June is Pride month. It’s also when I escaped Dallas for Austin in 2013. When I decided to do an early celebration of both events by taking in a Saturday afternoon drag show at the Halcyon, it felt like early, post-Easter liberation. It was the first time I had gone maskless in a public place and not been overwhelmed by the fear of my imminent demise.
The atmosphere was relaxed, with doors wide open to the sidewalk, humidity, heat and people—mostly laughing, goggle-eyed UT college students—on daytime bar crawls. Every minute of color, chatter, song and self-expression was a rainbow tonic to a woman dying of thirst. I already knew how potent that elixir could be from my days living a heartbeat away from Dallas gay community and working as a part-time contributor for the for the local LGBT paper, the Dallas Voice. What I didn’t realize was just how much I missed it.
A regal, purple-haired mistress of ceremonies named Alizae Brooks hailed all of us, queer, bi, trans and straight. This was a space of diversity, though more than 80% of the people there were cis-gendered females, with a smattering of gay men and a single grinning lesbian. The composition didn’t surprise me. Gay bars—or gay-friendly ones like the Halcyon—were straight-girl heaven. A place where groups of young women could feel safe. Empowered, even, enough that they could boldly push dollar bills into performer bras and keep bar tabs wide open for round after round of the drinks that would have made them far more vulnerable elsewhere.
The show was classic drag. In their bushy big hair and outrageous costumes, performers shimmied around tables and dropped into crowd-pleasing splits while lip-synching gay anthems by Cher, Whitney Houston and Keala Settle. No one could mistake them for Ru Paul’s Drag Race contestants. The skill levels varied. Smaller performers like Gomez moved lithe as snakes while larger ones, like six-and-a-half foot tall Maxine, twisted and thrashed powerful limbs. Bodies and breasts hadn’t been strategically poured into figure-molding spandex shapers. And stocking runs, padded bras, cheap gowns and wigs and less than Sherwin Williams perfect makeup? They were par for the course. But that was the point. The performers were amateurs, doing what they did for the love of drag.
My favorite performer was one who likely was not a gay man. Iris had breasts and soft features, though neither meant she was—or identified as—female. With a high-hair wig of Dolly Partonesque blondeness and the Cabaret-style eyelashes of a young Liza Minnelli, she swept across the floor on the balls of small feet with a grace that defied the rolls of flesh she did not hide. I liked her difference from the others. And that she moved and lip-synched to Abba’s “Dancing Queen,” showing that if she was a woman or woman-identified, it was a song for everyone, not just gay male drag artists.
I’d seen other, more guerilla-style spectacles before, like the ones put on by my sweet genderfucked girls, the DFW Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. But where drag queens call what they do performance art, SPIs call their public appearances manifestations. The Sisters will tell you they don’t do drag because they are do-gooder queer nuns—male, female, trans and everything in between—who also happen to love white face and glitter makeup, high heels, sequins, feathers, spangles and general fashion hijinks. When they aren’t fundraising or spreading smiles through bawdy irreverence, they’re doing the rounds at Dallas gay bars, where they talk safe sex with patrons and had out condom-and-lube bliss kits to the amorously inclined.
Friends in the gay community introduced me to them, the same friends who, without thinking looked after me when I had nowhere else to turn. When I first talked to them in late 2010, they were scrambling to figure themselves out; so was I. But problems with an autocratic leader led to an internal coup then a glittering, more democratic re-formation. The second time we spoke in 2011, they’d gotten their act together—so had I, more or less—enough to be granted trial status by the San Francisco Mother House. They became a fully professed house a year later. I visited them again at Dallas Pride 2012 to congratulate them with hugs, photos and whoops of joy.
Drag, or queer spectacles resembling, them garner a variety of responses from cis-gendered women and feminists. I love them but many don’t. Or if they do, they critique it for leaving out female/female identified performers or drag kings, those badass females/trans people butch enough to perform male camp. Still others—like Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney’s lesbian sister Mary—has called them the gender-demeaning equivalent of blackface performances.
For me, it comes down to intent. Nineteenth century minstrel show performers used blackface to caricature African Americans, one of many cruel racist blunders that continues to haunt the American consciousness. But whiteface has a different history. In Japanese Kabuki theater, actors wear whiteface, which began as a theatrical practicality that evolved into tradition. Not only did whiteface make the colored paints actors used indicate age, emotion and personality stand out. It also prevented oil and sweat from running all the colors together and ruining an otherwise impeccable look.
This isn’t to say whiteface can’t be abused as well. And that all drag queens exaggerate femininity without misogynist intent. The best performances use gender parody to move beyond the binary to which we have all been confined and show that other possibilities for how to be in the world can and do exist. But like so much these days, open spaces of possibility are under fire. A leaflet someone at the Halcyon distributed during intermission informed patrons that the city plans to demolish the low-rise gay bar district. No one quite knows why, but I can guess, Austin will likely use the land to feed the skyscraper addiction it got from Dallas.
The LGBTQ community nothing if not resilient. They lived through AIDS long before everyone else had to deal with COVID. It’s not for nothing that another of its most beloved anthems is Gloria Gaynor’s 1977 hit, “I Will Survive.” The bars and drag performers will reappear elsewhere after the storm, colors intact. Because like rainbows that’s what they do.