The Radical Art of Drag

E xiting the ferry in Fire Island Pines there is a little area recently designated Trailblazer’s Park. Beneath a selection of flags by different contemporary artists, there stands what must be the prettiest drinking fountain in the world. Designed by painter TM Davy, it’s sheathed in technicolor glass tiles, depicting the smiling face of activist Marsha P Johnson in the manner of a Byzantine mosaic, complete with gilded halo. A close-up is printed on the cover of the current issue of Fag Rag Fire Island, distributed to every house in the Pines. Editor-in-Chief Tomik Dash describes the kind of erasure this public art is meant to combat: “Unfortunately, the memories of Marsha and so many of our LBGTQ+ trailblazers have largely been erased by the corporate takeover of our Pride parades and events.”

As the instigator of the Stonewall Riots, Johnson has been resurrected in the 21st century as a synecdoche for radical struggle, situating Black and trans life as the beating heart of queer rights, past and future. Her saintliness is so deeply ingrained that reading a contemporaneous description of her as a human being, wearing a crooked wig and stockings down by her ankles, has the thrill of blasphemy. Take this sketch from Holly Woodlawn: “Usually whenever I saw Miss Marsha sashaying down the street I quickly dodged to the other side to avoid contact. But this time the crowd was too thick and I was stuck. And she had already spotted me, so I couldn’t hide. I was doomed.” The throng she ran into was the Stonewall Riots, 54 years ago this month. Holly ends by proposing her own less reverent memorial: “I’m surprised they didn’t erect a statue of Miss Marsha on top of Sheridan’s shoulders, waving a pint of Cucamonga in honor of her carryings on.”

We’re currently in a culture war, though many people are still in denial about its intensity, even as cynical and cruel attacks on trans people and drag queens increase every day. In response to accusations of moral degradation, there is a knee-jerk impulse to push back with representations of upstanding LGBTQ+ people as model citizens. These tight moral frameworks don’t allow for the complexities and contradictions that define our actual history, excluding the visionaries, fuck-ups and weirdos who have pioneered new ways of being.

Art is one antidote. Some of my favorite books are memoirs by trans women who also happen to be drag queens and who came of age during the counterculture of the 1960s when being gay, not to mention trans, was illegal and heavily stigmatized. All were published in the 1990s, catching a wave of mainstream interest in drag in the wake of Jennie Livingston’s generation defining film Paris Is Burning (1990) and RuPaul’s crossover hit song “Supermodel” (1993) to cite just two. I’m recommending four of my favorites, which, taken together, create a dazzling portrait.

Holly Woodlawn (1946-2015) is forever linked with Jackie Curtis and Candy Darling as the trans trifecta of Andy Warhol’s Superstars of the 1970s. A Puerto Rican who grew up in Miami, she hitchhiked up to New York City, just like Lou Reed croons in the opening of “Walk on the Wild Side” (1972). Her memoir of those years is essential for understanding the Warhol scene, with all its insane narcissism and drug-addled competition. She recounts Andy Warhol accusing Jackie Curtis of using him, to which Jackie shouts in reply: “No, you’re using me!” They were both right; of course, only Warhol got rich.

Outrageous and hilarious, Holly is a grifter with a heart of gold, coming across more like a looney tune than a hardened criminal, even as she’s committing crimes – mostly stealing while high on whatever. Take this scene where, after months of charging her meals and drinks to Warhol’s tab, she is abruptly cut off by a new maître d’:

She gets her way (he almost gets fired), and always provisional financial arrangements are struck.

Jayne County (b. 1947) is the reigning trans rock ’n’ roll provocateur slash performance artist, subject of a retrospective at Participant Inc., New York in 2018. Born in rural Georgia, County left the Atlanta scene for New York, falling in with photographer Leee Black Childers, Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlawn, who all briefly lived together in a tiny apartment:

(I can’t help myself quoting this passage – I just love Holly. There’s a lot of crossover in characters and events in these books, so reading each fills out the others in a sparkling panorama.)

Heavily influenced by the theatrics of Jackie Curtis and Charles Ludlum’s Theatre of the Ridiculous, County created a uniquely caustic glamor as the first trans rock ’n’ roll act. County passed stints in the underground scenes of London and Berlin, honing her craft and sharpening her transgressions. I was struck by one scene in which County performs at NYU in the seventies:

Just today I read this same argument against drag from someone on the right.

Bambi Lake (1950-2020) was the icy poet of Polk Street who passed through the visionary performance troupes the Angels of Light and the Cockettes in San Francisco in the 1960s, and, like Jayne County, entered the trans cabaret scene in Berlin around Romy Haag in the 1970s. She returned to the SF punk scene in the 1980s and made her name as a chanteuse, writing the anthem “Golden Age of Hustlers,” later popularized by Justin Vivian Bond as a way of paying homage to Lake’s genius. Her description of the Cockettes as artists remains an important precedent for today:

Lake is a keen observer of the scenes she moves through. Her voice is both clear eyed and wistfully romantic, making her memoir a primer on the history of drag as an artistic endeavor, with its own elevated form of connoisseurship:

The Lady Chablis (1957-2016) burst into mainstream consciousness as a character in John Berent’s true-crime bestseller Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1994). Already a local legend in Savannah, Georgia, she became a national phenomenon when she appeared as herself in the 1997 film version directed by Clint Eastwood and co-starring creepy closet-case Kevin Spacey, also apparently as himself. The scene where Chablis crashes a Black debutant ball, reenacting her real-life antics, is one of the most incandescent screen performances of all time.

Her wicked, irreverent humor is tempered by incredible heart. At one point Chablis realizes she’d put a lot of work into her outer appearance but needed to focus on aligning her spirit:

Her memoir is a philosophical self-help book for being free, summed up by her immortal catchphrase: “Two tears in a bucket. Mother fuck it.”

Running through all these books is a nuanced interrogation of embodiment, gender and sexuality, illustrating that there is no single summary of trans experience – and that the demand for singular explanation is itself a violence.

I also think of these books as just as powerfully about class. Excluded from traditional employment, by inclination and prejudice, all the authors were poor, and thus their decisions – toward self-creation and liberation – take on an almost metaphysical drama. They are not only about inventing yourself, using creativity and wit, but about bringing forth another, more beautiful world. These memoirs help us remember them not simply as saints or sinners, but as artists whose great work was their own existence: forging lives for themselves in a hostile world with unique arsenals of charm, humor and style.

Treat yourself and read them.

_{Banner: Marsha P Johnson on the corner of Christopher Street and 7th Avenue in New York City during the Pride March on 27 June 1982. Photo by Barbara Alper / Getty Images}