The excellent and poignant no-budget 1977 Canadian film ''Outrageous!'' tells the story of a drag artist, Robin (Craig Russell), who is obliged to pay a male prostitute for sex. Just as women are often regarded in straight society as being the weaker sex, so are drag performers positioned at a low spot on the gay totem pole.
If you don't believe me, rent the movie ''Flawless,'' but have nearby Pedro Almodovar's moving, nonjudgmental ''All About My Mother,'' with its European attitude as an antidote. Why wouldn't they? In our culture, drag performers are almost always portrayed as emotionally limited, frivolous, self-loathing, confused, self-castrating, sexually rapacious monster-messes. It is not surprising to me that audience members arrive with preconceived notions.
But I am also aware that, as the performance unfolds before them, some of those people are won over. In some cities around the country where I have performed, I have seen people's faces fall because I didn't arrive at the airport as the flailing, yelping maniac they had counted on.Īnd, yes, I am fully aware that many people are dragged (pardon the pun) to my shows practically kicking and screaming, certain that they are going to be forced by their friends to dully gaze at yet another backroom-gay-bar, lip-synching drag queen (an often disparaging term that I loathe). The flip side of dragphobia is drag expectation.
Although some people may not be aware of that particular symbiosis - which often occurs in professional circumstances behind the scenes - I believe misogyny and dragphobia are strongly intertwined because at their roots both are inspired by fear, a learned but involuntary force as powerful as breathing. The reason, I think, that people often strongly relate to the feminism they see in my shows is because of the correlation between misogyny and what I call drag phobia. Instead, I have been trying to do satirical drag humor that is not misogynist - and maybe that's feminist enough. The truth is, I never set out to create one. Many reviewers have perceived a feminist theme in my latest show and its predecessors. But what kind of showman would I be if, beneath the obvious silliness, there did not lurk some underlying themes, abstract or otherwise? And the notion of being trapped on various levels is definitely one of them. My show ''Lypsinka! The Boxed Set'' is primarily designed to make people laugh and give an audience a chance to lose itself in a mad visual and aural pop culture/show-biz collage. But what about the traps we don't make for ourselves? I'm referring to the stereotyping traps that others would have us inhabit. Whether willfully or unconsciously, we probably do. In the movie, Marion Crane responds to Bates, ''Sometimes we deliberately step into those traps.'' With all due respect to Joseph Stefano, the screenwriter of ''Psycho,'' I feel I am quoting the dark wisdom of Alfred Hitchcock. My friends look at me askance when I quote a psychopathic film character. And for all of it, we never budge an inch.'' Thus spake Norman Bates.
We scratch and claw, but only at the air. Clamped in them, and none of us can ever get out. YOU know what I think? I think that we're all in our private traps.