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4 SEPTEMBER 23 .2006 • Q-NOTES
Editor’s Note
by David Moore . Q-Notes staff
Of drag kings and queens
Is anybody still paying attention to drag
queens these days?
With more pressing matters at hand like
the struggle for gay and lesbian marriage
equality, a retro-evolutionary attempt at turn
ing our country into a theocracy by single-
minded evangelicals or the distinct possibility
of impending global warfare, it seems almost
impossible to think of anything frivolous.
I can recall a time in my young adult life
when drag queens were the center of queer
culture. There was no LGBT community cen
ter. No gay business guild and certainly no out
and proud bankers or companies like
Wachovia and Bank of America to sponsor
events like the recent PRIDE Charlotte festival.
Few, if any, openly gay individuals were polit
ically involved — especially in the South. The
very notion of demanding the right to same-sex
marriage was practically unthinkable.
So who were our figureheads?
In places like San Francisco there was
Harvey Milk — and on a national level names
like Barbara Gittings, Edmund White and
Larry Kramer come to mind.
I would be remiss not to mention local
names that made early pathways in that era,
like Don King, Mandy Carter, Jim Baxter and
Q-Notes publisher Jim Yarbrough. But still —
most gays and lesbians outside of major met
ropolitan areas in the mid to even late 20th
century remained largely closeted for fear of
personal safety.
It was a closed community. Our refuge was
the smoky dark bar with no windows.
Dancing was our shared recreation. Drag
queens were our figureheads.
A night or two a week you could see them,
done up to the nines with massive manes,
pounds of makeup, glittering in sequins,
slinking and lip-synching across a dance floor
or a makeshift stage
In between the pantomime acts, drag
queens with a gift of banter would often talk
about pertinent matters of the day — glibly,
of course — in effect becoming purveyors of
news and political opinion.
We paid a lot of attention to them. We
watched what they wore, how they moved,
what songs they chose to perform and often
times we listened to what they had to say.
That all began to change as the 1980s pro
gressed. The AIDS epidemic made activists
out of party boys and a growing trend towards
coming out meant fewer people were hiding in
dark bars. The gay press exploded and main
stream media was chomping at the bit to
cover LGBT issues.
By the 1990s drag went mainstream with
such performers as RuPaul, Dame Edna and
Lady Bunny. “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert,”
“The Birdcage” and “Too Wong Foo” were
hugely successful movies that presented drag
queens to the world as comedic, happy-go- .
lucky court jesters ready to entertain at the
drop of a dime. New York’s annual “Wigstock”
festival attracted fans of the art form to dress
in kind for a day while watching some of the
most outrageous drag acts known to humanity
(it also prompted a film with the same name).
Drag truly was everywhere.
Lesbians finally got in on the act, too,
around that same time. I saw my
first drag king show in Atlanta in
the early ’90s. While gay men had
been dressing up as women and
entertaining for centuries, “male
impersonation” by lesbians never
really took off in the same way.
Now there are drag king troupes all around
the country.
But what is it, exactly, that makes someone
want to dress up in clothes of the opposite sex?
Why spend countless hours (not too mention
dollars) creating clothing, make-up and hair?
I had a conversation with a young gay man
the other day. 1 had interviewed him once
when he was still a high school student trying
to form a gay student’s group. He’s now an
aspiring drag diva.
He poked his head in my office door and
asked me what I knew about a once well-known
Charlotte drag queen named Toni Lenoir.
Lenoir passed away back in the 1990s.
“I’ve seen her perform on video,” he said
with stars in his eyes. “She was so incredible.”
“1 didn’t really know her that well,” I
replied. “We talked a few times. She was pretty
nice, as I recall.” I shared a story about a time I
saw her perform at a now defunct Charlotte
club. While lip-syncing to the SOS Band’s
“Take Your Time” her beaded wig flew off her
head after a particularly sharp dance turn.
“The wig literally disappeared,” I told him.
“But she kept right on performing with these
little Buck Wheat tufts of hair. About an hour
later a guy came out to the dance floor with a
ladder, climbed up it and snatched the wig from
the top of a large mirrored disco ball. Nobody
ever figured out exactly how it got there.”
Later, after our talk, 1 recalled a conversa
tion I had with Lenoir following a perform
ance at Scorpio.
“You do that really well,” I said.
She sucked in her cheeks and arched her
eyebrows at me ever so slightly. “Why, thank
you.”
She sat down beside me for a moment at
the bar and I ordered us both a drink.
“What makes you want to perform?” I
asked.
At first she looked at me almost in shock.
“I wasn’t being rude,” I assured her. “I’m just
curious. What’s the motivating factor? What’s
the payoff?”
Then she laughed.
“It’s fun. People enjoy it. I get a lot of
attention.”
That summed it up rather nicely for me
right there.
The times have certainly changed, the fol
lowing is smaller and drag has gone from
underground to mainstream and now — in
some circles — practically passe.
As the LGBT community has attempted to
mainstream itself for acceptance by the
majority of Americans, fewer gay people want
to be gender-bending performers and fewer
gay people are paying as much attention to
drag queens like they used too.
Although the numbers may be dwindling,
they’re still out there. Still having fun, still
entertaining and still getting that attention
they crave.
Drag queens and kings are as much a part
of our community as the openly gay bank vice
president or the out lesbian business execu
tive. They’re part of queer culture and we
should never turn our nose up at the contribu
tions they made. I