Drag, Interperformance, and the Trouble with Queerness

Katie Horowitz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138327344
• eBook ISBN: 9780429830303
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This story of drag kings and queens at Cleveland, Ohio's most popular gay bar reveals that these genres have little in common and introduces interperformance, a framework for identity formation and coalition building that provides strategies for repairing longstanding rifts in the LGBT community.

Drag, Interperformance, and the Trouble with Queerness is the first book centered on queer life in this growing midwestern hub and the first to focus simultaneously on kinging and queening. It shows that despite the shared heading of drag, these iconically queer institutions diverge in terms of audience, movement vocabulary, stage persona, and treatment of gender, class, race, and sexuality. Horowitz argues that the radical (in)difference between kings and queens provides a window into the perennial rift between lesbians and gay men and challenges the assumption that all identities subsumed under the queer umbrella ought to have anything in common culturally, politically, or otherwise. Drawing on performer interviews about the purpose of drag, contestations over space, and the eventual shuttering of the bar they called home, Horowitz offers a new way of thinking about identity as a product of relations and argues that relationality is our best hope for building queer communities across lines of difference.

The bookwill be key reading for students and faculty in the interdisciplinary fields of feminist, gender, and sexuality studies; performance studies; American studies; cultural studies; ethnography; and rhetoric. It will be useful to graduate students and faculty interested in queer culture, gender performance, and transgender studies. At the same time, the clear and relatable writing style will make it accessible to undergraduates and well suited to upper-level courses in queer theory, LGBTQ identities, performance studies, and qualitative research methods.

1 Kinging

It’s 10:30 pm on the last Wednesday of the month, and for all appearances, it looks as if a dyke convention has hijacked the Union Station Bar & Lounge premiere of The Phantom of the Opera. The bar is strewn with glitter and heart-shaped sequins. Swaths of red and black tulle dangle between the rafters, and the well-worn wooden tabletops have been swallowed by decadent expanses of crushed velvet. On the back wall of the stage are mounted several oversized bejeweled and feathered masks. This elaborate set piece echoes the favor offered to each patron at the door: a green, red, or yellow mask signaling the wearer’s status as single, taken, or “it’s complicated.” Navigating both the newly defamiliarized space and the landscape of sexual availability, the regulars stake out the prime seating on the west wall while a throng of newcomers shuffle toward the back.

To the left of the stage, just past the booths of Wednesday night faithful and through the swinging black door that reads, emphatically, “ENTERTAINERS ONLY!!!!” the pre-show is well underway. Terrah tugs insistently on Pam’s binder, the garment lovechild of a sleeveless undershirt and control-top pantyhose used by transmasculine folks to minimize the appearance of breast tissue, and with each effort Pam’s curves disappear into Ace Daniels’ streamlined torso. Two tables down, a similar transformation is in progress as Ebony refashions Ashley’s bustline into pecs. Ashley holds her right breast to the side as layer-by-layer Ebony fixes it in place with strips of duct tape wrapped in a semi-circle from sternum to spine. The process is repeated on the left side and minutes later Landin Steele’s V-shaped upper body has emerged. In front of the mirror, Bryce Chambers adjusts his packer, a flaccid prosthetic penis, and asks Rory whether the resultant bulge is too large for his fitted jeans. Meanwhile, Trenton runs an electric razor through a Tupperware containing the remnants of his last haircut, chopping his erstwhile mane into an ever-finer cloud of five o’clock shadow. Once he’s satisfied with the result, he outlines a square goatee with a few spritzes of Aquanet to his chin, dips a powder brush in the ground hair, and dusts it over the hairsprayed area. He traces the edge of his beard with a moistened makeup sponge to remove any strays, and completes his metamorphosis into Timmy Knight.

As the eleven o’clock hour approaches, emcee Donnie Waste and his microphone take to the barroom floor. A surreal walking hybrid, equal parts circus ringmaster, Liberace, and small-town politician, he strolls the aisles encouraging patrons to sneak in one last cigarette, purchase another round, and tip their bartenders generously. He kisses cheeks, offers ribald commentary on the “man- and lady-parts” of fellow Bounce employees, and interrupts his own monologue to welcome a newly arrived friend from across the room. Meanwhile backstage, troupe managers Terrah (Miss Red) and Rory (Collin Lingus) rally the troops for a pep talk. All the hard work of the last month has paid off. Between the décor, the extensive publicity, and the promise of high production numbers, the Cleveland Kings and Girls (CKG) have managed to pack the house for this month’s theme show, “Love Is a Masquerade.” Terrah reminds the performers to take advantage of this windfall by mingling with the audience, chatting up first-timers, and personally inviting them to come back next week.

Then the traditional music begins (50 Cent’s “In Da Club”), signaling the main event. Co-hosts Donnie and Red take the stage, urging the audience to come in closer and fill the surrounding space. After a few announcements (all Skyy cocktails are $5; a prize will be awarded later in the evening to the audience member with the best costume; Donnie and Red’s production company, Wasted Productions, is sponsoring a show this Sunday to benefit the LGBT Center), Miss Red calls out the usual Wednesday night refrain—“Can I get a motherfuckin’ CKG?”—to which the initiated loudly respond, “WHAT!” And then the show begins, a line-up of solos and duets punctuated by the obligatory half-time show in which audience members who are celebrating birthdays, anniversaries, new jobs (or, failing that, break-ups, layoffs, or the not-insignificant accomplishment of securing a babysitter on a weeknight) are invited onstage to dance with (read: get humped by) the cast. All this culminates in a climactic group number to One Republic’s “All the Right Moves.”

In this piece, Miss Red does a turn as Miss Manners, the histrionic hostess of a late-Renaissance masquerade ball. She minces about the stage, overseeing the polite intermingling of her guests on the floor below. At the outset of the piece, the eight guests perform a highly stylized, meticulously choreographed baroque partner dance, bowing and curtsying, their physical contact limited to palms touching palms. But as Xavier Alexander Jade (X for short) enters the scene, clad in black pants, vest, and ascot, his hair spiked and his eyes rimmed with thick black kohl, silently crooning into an anachronistic 1950s Elvis Presley microphone, the crowd’s gentility begins to deteriorate. Under X’s Svengali-like presence, their conduct grows increasingly indecorous, proportional to the intensifying passion and sensuality of his performance, until finally the civilized, mannerly dancing has degenerated into a bumping, grinding orgy of movement. Scandalized by the dirty dancing and frantically waving her peacock feather fan to maintain composure, Red ascends the narrow bar table that flanks the stage, the better from which to self-righteously scold her guests. The piece reaches its climax as X joins Red on the tabletop and unmasks her, causing her to faint and fall into the arms of the unseemly dancers below. Her protestations having fallen on deaf ears, Red is finally consumed by the undulating waves of fleshly turpitude.

I begin with this performance because it both is and is not typical of CKG’s performance ethics and aesthetics, to the extent that there is such a thing as a typical drag king performance. On the one hand, the hetero-gendered pairings; the historical invocation of white, upper-crust proprieties; the damsel in distress figure; and the associations of femininity with innocence and masculinity with baser instincts appear at first glance to reify hegemonic sexual, racial, class, and gender norms. On the other hand, it literally upsets the very stereotypes it invokes by physically toppling Miss Red’s character and with her the traditional values she represents. This upending might also be seen to symbolize the performer-spectator relationship at CKG shows: in contrast to the traditional, proscenium-like staging of this particular number, these shows generally presume the absence of the so-called “fourth wall”—the illusion of distance between audience and entertainer.

In brief, that which does typify CKG shows can be broken down into four categories. First, the performers’ stage personas are mutable and impermanent. Although all the kings use a stage name, they do not aim for continuity in their onstage personas’ identities. The stage name is just a name—albeit one that connotes some form of masculinity: to put it somewhat reductively, “Collin Lingus” is an empty container that can be filled with any number of masculine types (rocker Collin, gangster Collin, lounge lizard Collin), and this is important because almost all of the kings’ performances are one-offs. Unlike the drag queens at Bounce, CKG members rarely repeat a number, and when they do, it usually involves some significant reworking. Consequently, and second, kings enjoy the freedom to try on new masculinities and sexual orientations with each performance, including explicitly queer ones, and importantly, this sexual fluidity is presented as an integral element of the natural range of masculinities, rather than as a threat to masculinity. Third, kings and bio femmes routinely breach the performer/spectator divide by pulling audience members onstage or by leaving the stage space and entering the crowd during performances. As I will discuss below, kings’ willingness to abase themselves for tips is central to the fourth and final constitutive aspect of the CKG’s performance ethos: a non-hegemonic relationship to class and race.

Sociologist Raewyn Connell (2005) provides a useful construct for understanding the nuanced and multivalent ways in which CKG members craft and interact with masculinity. Connell defines gender as a social practice organized around reproduction at all levels of society, from the individual to the discursive/symbolic to the institutional. As a social structure, it orders relations of power (via patriarchy), production (via the sexual division of labor), and desire (via heteronormativity). Connell asserts that masculinity must be interrogated through all of these lenses and in terms of its interactions with race, class, and nationality. That is, masculinities must be viewed in relation to one another in order to avoid reducing its complexities to uncritical “character typologies” (e.g. black or working-class masculinity) (76)—as if such types were uniform unto themselves. To combat this tendency, Connell identifies four relational patterns within masculinity: (1) hegemony, the culturally and temporally specific, dominant ideal that insures a masculine subject’s position at the top of the social hierarchy; (2) complicity in reaping the benefits of patriarchy, even if one does not meet all the standards of hegemonic masculinity; (3) subordination of masculinities that deviate too strongly from the hegemonic norm (e.g. gay masculinities, disabled masculinities); and (4) marginalization of masculinities that intersect with subjugated races, classes, or ethnicities. The tenuousness and instability of these relations is evidenced by the violence with which hegemonic masculinity often asserts itself against femininity and subordinated masculinities. The gender order is thus prone to crisis: whenever the fixity of masculinity and/or femininity is called into question (by women’s liberation, queer organizing, etc.), hegemonic masculinity must either reassert or revise itself. As I will discuss in greater detail later in this chapter, CKG performers have a particular fondness for representing the stability-threatening categories of subordinate and marginalized masculinities.

Connell claims that masculinities “are inherently historical; and their making and remaking is a political process affecting the balance of interests in society and the direction of social change” (2005, 44). “‘Masculinity,’” per Connell,

does not exist except in contrast with ‘femininity.’ A culture which does not treat women and men as bearers of polarized character types, at least in principle, does not have a concept of masculinity in the sense of modern European/American culture.

(68)

Despite the author’s desire to complicate and pluralize masculinities, this statement is predicated on a binary conception of gender. Indeed, it illustrates Gayle Rubin’s observation that “our usual understandings posit gender as in some ways binary; even the continuums of gender differences often seem structured by a primary binary opposition” (Rubin and Butler 1994, 70). The question remains then that if we want to argue that there is no such thing as “masculinity,” but rather many masculinities—as Connell clearly does—how can we maintain that the latter are defined relationally without viewing gender as a spectrum ranging from hegemonic masculinity to idealized femininity?

This problematic is further evidenced by the absence of female masculinities in Connell’s gender cosmology. Although Connell concedes that “to define masculinity as what-men-empirically-are is to rule out the usage in which we call some women ‘masculine’ and some men ‘feminine’” (2005, 69), the substance of her work does little to distinguish masculinity from male bodies. None of her examples or ethnographic data involve women, except in the roles of victims of and resistors to (hegemonic) masculine dominance. This is an especially striking omission, given that female masculinity is perhaps the most consistently subordinated masculinity of all. Yet instead of engaging with this example, Connell invokes gay men as the archetype of subordinate masculinity. And in so doing, she seems to fall back on character typologies herself. “Gayness,” she states, “in patriarchal ideology, is the repository of whatever is symbolically expelled from hegemonic masculinity, the items ranging from fastidious taste in home decoration to receptive anal pleasure” (78). In so saying, Connell appears to equate gayness with effeminacy and, by extension, sexuality with gender. But certainly, there are plenty of gay men who inhabit hegemonic masculinity more comfortably and successfully than many straight men (by being physically strong, sexually aggressive, emotionally detached, etc.). Certainly, there are gay men who participate in the subjugation of women; indeed, as the introduction to this book details, a major critique of queer theory is that the white gay male voice is overrepresented and too often stands in for those of all sexual- and gender non-conforming individuals.

What the drag king performances discussed in this chapter show us is that masculinities, though indeed relational, need not be tied to a gender binary, nor even to sustaining male dominance over the gendered social order. Since the particular qualities ascribed to the masculine ideal in any given culture are arbitrary (i.e., qualities such as strength, weakness, reason, emotion, assertiveness, and passiveness are inherently value neutral until we tether them to a system of patriarchy which deems some desirable and others undesirable), the CKG detach masculinity from both male bodies and patriarchy by recasting it as a simple aesthetic. A style, a way of walking, a way of dressing—masculinity consists entirely of gestures, and inasmuch as any/body can execute these gestures, anyone can access masculinity with equal legitimacy. Nevertheless, Connell’s terminology provides a useful provisory schematic for exploring the qualities that drag kings give weight to through their performances of gender, particularly in contrast to the qualities prized by drag queens (a topic which will be examined in depth in Chapter 2). The following analysis of drag king performances will thus be structured around Connell’s taxonomy of non-hegemonic masculinities, the masculinities which most appeal to the sensibilities of the CKG.

Performing marginalized masculinities

While drag queen performances aspire to perfection and theatrical professionalism, drag kings prize a distinctly low culture aesthetic. Although, as Butler famously notes, “the notion of gender parody” that drag queens produce “does not assume that there is an original which such parodic identities imitate” (2006, 188)—in other words, drag queens do not attempt to produce a facsimile of femininity or womanness—they do tend to put a premium on polished appearances and well-rehearsed performances. They want the work of drag to be evidenced through their impeccable self-styling and spectacular stage shows. In recent years, the work of queening has reached an international audience through the television show RuPaul’s Drag Race. At least half of each episode takes place behind the scenes, providing the audience a window into the craft of drag. We see queens sewing and bedazzling gowns, styling wigs, flattening their eyebrows with glue sticks, contouring their faces, strapping on hip pads and shaping garments, and practicing song lyrics for their lip syncs. I will have more to say about how the show has popularized and shaped public perceptions of drag in the conclusion, but suffice it to say for now that queening is constructed as an accomplishment that requires a great deal of training and preparation.

Drag kings are no less devoted to their craft. As Pam Stewart (Ace Daniels) told me,

I researched the hell out of some of the songs [I performed]. I would look up the video to see what they wore and I would try to mimic the outfits that they were wearing in the video or if they did a performance for an award show, like what outfit they wore there. Even until the last time that I did a show, I always tried to pick up different choreography just to try.

And yet, kings generally occupy a performative milieu that might be described as amateurish. In using this adjective, I am unequivocally not implying that kinging is crude or artless or that the performers are unskilled. Rather, I wish to signal that drag kings subvert traditional expectations of “serious” or “high” art. “Indeed,” as Jack Halberstam incisively notes,

terms like serious and rigorous tend to be code words, in academia as well as other contexts, for disciplinary correctness; they signal a form of training and learning that confirms what is already known according to approved methods of knowing, but they do not allow for visionary insights or flights of fancy.

(2011, 6)

Thus, what spectators accustomed to the more refined ethos of queening might read as sloppiness or failure in kinging, Halberstam reinterprets as “a refusal of mastery, a critique of the intuitive connections within capitalism between success and profit, and as a counterhegemonic discourse of losing” (11–12). This critique of capitalism, of the equation of success with affluence, of the collateral social division between winners and losers, is a central animating force of CKG performances.

As a general rule, the CKG cultivates a democratic atmosphere within the performance space. The separation of performer and spectator so typical of Western theater (including drag queen shows) is frequently transgressed during CKG shows. Audience members are routinely invited to join the cast onstage for pre-show games, open mic nights, and post-show dance parties. For a special theme show, the troupe circulated ballots on which audience members could vote for the song they wanted each king and bio femme to perform. The effect of such intermingling makes clear even to a first-time patron that by entering the bar on a Wednesday night, one implicitly consents to participate in the performance.

That said, the relationship between kings and their fans is neither unilateral nor really coercive. As much as kings expect a certain level of participatory willingness from an audience, they also unabashedly court their spectators’ generosity. CKG members routinely come down to the audience’s level, crouching on the edge of the stage to make eye contact with each fan that outstretches a dollar. Thus, when Ace Daniels spots a girl waving a tip in his direction, he locks eyes with her, saunters purposefully toward her, and places a hand or a kiss on her cheek before accepting the money, as if his time and performance were dedicated to her alone. A more explicit form of this self-abasement is the commonplace of simulating sex with tippers: performers remove dollars from fans’ lips, cleavage, and waistbands with their mouths and gyrate their hips up and down the length of his or her body. The kings’ willingness to submit to the audience’s demands—though circumscribed by racial difference, as I will discuss below—is consistent with the non-hegemonic forms of masculinity evoked by their names. These range from the punny (Logan Behold, Nic Tendo) to the dirty (Collin Lingus, Travis McNasty) to the abject (Donnie Waste, Blake Bound). But it is also consistent with a broader identification with the working classes, one summarized most eloquently by Miss Red/Christopher Dane, a bio femme and king who emcees th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: “radically different agendas”
• 1 Kinging
• 2 Queening
• 3 Gesturing back: a genealogy of drag genders
• 4 Gesturing forward: drag spaces and solidarities
• Conclusion: is drag still queer?
• Index