art
At some point during each episode of Las Culturistas, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang ask their guests, “What was the culture that made you say culture was for you?” It’s a delightful and revealing question, sometimes excavating in their guests long-forgotten memories or helping them recognize that something was more significant in the shaping of their worldview than they’d previously thought. Frequently, while fantasizing making the rounds as a guest on my favorite podcasts, I try to answer the question for myself. Would I cite my earliest visits to the Art Institute of Chicago with my sister? Would I invoke Murder by Death, Neil Simon’s detective parody whose screenplay I could recite (but couldn’t necessarily interpret) by the time I was 7? Would it be watching my dad sitting at the piano, or watching his mother’s made-for-TV movies? Or playing Scrabble with my mom on her bedroom floor while watching The Golden Girls?
I could go on…through hundreds of intersections like these as a kid, I was lucky to be exposed to a wide range of cultural and artistic influences. Thinking back, it was a more diverse array of artists, media, and experiences than one might expect for a cis white kid in the suburbs. I didn’t become an expert in any particular art form, but I gained a kind of vocabulary, a rudimentary semiotic lens, to be able to encounter and appreciate people and experiences that I didn’t necessarily “understand.” Growing up, I wasn’t in frequent communication with people of color, people outside my family’s socio-economic bubble, or with queer folx, but when I finally did enter those spaces and meet those people, I didn’t face the kind of culture shock that many people experience. That’s not to say that I navigated those spaces flawlessly, but I think I was better equipped than many of my peers.
Through their media, artists shape the way we see the world, but it’s the subversive ones who make the longest lasting impact on our culture. Subversive artists — the ones who, through their art, challenge, overturn, and undermine conventions, institutions, structures, and systems of authority — innovate and see their media in ways that others before didn’t (or couldn’t). I’m not thinking of protest or political art (well, not necessarily or exclusively): I’m thinking of the ones who transform the way people see the world.
For example: Martha Graham. The great mother of modern American dance, as a young dancer she was excluded from ballet, the dominant and the only acceptable form of dance in the “high arts” of the early 20th century. Success for women in ballet depended on a body that, despite the incredible feats of strength required to dance gracefully and en pointe, communicated fragility, a body that Graham didn’t have. It’s hard to ignore how this contributed to the unrealistic beauty standards of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Though Graham didn’t have that body, she understood something deeper about how the body moves and communicates, something ignored or stifled by conventional ballet. Starting with the nuances of her own body, its limitations, its power, she developed not just a technique but a distinctly American art form.
Today, we enjoy an entire industry of modern dance that grew from Graham and a few others (notably, many women like Ruth St. Denis and Isadora Duncan), but we can also see her influence on particular artists. Bette Davis trained with Graham, and we can see Graham’s distinctive and constant flow between contraction and release of her core in the way Davis moves across a screen and delivers a line. Graham opened the door for choreographers like Bob Fosse to build organic vignettes from bodies (not cram bodies into abstracted forms), and of course we see Fosse’s influence on contemporary Broadway, jazz, and even hip hop. Madonna, who trained with Graham when she first arrived in NYC in the 1970s, developed her own signature dance styles with Graham’s technique at the core.
It’s not just an industry that demonstrates Graham’s impact: look at the broader (if not completely inclusive) range of bodies in contemporary dance companies. Sure, the majority of dancers are still lean and sinewy, but broad shoulders, thick thighs, and a full belly are no longer ejectable characteristics. Also, “fragility” is a word we can no longer associate with women in modern dance. Look at Pilobolus, whose innovations build on the foundations of Graham and others to highlight the grace and beauty that come with strength, power, flexibility, and sensuality.
Often subversive art is only subversive because of its origins. Art that emerges from marginalized groups is often labeled primitive, degenerate, basic, freakish…the derogation depends on who is in power. The rise of the Nazis in Germany was accompanied by a movement to denigrate and eliminate “degenerate art,” a category designated for art by Jews, undesirable (to the Nazis) ethnic minorities, and homosexuals and for art whose forms or style broke out of the narrow Nazi worldview. Abstract expressionism was dangerous because it demonstrated the limitations of “acceptable” forms to communicate the modern condition, including the devastation of World War I, the emerging insights of psychoanalysis, and the crumbling yet persistent hold on power by aristocracies. The designation of “degenerate art” was but one thread in the Nazis’ efforts to convince the wider population that Jews, ethnic minorities, homosexuals, and dissenters were unworthy of recognition and, eventually, existence. The label intended to defuse and disempower their art, to silence these artists and limit their contribution to the ways we see the world.
In the US today, we see queer people being targeted, and art that emerges from queer people’s experience is being used as a proxy for heterosexist violence. Drag is one of those art forms. It’s subversive because it plays with and explodes our constructions of gender, because it magnifies and camps up our faults and assumptions, but mostly because it’s queer. And because it’s impactful. Drag artists push the boundaries of performance and challenge institutional norms for gender and expression. They blur the lines between distinct art forms and in so doing create new vocabularies. Like other subversive art forms that came before (modern dance, jazz, beat poetry, abstract expressionism, surrealism…) they draw from multiple sources to create something new, something that transcends our current categories, something that reflects, responds to, and challenges the cultural context.
I’m not sure when I first saw a drag artist. Of course, I remember Tony Curtis and Jack Lemon in Some Like It Hot and Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari dragging it up on Bosom Buddies, but I wouldn’t think of them as drag artists, and in those scenarios drag is only a comedic device that gives cis straight white men a layer of protection or access they didn’t enjoy before. Of course, I remember To Wong Foo, but I cringe today when I see Patrick Swayze and Wesley Snipes in overly affected gender performances (though John Leguziamo was pretty good, in my humble opinion). They’re all great performers, but they were playing a part, akin to any other role they inhabited. I’m talking about a drag artist. I think my first encounter was in a bar in Chicago’s Boystown. I was underage and mustering the courage to order a drink when a queen in a sparkling blue dress and boa slowed in front of me, turned and read my whole history on my face, and gave me a wink and a smile before floating across the room.
On visits home from college, I’d stumble across drag shows in the clubs in Boystown, and when I moved to Boston, I was in awe when club security would clear a path for Mizery to cross the dance floor in a series of high kicks. I’d venture into Jacques Cabaret and ignore the seedy old men by the bar, just focusing on the talent on the stage. It wasn’t all glamorous. It wasn’t all even very good. But they were doing it, and they took bigger risks than I’d ever taken as a performer, so I respected it and shelled out my singles when given the privilege.
In my first year with the Boston Gay Men’s Chorus, I was cast in a trio for our Rodgers & Hammerstein show to sing “I Enjoy Being a Girl.” In my audition, I was asked, “Would you be comfortable doing drag?” Betraying the 99% of my body that wanted to run back to the suburbs, I said, “Sure.” A month later, I was being fitted for a purple frock and overlay. I’d be the redhead in the trio, and when I finally slipped into my wig and costume, I felt like Endora (from Bewitched).
The number was brilliant — starting “backstage” with three half-dressed drag queens, we sang the opening lines like burnouts, but midway a mylar fringe curtain dropped, we quickly finished putting on our drag, and burst onto the stage with all the confidence and tempo of the Dreamgirls. We revived the act a year later. The chorus did a tri-city tour with our brother choruses in New York and Washington DC, and after our final concert at Carnegie Hall each group submitted an act for the after party at Splash. I rushed from Carnegie to the club and was shuttled downstairs. As our faces were being painted, people kept bringing us drinks and we chatted with increasing confidence (did I mention the steady flow of booze?) with the gogo boys who were changing and, um, fluffing all around us. When it was time for the acts to begin, we were led upstairs. There’s something about being in drag — people just clear the way for you and want you to drink. As I moved, the crowd opened Red Sea-style, and strangers just handed me drinks as I walked. The power. Oh, the power.
When a friend was turning 30, he requested a “dragapalooza,” so a group of us acquired outfits and gathered in a friend’s apartment where a couple of friends with considerable make-up skills did our faces. As a group, we slowly and deliberately transformed ourselves. When I turned to consider my finished face in the mirror, I expected to be shocked or frightened or confused. Instead, I felt like I was looking at an old friend. I suddenly saw myself in a different way. We bar hopped the whole night, bumping into and surprising (and delighting and horrifying) friends who didn’t recognize us, but at some point we split into smaller groups with a plan to reconvene and de-drag at the apartment. On the way, I’d had enough of heels and walked in hose-lined feet for about a quarter of a mile on a crumbly Boston sidewalk. Crossing Berkeley, we all noticed it at once: a car turning in front of us, the windows rolling down, passengers spewing hate-filled slurs at us, and, when we didn’t react to their words, beer bottles flying at our heads. When we got home, we learned that another friend who’d been on his own had been jumped, insulted with a series of slurs, and mugged. We de-dragged in a quiet and dim-lit apartment, each taking turns to weep a little.
My husband and I went to our second DragCon this year, and we got to see a lot of drag, both from famous performers launched by RuPaul’s Drag Race and other soon-to-be-legendary types at the Drag Queen of the Year Pageant Competition Award Contest Competition (yes, that’s the real name of the event). The drag we saw ranged from classic high fashion and devotion to haute couture to avant garde performance, and it all both titillated and humbled me. I so enjoy particular artists and delight in being surprised by new ways the queens communicate and perform, but I don’t always understand what I’m seeing. It’s precisely those moments that I’m grateful for the vocabulary I developed as a young person. Instead of relegating it or walking away, I seek to appreciate the way it challenges my notions of beauty, humor, politics, or communication. What’s the point of art, I’ve always thought, if I can understand it at first glance? What’s the point of art if I don’t see something different (about the art, about the world, about myself) every time I approach it? When I’m lucky enough to encounter drag that pushes my boundaries, I’m reminded to ask better questions, not to seek easier answers or definitions. I can’t, or rather, I won’t try to capture the ways that drag has transformed the way I see the world, both experiencing it behind the mascara and as an audience member. I want to let drag continue to shape me and the way I see the world, the way I understand gender and performance, the way I understand myself and others.
Thanks to RuPaul, a self-proclaimed “mother fucking marketing genius,” drag is ascendant, but with visibility comes vulnerability. Right now, drag artists are under attack as a proxy for everything that doesn’t conform to the attackers’ worldview. They’re being labeled as degenerate, as satanic, as pedophilic. State legislatures are passing bans on drag performance at a rapid rate, trampling the First Amendment with theocratic aspirations. The goal — and I don’t say this lightly or hyperbolically — is, like the Nazis’ derogation of “degenerate art,” eradication of not just the art form but the people who create it. At one level, that’s a sign that, like other subversive artists before them, drag artists are doing something right. On another, though, it’s a call to action to straight, cis people, to people who actually value democracy and the Constitution, and to Christians who subscribe to love and justice, not power (don’t you think the drag queens would be hanging with Jesus, the prostitutes, and the tax collectors?).
If those people don’t move to protect drag artists and the spaces they need to innovate, create, and shape our world, then say goodbye to the fabulous world they’ve been creating for us.
