Diary of a Drag Queen Read online

  All I remember is being both terrified and obsessively desperate to spin so fast I would hurricane through the roof and onto a giant stage with thousands of people watching me the way I was watching Madonna. Spinning the way I am now.

  So much of the queer experience is spent spinning.

  I remember the song being the soundtrack to my teen years, it blasting out on a yellow CD player that used to skip-skip-skip if you so much as inhaled, me sitting in my room flipping through Glamour or Cosmo or Heat with my one gay friend, Matt, who used to eat mayonnaise off a spoon, with whom I was silently in love for most of those teen years. Humming along would be our best girl friend Beth, who would get so rampantly drunk she would foam at the mouth and try to kiss any and all of my brothers, always revealing her giant, magnificent breasts at a moment’s notice.

  I remember, after fights with my parents – huge, hurtling rows full of terror and bile and homophobia and under-appreciation being flung like shit from both sides – running up the stairs and climbing out of a skylight onto my jagged slate roof and whirring around to ‘Ray of Light’, transmitted through the crappy earphones I’d kept from a flight my family took to Ibiza, our first abroad holiday ever.

  I remember turning it up on the 555 bus home from Lancaster as homophobic, mean-spirited schoolkids pelted oranges at the back of my head or dropped fag ash into my hair from their endless Lambert & Butler Blues, me in a world light years away from the top deck of that bus, imagining being adored the way I had adored Madonna since I’d sat on my dog-hair-covered carpet years before.

  I remember kissing a boy – who had a big beard that hummed with the scent of clever queer theory books and craft beers and vegan moisturisers, and who eventually moved to France with a much older guy to do a PhD in gender studiesfn8 – in my room at university while the song and my insides crashed hard like fireworks.

  I remember all the times a song saved me as I twirl here on my own, spilling dollar-store rosé all over the dark sanded wood floors of this apartment I’m illegally subletting in New York. I’m in half-drag, a demi-lewk, about to go out to an infuriatingly glamorous club that once turned away Rihanna, but lets my queer friends and me in so the rich people can gawp at something interesting. I might not be on the stage, with thousands of adoring fans looking up at me the way I looked at Madonna, but I am twice as wondrous as the me watching that Madonna video two decades ago ever dreamed I could be. That me would be so, so glad to be this me.

  When your identity is so fragmented, sometimes it takes an old song, the old song, to cram all the pieces into the same place at once.

  22nd December / le 22 décembre

  ‘I would totally die for you,’ Ace told me over FaceTime. We were chatting before he went down to Suffolk with his family for Christmas.

  Ace is my ‘best friend’, the kind of ‘best friend’ for whom you use air quotations whenever you describe them because the truth is we are both, dysfunctionally, in love.

  Well, I can confirm that I’m in love with him, but I haven’t gleaned whether or not it’s reciprocated. Before I arrived here, in New York, in this noisy apartment on the Lower East Side with a puddle of cash in a city where you can only survive if you’re swimming in wealth, into a job in fashion, which now has me never wanting to look at a piece of clothing again, we had driven around the south-eastern coast of the US together.

  We ate packs of biscuits and splashed out on a Cracker Barrel to break up the long drives between states. We did stereotypical gay-love-movie type things like sitting in fields full of long grass and smoking and talking about shit like Why Gay Men Love Female Pop Stars and Will Lady Gaga’s New Album Be Any Good and Can Straight People Be Queer and Our Sexual History (testing the ground of our sexual future). Of course, we never arrived at that sexual future, and now our relationship is played out in a blur of crackly pixels three times a week.

  ‘I would totally die for you.’

  I’m not sure if it was true love or a manipulative technique to check my allegiances after I was clearly bummed out and turned cold by him telling me he had a date tonight. Who goes on a date three days before Christmas?

  ‘Sure. I would die for you too, totally. But I wouldn’t drown,’ I replied, smugly testing his limits.

  ‘Oh charming. Although, to be honest, I wouldn’t think to save you first if a plane was going down. Like, I’d affix my oxygen mask before yours, and dive out onto the inflatable slide first. Removing heels, obviously. Dying in flight is just my idea of hell. But for the most part, I’d die for you.’

  Then he hung up, bouncing offline to go on his date, which I decide is doomed, and also decide I’m being unfair because it was me who chose to move to New York ‘for ever’, air quotes.

  Perhaps that’s all I can ask for. For someone who could love me enough to die for me in all but one scenario. Maybe that’s a better promise than monogamy, which will inevitably fall apart if modern dating statistics are anything to go by. Especially amongst the gays: we’re allergic to intimacy.

  Feeling bereft, I decided to take my sorrow onto the fire escape and smoke seven cigarettes, sitting in my loneliness. I miss Ace. I miss my friends at home, painfully, my heart hurting at the thought of them spread out across London, or Lancaster or Manchester or Newcastle, sitting outside bars in Soho, or at the Sun, our old Lancaster haunt, or on their couches watching Gogglebox, chain-smoking and talking about radical queer politics or whether they want pasta-pesto or a takeout for dinner, sheathed in colours and sequins, dressing gown and slippers, no make-up, or make-up a few slicks too heavy.

  I hope with a bursting wishfulness that they are thinking of me.

  23rd December / le 23 décembre

  I’m going out tonight with some friends, so I spent the better part of the afternoon getting into a full face. Day-to-day I’ve been wearing less face than usual – a lip stain here, a highlight there. But it’s the big one before the scene shuts down for Christmas tonight, so I wanted to do full-drag-queen-with-a-beard realness. I left myself three and a half hours to do it in, and now, for the first time in my life, I’m ready early.

  And so I’m sitting, staring at my make-up bag – messy, glitter-coated, jangled from coast to coast, up and down stairs, in the boot of countless cars. I love my make-up bag.

  My make-up bag. That passport which contains a bunch of crèmes, potions, polyfilla and over-the-counter drugs that diminish the muscles of an overbearing gender binary. They allow me to cross it. They are the hardware that allows me to finally live out my childhood fantasies, every one. It’s also a history book, connecting me to the radical queens, queers, butch dykes and trans folk who fought for me to be able to paint my face the way I want to paint it. In my make-up bag is a lifeline to an expression of my gender. In my make-up bag there are thousands of tricks for me to cover the scars of my teenage acne, or the slice on my nose from a homophobic attack that has never quite healed. I love the scars in some ways, but having the devices to cover them allows me to dictate their mark upon me.

  In my make-up bag there are missing pieces and extra bits – given, received and shared between my drag sisters and me like heirlooms, like gifts from Christmas crackers. We are reminded of each other whenever we use them. In my make-up bag there are hairs cut from the long hair of a drag king friend to make a beard, strewn, unwanted, but so integral to the history this kit holds. In my make-up bag there’s a kind of self-care that makes you omnipotent, even if just for a night.

  In my make-up bag there’s an ode to the women who gave me a femininity to explore, but not to parody (that’s just terrible, lazy drag). In my make-up bag there’s jewellery given to me by my friend who was so desperate for me to be kinder to myself that she found things to make me sparkle.

  Indeed, there are a lot of things in my make-up bag. And while it’s so easy to talk about colours, powders, primers, highlighters (yum! fave!) with a kind of Zoella level of soullessness and irrelevance, make-up to me, to many of us, is not an extravagant stockpile
of excessive frippery, but something that bestows power. In a world where that power is only taken from us, make-up is a tool that cheers us on as we draw our battle lines, giving so much power back to ourselves. It’s a secret language, misunderstood and disregarded by boring dudes who think make-up is ‘gay’, which allows us to communicate with each other both silently or with floods of Facebook messages about Kat Von D’s new matte lipstick.

  My make-up bag is not for anyone else. It’s very much for me, as yours is for you. While people question whether the act of wearing make-up is anti-feminist (much like they question drag), make-up is, ultimately, about choice, about allowing yourself to choose how the world sees you. The same can be said for not wearing any, especially if you’re expected to by society. Make-up gives us agency over our own image.

  Above all, my make-up bag is a kit that allows me to create an illusion that is closer to the truth than most people ever reach. People bandy about terms like ‘fake’, but choosing how you want to look is the definition of authentic.

  It’s time to go out. I apply a blister plaster and sausage the thigh-high boots on to my signature chubby thighs.

  24th December / le 24 décembre

  I’m deathly hungover today, and I’ve been pricking a needle way too far into a blister I got on the ball of my foot after wearing those fucking heels, and I’m pissed off because I can’t think of a single blockbuster gay movie that stars a gay actor.fn9 I’m also pissed off because I’ve been scrolling through Netflix on a fancy TV, lying on a Calvin Klein couch, on Christmas Eve in New York. I’ve told everyone at home I’m having the most glamorous time, but here I am, alone, wearing Lonsdale briefs and the cum-covered lime-green muumuu, sweating a lot because this sack-dress is made of cheap polyester, and with nobody to speak to on this day of togetherness. After the big Christmas blow-out last night, all the queers have gone back on various buses to faraway places like Ohio and the Upper East Side.

  I was supposed to spend the holidays with my New Yorker friend, Lily, but she’s currently at home recovering from facial feminisation surgery – and she doesn’t want to see anyone except her wealthy, married boyfriend who paid for the procedure to stop her getting attacked every time she walked anywhere after sunset. Fair, really.

  It’s sunset here and I’ve lit a roll-up fag, my last one scraped from a kilo barrel of Drum tobacco I bought two months ago in Nashville when I was driving around the south-east coast with Ace. For lack of anything better to do and anyone else to speak to, I’ve been leaning out of the window and onto my fire escape, smoking and chatting with the Empire State Building in the distance.

  I’m lonely. It’s always so embarrassing admitting you’re lonely. I need to stop chatting to the Empire State because I’ve decided it’s a patronising cisfn10-hetfn11 white man who, when I say something like: ‘Isn’t the fact that there are no big queer films starring big queer actors so representative of mainstream culture’s desire to commodify, package and sanitise the queer experience by making the stars of ‘queer’ movies straight, white and beautiful and, ergo, acceptable to a mass heterosexual consumer who can’t buy into anything if they have to imagine anyone involved actually taking a dick up the shitter?’, replies: ‘Film-making is storytelling, it’s fantasy, dude. Let go; what’s the obsession with identity politics? Aren’t labels just so unnecessary, especially now when every straight man I know is basically queer? Like, have you read Kerouac? He’s the ultimate queer. Look at my Varsity Jacket, bro, it’s ironic – the name tag says Maud.’

  I’m back on the couch, and I’ve landed on a cheap horror movie called Would You Rather. Its central premise is based on that game bored people use to pass time, but in the movie the ‘would you rathers’ are really violent and pointlessly bleak. Like ‘would you rather shoot Brittany Snow (the lead) or gouge your own eyes out?’ I mean obviously you’d shoot, because the grand prize is a million dollars – which Snow needs to save her brother who’s dying of cancer, to whom she returns home after this traumatic night to find dead anyway. Sorry: spoiler.

  Inspired by my profoundly dull two hours with Brit Snow, here is a game of ‘Would You Rather’:

  Would you rather eat dog shit or cat shit?

  Dog. Because you never know what a cat is eating because they spend 90 per cent of their time out of the house gumming at birds and rats and shit. At least with a dog you know what it’s eaten.

  Would you rather have teeth for toes or toes for teeth?

  Teeth for toes – nobody can see them, and think how much it would hurt when you kick an abusive homophobe.

  Would you rather be successful and miserable or unknown and happy?

  Now, the self-care anti-capitalist in me reckons that success in the stereotypical sense – wife, kids, money, fame, matching socks, Diptyque candles – is a neo-liberal construct to get us all to buy into this idea of working tirelessly for something that is actually unobtainable. But the raging homo inside me who loves Barbra, Liza, Madonna and Gaga would totally opt for fame/success and misery. I mean is anyone really happy all the time anyway? Also, the question I set for myself doesn’t stipulate whether I could get super successful, make loads of money and be really famous, and then one-eighty and step back from the spotlight to become a happy unknown who had an outrageous life and who says things like, ‘That was then, this is now,’ or ‘Fame was killing me,’ or ‘When are Hello! coming to do the feature on my new life?’ or ‘Do I look rested?’ after my latest botched surgery. Successful and miserable it is.

  It’s all hypothetical anyway. Because right now I am the most unfortunate mix of the two. Miserable and unknown. I moved to New York to be like a nu-age, politically engaged Carrie Bradshaw but I’m having infrequent and pretty sub-par sex and I’m not really doing anything in the city. Unlike Carrie and her mystery buckets of cash, I have no income, no savings. Come New Year I’ll have no job.

  I’m worried about quitting, because then I’ll have even less reason to get out of bed and then I will literally be the queen who moved to New York – the city that never sleeps – to sleep.

  It’s 11.23 p.m. Time to go to sleep.

  25th December / le 25th décembre

  It’s funny how so many Christian denominations (not all, I know) hate gays but love Christmas. Like, aren’t they basically the same thing? Tinsel? So gay. Gifting? We invented it. A guy with major abs on a cross? That’s gay BDSM 101.

  It’s a funny time for queers really, Christmas – the whole day, the whole tradition built around a religion whose central tenet (or one of) is that gays aren’t chill. Love the sinner, hate the sin, you know. Add to this the fractious relationships so many queer and LGBTQIA+ folk have with their families and the Christmas turkey tastes much, much drier for us ’mos.fn12

  I’m a lucky queer in that over the Christmases of recent years, after the spiral-of-existential-desperation-to-click-my-heels-and-disappear-dread that was my teens came to a close, I have actually developed a very special relationship with my very special family. But loneliness still resounds around these holidays for a lot of queers. While I’m fortunate to be tight with my close relations, the holidays proffer a different kind of loneliness: one brought on through everyone misunderstanding who you are now. It’s nobody’s fault, but the more I progressed into life as ‘a full-on queer’, the more it became evident that there were integral parts of me not to be mentioned at the Turkey Table. While we all chat kids and weddings, we don’t chat HIV activism or the powers of radical sex; we don’t chat gender or whether RuPaul’s transmisogyny renders her legacy obsolete.

  All the burning queer politics or the nights spent in repeat motion unsticking your wobbly heels or battered Docs from the Red Bull and ecstasy-plastered dance floors of gay bars, hoping to suck anyone’s dick, disappear around normative folk. A very Wizard of Ozzy kind of concussion. You feel infantilised and misunderstood, like you’ve got a thousand secrets scantily concealed just under the surface, because even though everyone knows you’re the things
you are, they don’t know the things that come with them.

  Many don’t even have family to go to on account of severed ties, chopped messily by the homo-, trans-, bi-, queerphobia that often abounds from the families of people like me. For something so camp, so apparently joyful, Christmas for many of us is as emotionally tangled as the fairy lights you chuck in the bottom of the decorations box year on year. Only to spend three hours detangling them. Only to realise 65 per cent of the bulbs have blown out.

  I miss my family, both biological and chosen. I especially miss my dad, and my mum and her Christmas dinner. Her four different types of potato, two types of carrot, parsnips, two types of stuffing, bread sauce and, even the worst bit, the turkey. One time, when I worked on a farm for pocket money, I had to wank off tons of male turkeys (or Toms or gobblers as we call them in the trade) in order to get them to spaff their loads into rubber tubes. Turns out fattened Christmas turkeys can’t and/or don’t have the energy to fuck, so we had to do it for them.fn13 It sounds humiliating, but weirdly once you’ve wanked off one turkey you just feel proud to be part of the circle of turkey life, the wonder of the Christmas mass-slaughter.

  I decided to send a few of my friends Happy Queermas texts, offering some queer solidarity on this strange old day. Glamrou – my sister, one of my best friends, and an Iraqi immigrant drag queen who hates Christmas more than me – responded with: Happy Queermas baby! It’s such a fucking white queerphobic day. Have been feeling lonely throughout. Thinking of you xxx