Is drag boring now?
Who’s afraid of RuPaul? No, seriously, who?
I was in Toronto the other weekend (home of one of North America’s three hellmouths, the other two being located in Los Angeles and all of Florida) and walked by a bar advertising “drag brunch,” a notion so nauseating I had to steady myself. Gentrification but make it yassss and slayyyy, at long last. Well, I mean, it’s not an altogether surprising development, considering the gays have been the heralds of gentrification for a long time now, flying ahead of condo developer Galactuses as unwitting Silver Surfers. Gays and what Richard Florida termed “high bohemians” move into shitty neighbourhoods, fix them up, increase their cultural capital, and then make the neighbourhoods desirable for successively bigger fish to come and displace them, and so on until the neighbourhood becomes a ghosttown populated entirely by absentee Chinese real estate speculators. So it goes — and it goes especially in Toronto.
I couldn’t imagine a more unholy union than contemporary RuPaul-watching drag aficionados and mimosa-sipping brunch assholes, so of course I looked into it — can you believe that this bar only hosts one of Toronto’s drag brunches? There’s like a thousand of them. People fucking rank them.
Is drag… boring now? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I still fuck with the odd queen — Crystal Methyd is dope as shit — but is it possible this shit has sort of run its course? Drag in its current form has its roots in ball culture, in which poor (primarily black and latino) queers competed, often judged for verisimilitude, in a number of performances often representing categories from which they were traditionally excluded — “womanness,” wealth, etc. When Livingston made Paris Is Burning she had to conceal its content from the National Endowment for the Arts, you know, because of shit like the whole Jesse Helms vs. Robert Mapplethorpe thing. The Reaganites would have smote her with lightning.
Sure, drag was “transgressive” once, but you can’t keep pretending you’re doing anything “transgressive” when one of the biggest media empires on the planet is a series of drag competitions that’s swimming in institutional accolades. The fucking Vice President of the United States was photographed smiling next to a drag queen. In fact she invited her! Drag’s transgressive in the way that modern hip hop is transgressive, in that it isn’t anymore, really, aside from among the usual moral conservative Republican stooges who are already outraged by basically everything everyone who isn’t them does anyway. Gone are the days where N.W.A. sounded dangerous. Dre is a billionaire Apple employee now. Your mom listens to DaBaby. It means nothing. A lot of these people are millionaires now. RuPaul lives in a house that looks like the fucking Palace of Versailles.
Is this shit even actually for the gays anymore? Last drag show I got brought to (kicking and screaming at this point) there were more cis-woman performers than anything else. Is that much of a surprise? Take a look at these crowds for “drag brunch” for a minute with me:
What do you actually see? Yuppie cis women. That’s who drag is for now. I had a friend, defending all this, opine that women were drawn to drag because it demonstrated the spectacle of Women Behaving Badly in a space where they were free to do so. Conversely, I’ve heard from drag queens what cis women “behaving badly” at these events amounts to too, and it’s widespread sexual harrassment of the queens. We’ve all seen those bachelorette party dipshits that crowd out the drag bars. I even went to a purported “alternative” drag show the other night and who should I see in the front row but these fucking Vancouver vampires with the worst basic bitch highlights you’ve ever seen in your life!
Hooks was wrong back in the day when she called drag (Paris Is Burning in particular) a spectacle for the well-to-do whites, but I mean, I guess she just wound up being ahead of the curve a bit. In 1989 a profile in Artforum called drag “the latest phenomenon” for “New York trend-mongers,” and ain’t that just telling of where this was all headed. Madonna would release “Vogue” the following year.
The brunchification of drag is nearing completion. The poor queers are being displaced by yuppie ladies searching for their elusive “gay best friend” who they presume will arrive like a platonic Prince Charming, give them a chaste kiss on the cheek, and then maybe give them a makeover. The twin pincers of trust-fund tenderqueers and homonormative gay stockbros will perforate the culture and make it more “digestible.” The neighbourhoods queers made seem “charming” and “cultured” are all opening nth-wave coffee shops. Struggling drag queens will travel into these neighbourhoods to caper for obnoxious straight women and the occasional gay man dressed like one of the Try Guys, and then go home to live in the toilet from Trainspotting.
Yes. Drag is boring now. And worse.