March / le 18 mars

  24th March / le 24 mars

  25th March / le 25 mars

  26th March / le 26 mars

  31st March / le 31 mars

  April/Avril 1st April / Le 1 Avril

  2nd April / le 2 avril

  3rd April / le 3 avril

  4th April / le 4 avril

  5th April / le 5 avril

  6th April / le 6 avril

  7th April / le 7 avril

  8th April / le 8 avril

  9th April / le 9 avril

  10th April / le 10 avril

  17th April / le 17 avril

  19th April / le 19 avril

  22nd April / le 22 avril

  24th April / le 24 avril

  27th April / le 27 avril

  May/Mai 3rd May / Le 3 Mai

  6th May / le 6 mai

  7th May / le 7 mai

  10th May / le 10 mai

  13th May / le 13 mai

  17th May / le 17 mai

  21st May / le 21 mai

  23rd May / le 23 mai

  26th May / le 26 mai

  28th May / le 28 mai

  June/Juin 1st June / Le 1 Juin

  3rd June / le 3 juin

  10th June / le 10 juin

  11th June / le 11 juin

  17 July 2010, Benidorm

  29 November 2011, Cambridge

  19 January 2012, on a train from London to Cambridge

  14th June / le 14 juin

  16th June / le 16 juin

  20th June / le 20 juin

  21st June / le 21 juin

  22nd June / le 22 juin

  30th June / le 30 juin

  July/Juillet 2nd July / Le 2 Juillet

  5th July / le 5 juillet

  6th July / le 6 juillet

  7th July / le 7 juillet

  9th July / le 9 juillet

  15th July / le 15 juillet

  18th July / le 18 juillet

  20th July / le 20 juillet

  23rd July / le 23 juillet

  24th July / le 24 juillet

  25th July / le 25 juillet

  26th July / le 26 juillet

  August/Août 1st August / Le 1 Août

  4th-10th (I had so much wine this might all be in the wrong order)

  11th August / le 11 août

  19th August / le 19 août

  22nd August / le 22 août

  26th August / le 26 août

  31st August / le 31 août

  September/Septembre 2nd September / Le 2 Septembre

  4th September / le 4 septembre

  8th September / le 8 septembre

  10th September / le 10 septembre

  11th September / le 11 septembre

  13th September / le 13 septembre

  15th September / le 15 septembre

  17th September / le 17 septembre

  19th September / le 19 septembre

  24th September / le 24 septembre

  26th September / le 26 septembre

  27th September / le 27 septembre

  October/Octobre 3rd October / Le 3 Octobre

  4th October / le 4 octobre

  5th October / le 5 octobre

  6th October / le 6 octobre

  7th October / le 7 octobre

  9th October / le 9 octobre

  10th October / le 10 octobre

  12th October / le 12 octobre

  13th October / le 13 octobre

  14th October / le 14 octobre

  20th October / le 20 octobre

  24th October / le 24 octobre

  26th October / le 26 octobre

  30th October / le 30 octobre

  November/Novembre 2nd November / Le 2 Novembre

  3rd November / le 3 novembre

  6th November / le 6 novembre

  7th November / le 7 novembre

  8th November / le 8 novembre

  9th November / le 9 novembre

  13th November / le 13 novembre

  15th November / le 15 novembre

  20th November / le 20 novembre

  21st November / le 21 novembre

  22nd November / le 22 novembre

  25th November / le 25 novembre

  27th November / le 27 novembre

  29th November / le 29 novembre

  December/Décembre 1st December / Le 1 Décembre

  2nd December / le 2 décembre

  5th December / le 5 décembre

  6th December / le 6 décembre

  9th December / le 9 décembre

  10th December / le 10 décembre

  11th December / le 11 décembre

  14th December / le 14 décembre

  15th December / le 15 décembre

  17th December / le 17 décembre

  18th December / le 18 décembre

  Acknowledgements

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Crystal

  Look up the term ‘Global Phenomenon’ in the dictionary and you will simply find a picture of Crystal’s face. She’s beautiful. She’s a model. She looks like a block of cheap Edam that’s been left out in the sun. She’s known for always having a cigarette in her mouth, while shouting at people for smoking in her face. She also coined the term ‘money’ and has been living in her overdraft since the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Crystal forms one fifth of DENIM, the drag supergroup, and is adored by fans for her lazy demeanour and her powerful falsetto.

  Tom

  Tom Rasmussen is a Northerner based in London. When out of drag, they are a regular contributor to the Independent, Dazed & Confused, i-D, LOVE Magazine and Refinery29. Their work has also been featured in Vice, Broadly, Tank and The Gay Times.


  In 2018 they were named an LGBT trailblazer by The Dots and one of the voices of now for i-D.

  This is for my families, biological and chosen – thanks for loving me.

  This is for my community – thanks for teaching me.

  This is for my thirteen-year-old self – thanks for sticking with me.

  This book is a work of non-fiction based on the life, experiences and recollections of the author. In some cases names of people, places, dates and sequences of events have been changed solely to protect the privacy of others.

  PROLOGUE

  * * *

  What’s the story of your life?

  The story of my life is that I have more embarrassing poo stories than anyone I know. There was the time I shat myself during a kiss with a boy I fancied and he never spoke to me again. There was the time I shat my pants, a huge intact log, while giving a speech at a friend’s birthday party in front of her dad who was a judge on Dragon’s Den. Thank God I wasn’t asking for funding. Another time, I got so drunk I shat my pants in the cinema in front of all my judgmental high school friends. Once, I was sick on a guy’s dick after I’d had not one, not two, but three croissants for breakfast. Not an actual shit story, but a shitty story nonetheless. There was the time I borrowed an American Apparel leotard from a friend of mine and gave it back, unbeknownst to me, with some pretty violent skid marks decorating the inside. We did speak again, but she made me buy her a new one.

  I roll these stories out more regularly than my favourite leopard-print sequin pantsuit because I spent a lot of my life in the violent, painful clutches of shame, which manifested itself in various modes of self-harm, self-destruction, and other untenable, unsurvivable behaviours.

  I learned, however, that the antidote to this shame is not pride, or honour, or even celebration. That comes later. The antidote to shame is honesty. Stark, crass, funny, powerful honesty. Honesty that smashes through notions of taboos and inappropriatenesses. I am not shameful, because I’ve done nothing wrong. It’s the same with being gay, queer, femme, non-binary, a drag queen.

  And so I tell my poo stories, because it’s the only way I know how to free myself from the shackles of shame that would see us all bound for life. It’s the only way I know how to survive.

  But sometimes – rarely, but sometimes – it’s not the right moment, in a social setting, to share one of my stonking shameless shit stories. And so I keep a diary.

  DECEMBER/DÉCEMBRE

  * * *

  18th December / le 18 décembre

  It was 1.15 a.m. last night, New York time, when, wrapped in a heavy Calvin Klein Egyptian cotton sheet, wet with my own cum, I realised I had to quit my first job in fashion.

  It’s a fairly usual first job in fashion: latte runs, bollockings for eating too much at a PR breakfast because I finished my eggs Benedict, constantly being reminded I’ll never make it as I carry my boss up four flights of stairs while she’s blackout drunk in the late afternoon … that kind of thing.

  But there, last night, at 1.15 a.m., it all twigged. A sext from the boyfriend of my boss, Eve, arrived on her personal phone, which was by my bedside:

  That was hot baby, wanna go again?

  My job description was PA, which turned out to be a fairly loose catch-all term for a gig that encompassed a variety of descriptions: personal head-masseuse, scraper-of-dog-shit-from-bottom-of-Ugg-boot-person, boyfriend sexter. That’s right: she goes to bed at 10 p.m. on the dot every night and makes me stay awake to keep texting her boyfriend while he works a nightshift. She told me very specifically that if I wanted to keep my job I would have to ‘go with the flow with whatever Jared wants’. So when he sexts, I sext back.

  When I arrived in Manhattan I was afresh with the naivety of a 24-year-old drag queen on the hunt for a big break and a series of big dicks. I thought my evenings would be the perfect time for an hour or so of writing,fn1 followed by countless nights out with my swathe of queer, cool, self-assured American gal-pals.

  None of that materialised and, instead, I’ve spent my evenings diving about a file of nudes of my boss on Dropbox. And, never fear, they don’t run out – she constantly tops them up: butt naked at the gym, an exposed tit in the bathroom of a Hard Rock Cafe (wtf?).fn2 She once sent me a close-up pic of her vagina and told me to study it so when I tell Jared that I’m ‘touching my pussy’fn3 I actually know what a ‘pussy’ looks like. Then she laughed. She doesn’t pay me for this shit. If I’m going to do sex work I at least want to get paid.

  And so, in order to survive this early career obstacle course, this nightly sexting ritual has moved swiftly from a place of trauma to a place of pure, unadulterated sex, because it had to. It has become a place in which I become my boss, my horrible boss, so horrible she could play a lead role in that horrible movie Horrible Bosses. This isn’t that classic brand of gay male misogyny – something rife among many parts of my community – she’s just a categorically dreadful person. And yes, if she were a man I would think she was even worse.

  So, terrified, for three months I’ve sexted like a boss: aggressive, power-hungry, compulsively lying, with savageness coursing through my veins as I masturbate furiously in tandem with her partner, who is none the wiser.

  I’m used to becoming ‘her’ after hours, but this is a different kind of her to the her I usually become. In drag I’m full of love, laziness, sensitivity, with a subtly promiscuous edge, but as my new virtual drag character, Eve, I’m all about the power fisting – something Jared has begun to love.

  Truth is I like watching her do her job. I’m not quite sure what it is: producer of some sort, but she says things like ‘unacceptable’ and ‘foreclose’ and ‘consequences’ and ‘Forbes list’ all the time and it makes me feel powerful by proximity.

  I appreciate how talented with targeted abuse she is. Honestly, she can out-savage anyone, and so many people are deeply terrified of her because she can make anything seem like it’s your fault. It’s power fisting, but in the boardroom. And I try to drink in her power, skimming off the severely abusive content that comes with it, there in her home office in a rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood in Harlem – her complaining about ‘the number of chicken shops around here; it stinks’, me wishing a near-fatal injury on her.

  But, as anyone knows who has been obscenely mistreated at work – anyone who’s been shouted at, bullied, underpaid, criticised for doing things exactly as you were asked to – it’s impossible to take the good things without the bad. Instead it’s all you can do to save the shreds of confidence you have left after a daily savaging.

  I’d moved to New York using what was left of my pitiful overdraft, because I was moving here for a first job that would help me break into the closed-off, elitist world of high fashion. This was my break, I told myself, despite the pay and the perks being non-existent: I am Andy Sachs from The Devil Wears Prada;fn4 these are(n’t) the Chanel boots.

  And, like any decent queer, I grew up watching fashion reality TV and, thus, assumed that, in order to succeed in the fashion world, all of this was simply a rite of passage: the constant barrage of abuse, sexting, near poverty. I was a northern queer who’d never left Europe and dreamt of working in fashion.

  But, of course, the job wasn’t what was promised, the terms of employment never arrived, and now all I have is mild PTSD, an overflowing canyon of fat-phobia, and a ban from every Union Market in the city because I was caught stealing an orange and a wheel of Brie a few weeks back, because I couldn’t afford to eat.

  Worse than all of this is that I am complicit in her violent behaviour, because I’m too poor and too scared to say anything when she takes another fist to the cat, or berates someone behind their back because of their weight, race, gender, shoes.

  It’s all for the Green Card: a golden ticket to lift me out of my regular life into a world of money, success, fame, glamour. Eve promised and promised, and I trusted and trusted, even though she’s the kind of white person who wears a Navajo print poncho
.fn5

  With said Green Card I would finally become Carrie but not annoying, Hannah but not a racist.fn6 I would be the 24-year-old who moved to New York, against all advice, and actually made it. It wouldn’t be long until I was one of those rich gays with a penthouse in TriBeCa who collect art and wear tortoiseshell glasses and go to Miami Basel every year and get a GLAAD award, and still, somehow, remain radically political.

  It’s now officially Christmas break, and Eve is flying to Australia with Jared, so my nightly sext duties are over, and I feel a little abandoned by him, to be frank. I decide now is the time to concoct a plan to quit and actually use my time to earn money a way I love. Time to follow my dreams: time to marry rich.

  Gonna go to bed and wank over imaginary sext conversations with Jared.

  21st December / le 21 Décembre

  There are few things that make a queen twirl like vintage Madonna. I hate being reductive, because then I’m just the same as pretty much every single media portrayal of anything LGBTQIA+ or aligned.fn7 For some queens (and also some queers, femmes, butches, bull dykes, trans women, transvestites, faggots, trans men, asexuals, leather daddies, fisting pigs, campy twinks, aromantics, bisexuals and radical faeries) their tonic might not be a Madonna: it could be a Judy, or a Lady Gaga, a George Michael or a Beyoncé, The Cure, or a niche riot grrrl group who should be way more famous than they are, or Lou Reed or Alaska Thunderfuck.

  But for me, a proud cliché, it’s Madonna. She’s always been an escape route when things feel uncertain: going back to this noise that set you aflame as a child.

  Generally it’s all Madonna, but right now it’s ‘Ray of Light’, to which I’ve just finished spinning around in thigh-high silver lamé boots that chafe my thighs to within an inch of the bone. I’m wearing a red wig and a lime-green muumuu that has dried sperm down the back from a story for another time. And this kind of spinning has ignited a sensation I haven’t felt for a while – a deeply sexual, emotional fury just south of my belly – and it reminds me of the first time I heard ‘Ray of Light’, aged seven, sitting on my dog-hair-covered lounge carpet, at home in the north of England while my siblings fought over the remote. I remember not understanding that deep-belly feeling.