{"id":154110,"date":"2021-08-18T12:00:38","date_gmt":"2021-08-18T16:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=154110"},"modified":"2021-08-24T15:38:41","modified_gmt":"2021-08-24T19:38:41","slug":"what-is-drag-anyway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/08\/18\/what-is-drag-anyway\/","title":{"rendered":"What Is Drag, Anyway?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Martin Padgett\u2019s first book, <\/em>A Night at the Sweet Gum Head<\/a>, tells the story of Atlanta\u2019s queer liberation movement through the alternating biographies of two gay men, runaway\u2013turned\u2013drag queen John Greenwell and activist Bill Smith. In the excerpt below, an underage Greenwell sneaks into a bar and discovers drag.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Another Believer, Eagle Portland interior<\/em>, 2021, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons<\/p><\/div>\n

Huntsville, Alabama<\/em><\/p>\n

January 1971<\/em><\/p>\n

John Greenwell could stay in Huntsville and be the town queer, or he could run away and be free, so he ran.<\/p>\n

He threw a couple of days\u2019 worth of clothes in a cheap gray briefcase he\u2019d had since high school, counted eleven dollars in his wallet, each bill worn down like him, and flew out of the house that he had never called home.<\/p>\n

He had been born in Kentucky, the son of a mother he loved and an abusive, alcoholic father he grew to hate. The family moved whenever the military shipped them to another place: Tennessee, Texas, California, Germany, Alabama. By the time he finished high school in Huntsville, John Greenwell had already lived many lives.<\/p>\n

He had been a good student, a Boy Scout, a member of the French club, an actor in a school film about poverty. A graduate. A heterosexual. When he braved the cold and walked to the bus station on the edge of Huntsville and put his dollar on the counter and found a seat on a bus headed east, he put that John Greenwell to death.<\/p>\n

He dreamed of becoming a hippie, of growing out his short brown hair, of life with people like him. He wanted to see the world through psychedelic eyes. He wanted to touch the bodies of gods.<\/p>\n

The bus rumbled to life. Its air brake hissed as it pulled away. Huntsville dimmed behind it as John\u2019s eyelids flickered. He fell asleep to the urban lullaby he\u2019d learned in eighth grade, Petula Clark\u2019s escape fantasy, \u201cDowntown.\u201d<\/p>\n

The bus crossed an imaginary line in the dark and Alabama faded into Georgia. John woke for a moment, decided he would never go back, then drifted off into the comfort of his dreams. <\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Wet bus doors slapped open and woke John up in Atlanta as midnight grew near. He walked from the smartly styled art deco bus station toward a hotel down the street, paid four dollars for the night, tossed his briefcase onto the dirty mattress of his small, cold room, and charged downstairs, not knowing what he would find.<\/p>\n

John had only cruised a few city blocks toward the Strip when a one-\u200barmed man called out from his car. He didn\u2019t say much. He didn\u2019t need to. John ran back to his small, cold room, grabbed the cheap gray briefcase too small to hold any fear, raced back down the stairs, and jumped in for the ride. The newly minted couple drove south, to a house in a bad neighborhood where the stranger slept with a gun under his pillow.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

The stranger waved goodbye to John in front of Rich\u2019s department store the next morning. The ornate temple to commerce towered over an entire city block, so imposing Atlantans used it to locate themselves physically as well as socially. Margaret Mitchell had bought her dress for the Gone with the Wind<\/em> premiere in 1939 there. Martin Luther King Jr. had integrated the store\u2019s lunch counter. Coretta Scott King wore a conservative cloth coat from Rich\u2019s when the reverend accepted his Nobel Peace Prize.<\/p>\n

Rich\u2019s had an auditorium, a china store, its own post office. Shoppers could wander past the Store for Fashion with its hat bar and wig salon, or the Parfumerie, where cloying spritzes of Chanel No. 5 clung to the air. They could smell the heady scent of yeasty breads and Lady Baltimore cakes and pecan pies that wafted from the bakery, watch children cheer as they rode the curly tailed Pink Pig monorail overhead through the toy \u00addepartment, or taste the tangy dressing of the Magnolia Room cafeteria\u2019s chicken salad. Shoppers from around the South made special trips to Atlanta to buy from Rich\u2019s. It was Oz compared to the Sears catalog store where John\u2019s mother had bought the scruffy overalls that had followed him there.<\/p>\n

John pushed his way through ornate brass-\u200band-\u200bglass doors, found a friendly face at a counter, and asked if Robert worked there. A counter clerk pointed him to the shoe department, where Robert looked up in mild shock. He never expected his young acquaintance to make the trip to the city.<\/p>\n

They had met only briefly, in a clandestine place months before, but Robert had made a promise, and he kept his word. He brought his stray home to his lover and they made John a bed on the couch.<\/p>\n

John exhaled, then slept deeply. He had been in Atlanta just one day. He had a place to sleep, and a few dollars in his wallet. It was nearly all he had, now that life had started all over again, after it had barely begun.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Atlanta<\/em><\/p>\n

Summer 1971<\/em><\/p>\n

John rang up customers and stocked shelves at the SupeRx drugstore while he waited for night to come.<\/p>\n

He had pined for the great unknown of big-\u200bcity life, just like the heroes and heroines he read about in books and saw on television. The Wizard of Oz<\/em> went Technicolor when Dorothy hallucinated her way out of Kansas; John\u2019s life flipped into brilliant relief when he left black-\u200band-\u200bwhite Alabama for urban Atlanta. The allure was absent in the SupeRx\u2019s fluorescent lighting or its dingy carpet or its mind-\u200bnumbing work, stocking shelves and counting receipts and checking out customers. It all came to life at night.<\/p>\n

The drugstore lacked a certain glamour, but it was better than his first unsteady months in Atlanta when he had waited tables, took on odd jobs, and slept with men who let him stay overnight. SupeRx paid $1.60 an hour, enough to get him a room in a house nearby. It gave him something to do until he could head out after dark, to places like the Cove, where freedom coursed along \u00adinvisible conduits.<\/p>\n

Since he was six months under the age of twenty-\u200bone, John still was too young to get into any bar, gay or straight. His salary gave him the ten dollars he needed for a fake ID. When the Cove\u2019s bouncers took his fake ID and pulled him out by his ear, John had to join the clique of underage revelers who waited in the lobby of bars, in the hope of finding a source for a new license, or at least a lift back home.<\/p>\n

He had better luck at Chuck\u2019s Rathskeller. A friendly bouncer drove him home one night, then gave him a place to sleep. One night turned into three. Soon the bouncer became his roommate and friend, one who would look the other way when John slipped in the bar through a back door.<\/p>\n

Chuck\u2019s had taken over an old juke joint and dance hall on the corner of Tenth and Monroe, near a high school on the corner of Piedmont Park. During the day the park teemed with the gay life John had dreamed about, shirtless men walking together hand in hand, women spread out sunning on picnic blankets. At night, the crowd reemerged at Chuck\u2019s, where a DJ spun dance records for hundreds of club-goers. Atlanta drew gays and lesbians from all over the South, and on any given weekend the club put them all on display like the packaged goods once sold inside its walls.<\/p>\n

Chuck\u2019s held drag shows late at night, taking over the mantle from shuttered clubs like the old Joy Lounge and the infamous Club Centaur. John had heard about drag before he came to Atlanta but had never seen it. He watched, rapt in curiosity at drag shows, whenever he could. He saw an acquaintance, Alan Orton, perform as Barbra Streisand, his profile a mirror image of the Broadway queen. He witnessed a man named Alan Allison blossom into womanhood as Allison. He thought he saw Pearl Bailey perform \u201cHello, Dolly!\u201d but realized it must have been a convincing illusion.<\/p>\n

He clapped along as the crowd gave the drag queens applause and money. They were quasi-\u200bcelebrities, queens of a demimonde that existed only at night, hidden under the mantle of dark.<\/p>\n

John had long held fantasies of fame. But drag? It just wasn\u2019t what men did in Alabama. He found it odd and disturbing, but it drew him in nonetheless.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

What is drag, anyway?<\/p>\n

Drag intersects with impersonation but goes beyond it. Impersonation is nonthreatening mimicry: Jonathan Winters as Maude Frickert, Flip Wilson as Geraldine. They\u2019re men in dresses, no more. Their brilliant comedy derives not from the assumption of gender but from the assumption that the only punch line is in the contrast between their feminine look and their masculine selves.<\/p>\n

But a gay man in a dress, or a lesbian in short hair and men\u2019s clothes, is an altogether different being. Their images course with the electric knowledge that the performers have voluntarily given up citizenship in their presumed gender. Drag decimates presumptions of sexual identity\u2014\u200bmale, female, and all the points on the spectrum between those labels.<\/p>\n

Drag gives many people the tools to decipher the complex meaning of their sexuality, a way to choose the place where they can exist peacefully inside themselves. Some see drag as an ultimate expression of self. Some see it as a threat.<\/p>\n

When it matters most, drag asks universal questions. If you could wipe the slate and create a new identity, what would it be? What would you keep, and what would you set aside? Would you still be yourself?<\/p>\n

Drag teaches an important lesson: Sometimes, to find out who we really are, we have to become someone else.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

When the Cadillac pulled up to his antique-\u200bstrewn apartment, John knew a star had arrived. John\u2019s roommates had offered to put up some visiting performers from Louisville, including the leggy woman who strode up the driveway. She wore huge Jackie Onassis glasses, red hot pants, and a white tank top that exaggerated her height, her dark skin, her strong resemblance to Leslie Uggams.<\/p>\n

\u201cHello, I\u2019m Crystal Blue,\u201d she said softly, in a high-\u200bpitched drawl, and extended a hand to John. She mesmerized him. Her voice perfumed the air with ambiguous allure.<\/p>\n

She took his hand and inspected his clean-\u200bshaven face, smooth skin, high cheekbones, and lean, \u200bhundred-and-\u200bfifty-\u200bpound figure. He would make a beautiful woman.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou do drag, don\u2019t you?\u201d Crystal asked him.<\/p>\n

He wanted to meet men. He hadn\u2019t moved to Atlanta to do drag.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou will, honey. You will.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over the next few days, John grew to admire Crystal. Drawing from a suitcase, she had the magic to transform herself into a new person, one without a past. John realized he could do the same, become someone else, perhaps a beautiful woman with raven hair and long eyelashes. He tended to give in to his impulses, so when Crystal offered to teach him her art, he said yes.<\/p>\n

Crystal groomed John. With the entourage she\u2019d brought along, she helped him pull on and pin her wig, a black helmet updo sprayed heavily with Aqua Net. It fit. John didn\u2019t have a clue how to glue on the big, thick eyelashes Crystal wore. She helped. He knew nothing about makeup. Crystal knew how to soften his male features. With her hired hands she reinvented him in a matter of minutes, and when she was done, the mirror reflected someone he did not recognize.<\/p>\n

Wearing one of Crystal\u2019s costumes, he toted her makeup and gowns and slipped into Chuck\u2019s Rathskeller with her. He sat backstage while Crystal prepared, then watched as she transfixed the crowd with a song from the Broadway musical Purlie<\/em>, the story of preacher Purlie Victorious Judson, who battles Jim Crow laws in his Georgia hometown and finds allies within a family held nearly in slavery, eventually freeing them from bondage.<\/p>\n

Melba Moore\u2019s \u201cI Got Love\u201d wafted from a turntable in the dim cavern of a club as Crystal wrapped her arms around herself. She walked with a confident strut and worked the crowd. \u201cI know I\u2019m a lucky girl, for the first time in my life I\u2019m someone in this world!\u201d In turn, the crowd pulled out dollar bills, first a few, then many. By the time Crystal took her third callback, the money had grown into a pile. She lifted it, and let it rain down on her.<\/p>\n

John watched in awe at Crystal\u2019s command of the crowd. For the first time, he thought he might want to do the same.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Martin Padgett has an M.F.A. from the University of Georgia\u2019s Grady College of Journalism and received a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellowship. He has written for <\/em>Oxford American,\u00a0<\/em>Gravy,\u00a0<\/em>Details, and <\/em>Business Week. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.<\/em><\/p>\n

Excerpt adapted from <\/em>A Night at the Sweet Gum Head: Drag, Drugs, Disco, and Atlanta’s Gay Revolution<\/a>,<\/em> by Martin Padgett. Copyright \u00a9 2021 by Martin Padgett. Used with permission of the publisher, W.\u2009W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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