LETTING DAYS DRAG BY

Most of us are watching television as the world is under house arrest. My consumption hasn’t gone up but part of that may be due to the fact I have moved into a new condo and I haven’t figured out what to do with a dangling cord on my flat screen. It basically means no CNN. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Checking their site online three times a day is obsessive enough.

I still get Netflix but I’m not a trend jumper. I haven’t watched any of “Tiger King” and I don’t have the slightest urge to see what all the buzz is about. I’m just beginning the second season of “Schitt’s Creek”. It’s fine but everyone I know seems to think it’s the bee’s knees (a first, and likely last, time for me to use that expression) and they’re all way ahead of me. “It gets better,” they keep assuring me. At an average of two episodes a month, I may never get to that point. Having finished all of “Grace & Frankie” and an Australian show called “Offspring”, my most regularly viewed show now is “RuPaul’s Drag Race”. Yeah, quality television.

I’m certainly not current on that show either. I hadn’t watched it since last spring but then I was bored one night and needed to watch something to take my mind off the pandemic. I had to stop fretting over whether I’d suddenly developed an alarming shortness of breath. (I hadn’t.) I opted for the kind of fluff that comes in bouffant wigs and ‘80s flashback shoulder pads. Thank god for drag queens.

This is probably my fourth season, viewed in no particular order at all. The cycle I’m currently watching includes ultra limber Yvie Oddly, oversized Miss Silky Nutmeg Ganache and the second coming of Miss Vanjie. Really, I should have stopped watching after the second episode. With the exception of Yvie, I didn’t find any of the queens to be compelling and the always repeated lines, a trademark of reality shows like “The Bachelor” (“Ladies,...the final rose.” and “ANTM” (“Congratulations, you’re still in the running to be America’s Next Top Model”), grated.

Yvie Oddly

“Gentlemen, start your engines. And may the best woman...win.”

“And don’t fuck it up.”

“While you were untucking back stage, I’ve made some decisions.” That last line always perplexes me as the drag queens return in full makeup and dress, no untucking whatsoever. At least that’s my assumption. I don’t spend time staring down at that region.

Still, I watch.

My very first gay friend in West Hollywood was a drag queen, a 6’4” rail thin guy named Jake who, dressed in ordinary shorts and t-shirt could get away flirting with and fondling the hunkiest men that showed up to Rage or Micky’s on any particular night. (Back then, pre-“Me Too” and all that Kevin Spacey ickiness, groping was a common form of gay bar communication.) They viewed Jake as harmless, never a prospect for a one-night stand or a quickie make-out session in a BMW parked a few blocks down on Robertson Boulevard.

Jake had mentioned in passing that he sometimes performed in drag at some dumpy bar that wasn’t even on Santa Monica Boulevard. He never invited me to a show and I never even asked the name of the bar. We both knew I was overwhelmed enough, trying to find my bearings in the most staid clubs of the time, attempting to quell a natural sense of alarm on the rare occasion someone hello’d me via grope.

Then, early on an overcast Sunday morning in an empty Trader Joe’s parking lot where we’d agreed to meet before heading to an AIDS fundraiser, an Amazonian woman in a glittery, sequined red dress approached and asked me if I was looking for a good time. Instantly, my cheeks matched the dress, sans sequins. “It’s me,” she said twice, the second time a full octave lower. Jake.

Damn, I can’t even remember her drag name. I’ll just call her Victoria Tucker. As a reserved Canadian arriving in L.A. after eleven years of khaki-and-polo Texas conservatism, my first look was horror. How could I spend the next three hours in public side by side with a drag queen? My reaction was exactly what Victoria wanted. She cackled, goosed my ass and my self-conscious skittishness gave way to laughter. I became a drag hag.

Alas, Jake moved back to central California after a couple of years, thus severing my one drag connection. During my first years in Vancouver, a dear friend had a casual predilection for dress-up, breaking open his “tickle trunk” after Monday night “Melrose Place” viewing parties and inviting guests to don a wig, a muumuu, a pair of heels and a strand or two of plastic pearls. While I never participated—always too self-conscious—I was a desirable audience, easy to laugh, even easier to be shocked. I often joined the same friend for Sunday night drag shows at The Odyssey. On one drunken New Year’s Eve, friends marveled as I took to reading a few of Vancouver’s better known drag queens. Or at least that’s what they told me the next day at brunch. Apparently a few too many rum and Cokes can effectively numb even the most deeply entrenched self-consciousness.

Miss Peppermint

But personal links to drag queens are twenty-something years behind me. Maybe that’s why watching “Drag Race” feels both nostalgic and, despite all its canned lines, fresh. I’m a gay man viewing a part of gay culture as an outsider. There’s something both progressive and retro about the show. I grew up at a time when coming out was a dramatic occasion, fraught with the potential of brutal rejection, so I’m still wired to perk up whenever the participants chat about their own stories of coming out, not just as gay but as committed drag queens, usually as they are applying thick foundation or painting on several layers of mascara. There are always compelling new layers to the coming out story for a conventional, white-bread viewer like me, whether it’s Mercedes Iman Diamond, the first Muslim queen, or Miss Peppermint, the first out transgender woman drag queen on the show.

“Reading” Time

The element of each season I don’t care for is how so many of the contenders can’t seem to shed the tough-girl, bitter-dissing persona of their act. Yes, many drag queens are known to take the campy put-down humor of ‘70s gay men and add an on-steroids version to their performance. Presumably this demeanor served earlier drag queens well when heckled on the street and on stage. It may have been a survival tactic. Indeed, “Reading Is Fundamental” is a mini-challenge on most cycles of “Drag Race” wherein each contestant dons a pair of colorful frames and “reads” other contenders with insulting quips. It amounts to about eight minutes of an entire season. But there are always a few of the drag queens who are on high alert in the workroom, ready to diss at any moment to defend themselves or to get into another queen’s business. Just to be sure we know how fierce they are, they throw in several “bitch” references, as in “Bitch, you don’t wanna be messin’ wi’ me!” That’s when I want to fast forward...if only the batteries in my remote were more reliable. I get it...this is reality show theatrics, a reminder that I really should be reading that Booker Prize long-listed novel gathering dust on my nightstand. When this season of “Drag Race” is over, I swear…

Nina West

Or maybe it’ll have to wait till after the season following this one. I truly need some mindlessness in this surreal era of COVID-19. In truth, it’s not even completely mindless. Among the flock of bitches, there’s always at least one Nina West, a befuddled yet sweet drag queen who rights things just as they seem to be drifting toward trashy viewing. There’s also the artistry, the elegance and the gasp-worthy creativity/audacity of the upper echelon of contenders. More than anything, there’s a reminder that, as this show has been so widely embraced, with versions popping up in other countries like Israel and the Netherlands, it has not only normalized a once-fringe element of the LGBTQ community, it’s made all things gay more accessible and acceptable. At least, that’s what I tell myself as I stream yet another episode.

I’ll take Yvie Oddly for the win, Ru!