Dallas Block Party-- A Faux and 3 Drag Queens

What an amazing and unexpected weekend!

Here in Dallas, we have what is known as THE block party the weekend before Halloween; the street closes down, everyone gets dressed up, and they drink, drink, and drink. It's something that everyone needs to experience at least once.

i didn't plan on going this year (i've gone to all but one since i've lived here), but the drag-verse had other plans. At the last minute (literally 20 minutes *gasp*), i was texted by Richard Curtain--GM & show director at S4/The Rose Room not to mention THE Edna Jean Robinson--reminding me of a performance that i had committed to early in the week. i hadn't heard anything about it so i just ASSumed it wasn't happening.

SOOOOO

i painted the quickest drag mug EVER and ran across the street--trying to part the seas of people that were everywhere--and was greeting with the news that i was going to be performing with, not only Edna herself, but two of the baddest drag bitches in Dallas: Jenna Skyy and Krystal Summers.

HELLO!?!?! IT DOESN'T GET MUCH MORE FLAWLESS FOR A FAUX QUEEN!!

And there i was: in front of thousands of cheering Halloweeners as one of the 4 fiercest and best dressed queens on the block.

Wanna see?!?!?

(It's not my favorite pic of myself, but hey--it captured a moment that otherwise would have lived only in my head.)

Me, Jenna Skyy, and Krystal Summers

(That's my legs on the left!!) We were number 7 of the 15 Best Costumes at the block party!

WERQ IT GOLDIGGERS!!!

Great night, great peeps, and the longest catwalk ever!!

Here are more fun block party pics



To see the rest of the pics, click here.

Ahhh...i love Halloween!

Cartoon Characters in Drag. Let the Dragulation Commence!!

So i thought we'd do something uber-fun today! i am a SUCKER for cartoons (in particular the Powerpuff Girls, South Park, Family Guy, and Jem and the Holograms) and watch them often. Yesterday i was fucking around on Facebook and i came across this picture:

Best Powerpuff Girl EVER!

Not only is Buttercup my FAVORITE PPG, but she's in DRAG!!!!!!!!!!! So i started thinking about other cartoon characters who have donned drag and *POW* this post was born. These cartoons are animation history that drag has been in our pop culture consciousness for quite some time. Here in one fabulous gender bending post are my favorite cartoon drag moments. Grab your Lucky Charms cereal and enjoy!

Disney's the Chipmunks

My favorite cartoon growing up (and still is) Jem and the Holograms--although i identified more with Pizzazz . In retrospect, i really believe that Jem was Jerrica's drag persona and Jerrica, like me, is a faux queen--second only to Miss Piggy. Take a look for yourself:

Day/Night Drag

i don't think it's possible to have a conversation about cartoon drag characters without mentioning the Queen herself:

Bugs Bunny - The original drag queen

Bugs Bunny was in drag SO much that someone got smart and created this (so true BTW):



FLAWLESS

And who can forget when our favorite foul mouthed character donned a wig, dress, and heels (proof that all these things don't necessarily make a drag queen):

Cartman in drag

And my personal favorite--i didn't want him to get jealous since i spotlighted his partner last week:

Kermit the Frog on the Ed Sullivan Show

i was determined to find one of Popeye in drag but it didn't happen. Whatcha think? Did i miss any? Any that you'd like to share?

Bio Queen Manifesto Interview

i am VERY excited to announce that i have the honor of interviewing the 4 AMAZING women who co-authored the Bio Queen Manifesto. The interview is being conducted in 2 parts and i finished the first half last night. What a liberating and exhilarating experience!

As a community, we have such a rich history that we do not necessarily know about because it's scattered all over the place. The Bio Queen Manifesto is such an important piece of our drag history and the manifesto itself is nowhere to be found on the Internet. The myspace page where i originally found it has since been taken down. So i have published it in its original form here. Go read it. It's good stuff. It's a piece of our history that i hope to capture panoramicaly in the interview; the final edited interview will be included in the Female Drag Queen Anthology.

I can't wait to share it with you all!!

The Original Faux Queen - Miss Piggy

Dear Miss Piggy,

YOU had me "moi!"

i remember when we first met, you were a young piglet and came via postal mail in the form of a comic book, "The Muppet Babies." i saw you once again when you made your second big screen movie, The Great Muppet Caper. You were doing the most incredible water ballet in the fiercest costumes and i couldn't keep my eyes off you. i had to figure out a way to be just as fierce as you were. 

And then it happened!
i found you!
In spandex no less . ..

 

i did your workout like it was my own religion. i hung your pull-out poster on my wall as inspiration. i studied the record cover like it was a treasure map. i wished on star every night in hopes of adding even just a speckle of your flawlessness into my life.



But i still didn't feel any different. i still didn't feel glamorous. i was still no closer to your fabulousity than when i first started. Devastated, i did the unthinkable . . . i sold my record in a garage sale. i KNOW. i know. i was hurt.

Soon after albumgate, you wrote THE book that changed my life and became my bible:

WIGS!!?!?

FASHION?!?!?

i was on a roll to being a diva!

But life happens. i became a teenager and i forgot all about the world of one diva pig because i was too distracted by the world of clothes, shoes, boys as drag divas, and love. Yes love. i had lost sight of the origins of my flamboyantly diva self.

i had forgotten you.

But you, my darling diva, will not be denied. You did NOT forget about me.

20 years later you reappeared when i least expected it--in a place that i would have least expected to find you--a vintage record store.

You had come back to me!!! You had forgiven me for selling you in the first place and for forgetting about you. We were back together. 

i brought you home and dusted off my bible. As i listened and read, i started to remember all the reasons that i fell in love with you in the first place: because you did not let your appearance dictate who were were, because you didn't take any crap from anyone (not even your Kermie), because you were always a lady despite being born a pig, and you did all with great style, grace, and attitude. 

And then it hit me.  

After all those years of trying to be you, i realized that i found you through just being me. You were never going to really tell me your secret to your flawless self, i had to go out and find that divaness for myself by myself. i realized that THAT'S what you were trying to tell me all along when you said, "the secret of getting that marvelous present you always wanted is to go out and buy it yourself." --i finally did that. i went out and created myself into the marvelous present/queen that i always wanted to be. My queendom was the only present i needed. i just had to need and want that queendom so badly enough that i would go out and find if for myself. And i did.

i still do.

We are kindred spirits, Miss Piggy. i, like you, am a little speckle of drag glitter-glamour where you would least expect to find it. 

kissy kissy from your forever devoted subject,



moi

How can you not LIVE for this FLAWLESSNESS?!?!?!?

Want more Miss Piggy fabulousity? Check out this amazing website: http://www.misspiggyfans.com/

Faux Queens the Book: Working Introduction

So with some tweeks of course, here is a sneak peak of the introduction to my work on faux queens.
___________________________________________________________________

    It’s a good thing I was born a girl, otherwise I’d be a drag queen.
                                                                                               Dolly Parton (qtd. in Stevens)


     I was seven years old and I was obsessed with Dorothy’s ruby red slippers. I watched The Wizard of Oz over and over again fast forwarding to the parts that featured the shoes. I needed those shoes in my life, and I was determined to have them.  I rummaged through the all-too-big hand-me-down heels my mother gave me when she was finished with them and found the perfect pair to prep for transformation: a caramel-latte-colored, faux snake-skin, three-inch heel. I asked my mother to take me to the craft store where I had her purchase five tubes of red glitter. Armed with this glitter and an unstoppable imagination, I layered the entire shoe with Elmer’s glue and then covered them completely with those tiny red prisms of magic until I had created my very own pair of ruby red slippers. Fast forward to 2009: I am playing a modern-day Dorothy in a drag show and I am watching my drag mother, Jenna Skyy, somewhat in disbelief, as she transforms a pair of white knee high boots in almost the same way I had: red spray paint, spray adhesive, and buckets of red glitter into those same shoes I had created for myself over twenty years ago. At that moment I knew there was no real distinction, save for biology, between me and my drag mother—I, like her, had always been a queen.


     As far back as I can remember, I have always had an affinity for all things considered to be and accepted as gendered feminine/female excessive. From Dorothy’s ruby red slippers, to my obsession and need to be Miss Piggy—the way she could change her look at the drop of a hat (sometimes literally), I have never been one to shy away from all things shiny, sparkly, and rhinestoned.  So I am not surprised to find myself surrounded by books on drag queens, hyper-feminine female performance, and any/all things excessively marked feminine. Still, despite however closely and deeply connected I was or might have felt towards the drag queen community, there was still one obvious and blaring question that I couldn’t escape: how and where does a biological female (cisfemale/ciswoman) who loves and feels she is all things drag fit into this gay male-dominated community? And then, on a randomly ordinary kind of day, I stumbled upon my answer: in the Wikipedia drag queen entry nestled in-between the various definitions and descriptions was a new term that I, in all my years in the drag, academic, and LGBT communities, had never heard: faux queen. “A faux queen or cisqueen is a female performance artist who adopts the style typical of male drag queens. A faux queen may be jocularly described as ‘a drag queen trapped in a woman’s body,’ though few are female to male transsexuals” (Faux Queen 1).  Needless to say, this discovery set me off on a firestorm of Googling, YouTubing, and endless searches for literature, pictures, articles, personal testimonies—ANYTHING that would manifest and deepen my understanding of this new subset of  drag. My searches led me to small bouts of victory and sporadic revelations: I learned there was a faux queen pageant in San Francisco that began in 1996 and ended 2005 (where was I!?!?) and that more cisfemales than I could have possibly imagined claimed, right along with me, to both feel and identify as a “drag queen trapped in a woman’s body.” But it also led me to more questions and new obstacles: why wasn’t there more literature and scholarship on us? Why and how could I have not heard about these gender performance rebels in all my involvement with my local LGBT and drag communities and academic pursuits?


     This work is an exploratory journey into the world of drag: the art, the illusion, the queens, and how the cisfemales who love them make sense in it. While ciswomen performing various forms of femininity, sexuality, and women’s roles is not new, cisfemales performing drag in the gay male drag world is emerging as something unique. Among the various forms of cisfemale drag are female dragging male—drag kinging, woman dragging woman—burlesque or neo-burlesque, and woman dragging man dragging woman—the faux queen. While I touch upon notions of burlesque, particularly neo burlesque, I am not equipped nor do I have the experience and knowledge in this art form to begin to hypothesize what female/drag performances and identities mean to other cisfemale performers of drag. While I take into account and believe these gender performances carry their own gender, political, and social connotations that bring with them their own unique perspectives and relationship to drag, I do so only in relationship to the drag world and to faux queens. What follows is a narrowly focused snapshot into the complex panoramic world of faux queens. My ultimate goal is to illustrate how the faux queen relates to and transforms drag and gender; I argue that the very act of a ciswoman performing as a gay man performing as a “woman” and the choice to more closely align and identify with a drag queen’s version of femininity (what I call flamboyant femininity) is exactly the kind of transgression that queer studies, academia, and the LGBT community need to embrace in order to expand their definitions and beliefs about gender construction, gender performance, and gender identity.  My work on drag is about carving out and creating new spaces between preexisting ones for myself and others that I could not find in anyone else’s theories, scholarship, and media that surveys women, gender performance theory, gender identity, and drag.  

Faux Queens - The Book

Here's a sneak peek into my book in-progress about faux queens. This is the as-of-now preface--i am more than sure that it will go through many more edits but i wanted to show you where i'm starting from. Drop me a comment and let me know what you think!!

The construction of a written body of work is really no different than the art of illusion: start with an empty page—a blank face. You begin by playing with the general layout, gathering your ideas, main points, and (perhaps) quotations onto the page–layering foundation on the face, a bit of shimmery highlight, and a gradient of shades for contouring. You write yourself in(to) the work (whatever that means to you); after all, the personal is political—add a burst of color on the eyelid and your signature trademark (mine is a random rhinestone on my face). You then incorporate the scholarship and opinions of others whose works both support and challenge your own—create your body shape by adding foam hips, “tucking,” and a stuffed bra (or prosthetic breast plate—know in the drag world as a “tit bib”). You top it all off with an overarching conclusion or “ending”—throw on your highest pair of heels, wig/hairpiece, and your one-of-a-kind handmade costume and viola! Fiercely flawless, you have just attempted and completed both your first written body of work and your first “drag body” of work. However, we know that neither is as simple as my analogy might suggest. Complications occur: you find that your writing contradicts itself; you try to blend colors on your eyelid that don’t work well together; you can’t put your ideas into words let alone get them on paper; you confuse inspired by with replication, and creative freedom in your makeup for painting hard.[1]

Sometimes colors, materials, and ingredients do not blend well together—oil-based make-up with water-based cream, spray adhesive on bare skin, metal-set rhinestone jewelry with a chiffon gown. Other times you just need the right kind of tool/brush—one specifically made for shading—to help foster the blending process. In this work, I attempt to be both the brush and its strokes as I blend vantage points within subjects of drag, the drag queen, and its newly emerging component: the faux queen. Bridging, blending, finding points of connection within the multifaceted (and heavily opinionated) world of drag is not necessarily easy, nor are drag’s ideas often conducive to one another; however, I feel that finding these moments and places of connection is necessary in order to explain and show this world —a world which is very standoffish to outsiders—in the most panoramic view possible, to the communities that need it the most: queer studies, academia more generally, and the LGBT community. It is from a place of honor and respect for all the drag queens who have opened their art to me that I begin the blending process of the various hues that make up the rainbow of our community/myself: the student trying to (creatively) find academic form and function amidst all this abstract tulle,  glam, and AB Swarovski crystal gowns and shoes; the voice and performance of the drag queen trapped in my body who joins the gay male drag community in love and admiration, not competition and/or appropriation; and the bio-female who is so attracted to this world of gay male drag that she has dedicated her life and this entire work trying to find her and other’s home/place within it.

  

[1] In the drag world, the phrase “painting hard” is used when the make-up is not blended properly, i.e. the make-up wears the queen not the other way around. Color, texture, design . . . anything that the mind can image is game in drag make-up; however, the key to the perfect “mug” is to blend it all together. (“Mug” is drag slang for face.)

Behind the Scenes of a Faux Queen

So, this past weekend i was feeling nostalgic and extremely thankful for this amazing creative life i am living and i decided to go back through some (not all cause there is WAY TOO MANY) of my drag photos. Here are some of my favorite backstage photos from my 7 + years in the drag world. Enjoy!!