The year I turned 14, my friend Kirsten and I watched the Aussie movie
"Priscilla Queen of the Desert"
somewhere between 5 and 25 times. (I'm hedging my bets knowing how fickle memory can be.) For those of you who don't know (what a shame!), it's a lovely movie starring Guy Pierce ("Felicia/Adam"), Hugo Weaving ("Mitzy/Tick"), and Terence Stamp ("Bernadette"), about three drag queens on a road trip from Sidney to Alice Springs to pay a visit to Mitzy's six year old son, who she's never met.
(While in the movie, the queens travel between gender identities, choosing sometimes to go out as "girls" and other times as men or "boys", I use female pronouns here--she, her, hers--because throughout the movie, they tend towards them.)
It's a film that truly captured the heart of young Roz--I was smitten. My friend and I even obsessed over being characters from Priscilla for Halloween, only to be thwarted by how to play at being men dressed up as women. (Personally I think if we'd thrown a bit more back into it, we could have made it work.)
I'd mostly forgotten about Priscilla until last weekend when a friend's bridal shower brought our group to the
Broadway version.
It brought it all back--the costumes, the songs, the heartbreak, the joy. It also brought up a lot of questions for me.
My parents were very liberal and I don't have any distinct memory of learning about what gay and lesbian meant. My parents had gay friends, some with children, and it was always a part of the larger definition of "normal" and "family". As far as I can tell, as I grew up, I must have been more surprised to find out that other kids thought gay people were not normal, given the messages I received at home. What seems more interesting is when I first explored what drag meant, and who drag queens were. I don't remember watching the movie and being very surprised and I also don't remember any situation in which my mother would have decided to sit me down and explain all about drag.
I certainly didn't know any drag queens growing up and while my parents are incredibly liberal and open, I can hear my mom saying now "Some men like to dress up in women's dresses. It's ok of course but I don't really understand it." So was my obsession with Priscilla just another case of straight-girl voyeurism? Or something else? I certainly didn't know the term faux queen, and if I had, perhaps I would have tried harder to make our Halloween costumes work.
A five minute google search tells me that for many drag queens, drag kings and faux queens, the motivation is the malleability of gender roles and public expression of them. For others it may be more about performance and show biz. The general assumption is that drag queens are gay or trans men and drag kings are lesbians or trans women. But that's not always the case. Perhaps I was just interested in exploring my gender identity, or maybe I was attracted to the glitter and high heels and boas I otherwise eschewed in my 14-year-old world of fashion in which ripped jeans 4 sizes too big and thrift store flannels dominated my catwalk. I remember the brother of the same friend who loved Priscilla chiding us "Don't you care that some dead guy used to wear that shirt?", the subtext being "Why don't you want to dress like a girl?" I remember feeling self-impressed pressure to assert my feminism and my "screw you, society!" through non-feminine clothing. I wanted to hide any new curves and showed up to school in mostly brown flannel and scruffy hair. In hindsight, I wonder whether I was suppressing a deeply felt desire to embrace the exaggerated feminine and found it in Mitzy, Bernadette and Felicia.
The Broadway show on March 10 ended with a heartfelt appeal not to forget the larger implications of the show by Tony Shelton who played Bernadette. He described how a gay couple from Missouri, celebrating 30 years of partnership, made public their plans to wed that weekend. One of the men, a high school music teacher, was promptly fired from his job. What seems unimaginable here in New York City, at least legally, seemed to be par for the course in middle America. But, Tony assured us, this tale of bigotry and discrimination ends on a happier note. After the Times ran an
article,
more than thirty job offers rolled in and the couple went ahead with their plans to get married that Saturday (March 10) in Central Park. "And," Tony went on, "...they are with us in the crowd tonight!" The audience went wild, clapping, cheering, some even crying. It was a night that made me proud to live in a place where this can happen and where supporting it is easy. I just had to sit in an audience and cheer and cry, with no concern for my well-being. I just hope someday, everywhere, gender- and sexual-identity choices will be just that--choices.
In the meantime, now that I know what a faux queen is... perhaps it's time for my debut?
