What did I do for two months?

I suppose I should have been wary from the get go when my lit review began with Tristan Taomino’s article, “Drag Kings make me Wet.”  Well, I absolutely agree with her, and with this being the case, what wouldn’t be a more perfect topic or group of people to study the last semester of my senior year.  I whole heartedly admit that the thought of doing my research watching women dressed up as men at a bar was definitely appealing.  The thing is, it got a little more complicated.  I got too involved and suddenly I felt like the one who should be signing the consent form.  I made lists of all the things I did right and wrong after each night of observations.  From the police reports and dollar dances to the art of peeing, lip syncing and packing, I was under their spell. I got the feeling like this whole thing is out of control, like this project is too big, like I’m living it, like there’s no way to sort out any of this.  I began to figure out quickly the more I learned, the less I realized I knew.  After this project and field experience my perceptions of both the drag scene and myself changed.  Quickly this became a very personal project.  I give myself credit for undertaking a subject that I knew was very loaded.

This was in no means intended to be an auto ethnography, but in many regards, it came close.  I started dressing up in drag.  I explored parts of myself that I had never allowed myself to even get remotely close to understanding before.  I began to ask, am I one of those women who only dresses up for fun, or is there a little “king” in me when I leave?  And, I also had to ask myself why I was so interested in Drag Kings.  Did I suddenly like men?  What was the appeal?  I learned that I was coming to terms with the fact that I wasn’t testing the waters, only learning that masculinity isn’t something owned by biological men.  Anyone can possess it.  I wasn’t straight, god forbid, I just liked the contradictions.  This project also came at a time in my life when I was becoming even more involved in the women’s movement.  I was dealing with beginning to see myself as a survivor and not a victim of sexual assault.  Dressing up became like saying, “I’ve got it too, motherfuckers.”  It’s healing, it’s cleansing.  I became something that I feared and I was disgusting and repulsive, and beautiful and sexy and intelligent.  I was me.  All of me.

The Drag king is to gender what ethnography, as a research method, is to social science.  Dragging can be a way of seeing; a way of knowing our own socially constructed gender system.  It is by taking pieces of the mundane, the taken for granted, and throwing them into an unusual context that drag accomplishes one of its feats, awareness.

In the closing paragraph Judith Halbertson wrote in The Drag King Book, "we could say that we are remaking the terms of normal life.  The Drag King, in a way, does not simply expose so-called abnormal desires, or abnormal genders, rather he revels in what is already perverse in the normal.  The Drag King gives us insight into the vagaries of normal masculinity, its own set of peculiarities, its own way of making those peculiarities seem mundane.  We can call this the drag effect and take it out of the drag club and into everyday life as a strategy for restaging everyday life.  Gertrude Stein, finally, could have been talking about the Drag King, and maybe she was, when she wrote, “she always says she dislikes the abnormal, it is so obvious, she says the normal is so much more simply complicated an interesting.”  With the arrival of the Drag King, the normal will never be the same again"  (Halbertson, 1999).

Judith Halberstam and Del Lagrace Valcano, in The Drag King Book, write about something they call the drag effect.  I think this entire semester I’ve been under the “drag effect”, or at least experiencing it. I guess this was exploratory research, in more ways than one.  I mean my questions only lead to more questions, which lead to a few answers in the form of questions.  So here’s my mess and masterpiece, my moments of pure genius and absolute irrationality.  Drag worked its magic on me, one of its many goals.  It got me squirming in my seat, wondering, and questioning.  I’ve learned not to take things like gender or sexuality for granted.  Spend enough time at the drag king bar and you too will soon be studying that person in front of you in line at the grocery store,  examining their neat facial hair, wondering if it’s held on with liquid latex. I’ve also learned that sometimes our deceptions, our tricks, and own creations of our selves can be more convincing than the real thing.

So, what is a drag king?

The creation of one’s gender is a performance that happens on a daily basis.  Some self-identified women choose to represent themselves in a masculine way in their daily life.  Often these individuals are referred to as male impersonators, a general term for all types of female to male genderfuck.  Drag Kings, for the purpose of my study, are defined as a woman who appears as a man consciously, for a performance, and who may or may not have any masculine expression in her everyday life (Halberstam, 1998).  Drag kings rely on symbols such as facial hair, clothing, and movements during an act to perform masculinity.

Findings:

The motivations behind dragging vary greatly.  Many Kings perform because of political goals, as a tribute to female masculinity, to heal, to act out anger, or to honor the memory of a loved one lost.  The Metro Detroit Kings I studied all shared awareness that their behaviors challenge our dichotomous gender system.   Along with reading Female Masculinity, drag helped me see that masculinity is not equivalent to maleness.  It is a set of gendered signs available for all to use.  When I watched the Kings perform I saw that they were recreating masculinity and claiming it for themselves.  Drag Kings perform gender by hyperbolizing the signs of masculinity.  A group of five Kings at Stilettos one night were smoking cigars.  I watched as two women approached the group and began to flirt.  They asked to try the cigars and pretty soon the Kings were instructing them, assuming that role, playing men.  Watching these exaggerated displays provided me with insight about how constraining gender roles really are.  If it’s so shocking to see women in drag, in some way it must be still a little shocking to see women utilizing other traditionally masculine “signs” in their daily lives.  The very act of dragging illustrates the social construction of gender.  Drag presents gender as mutable, as an experience that people can construct, in contrast to identity dictated by biology.  The Drag Kings, in their performance reconstructed masculinity with ease and a few props.  With the right clothes, facial hair, and movements the system is challenged.  I found it important to frame my research experience as best as I could within a feminist context.  Feminist theorist Judith Butler takes the notion of a binary gender system further by examining how these categories support gender hierarchy and compulsory heterosexuality (Butler, 1990).  Many second wave feminist question drag’s role as a political statement.  I think that Lauren Hastings may have said it best when she commented, “The world we live in follows our own designs and the blueprints are in our hands” The drag scene is influenced by lesbian culture and lesbian culture is shaped by the drag scene.  Drag is also a reflection of our society at large.  We have created the very thing that drag tears down.   Does Drag imitate life, or can life also imitate drag?

Methodology:

I made observations at Stiletto’s, a lesbian bar in Inkster, over the course of a month.  I visited the bar eight times on Saturday and Sunday nights usually staying for about 4 hours per time.  While making observations I talked to various audience members and performers.  I was also able to conduct four formal interviews with kings who regularly perform at Stiletto’s.  Three wished to be identified by their stage names, Michael Jacobs, Bryan, and Kevin.  The fourth woman only wished to be identified as Kelly.  All of the subjects that were formally interviewed were white women between the ages of 20 and 28.  Kelly and Michael Jacobs are romantically involved, and often perform together.  Their performance styles are similar.  Both dress in baggy men’s jeans and somewhat preppy clothes.  Self-described as king fags, they don’t view themselves as overtly masculine.  Both perform songs mainly from 89X by bands like Linkin Park and The Calling.  Kevin is tall blonde and lanky.  He’s your classic cowboy warbler.  He makes big tips, and has a fairly large following of women who love to get onstage and swoon.

Bryan is smooth, but intelligent.  He has an aura of mystery about him, like he’s always holding something back.  I interviewed Kelly and Michael at a Rams Horn in Rochester Hills. I have a few discussions with Bryan and Kevin on Sunday nights before the show started.  I found that the better interviews were the ones conducted outside of Stiletto’s.  I was able to gain more insight into the role drag plays in my subject’s daily life when we weren’t at the bar.  I listened during the interviews and wrote up notes later on to describe our conversations.  After my observation nights at the bar I would come home and write up field notes right away.

Moments of weakness and confusion:

Undertaking an ethnography project for the first time was exciting.  Finding a topic and a cultural scene that fascinated me made it extremely difficult to make any decisions regarding an area of focus.  I wanted too much and I wonder if I got anything.  I lost focus and lived in the periphery.  Both my greatest strength and weakness was my inability to set limitations.  Not only in my area of focus, but with personal boundaries as well.  I wanted to be close, but far enough away.  I wanted to feel enough, to know enough, to understand the King’s explanations of them selves.  It’s a fine line to walk, and after my first night at Stilettos I was exasperated.  I’d become a celebrity.  Kings bought me drinks and talked to me without any prompting.  I think many of them were just as interested in me as I was in them.  I was asked numerous questions, everything from why are you doing this? Are you straight?  Do you want to perform?  Do Drag kings turn you on?  Do you want to film us?  Do you want to be our cheerleader?  Will you sleep with me? to what’s you sign?  I answered most questions as honestly as I could because, in an attempt to integrate feminist methods in my research, I wanted my subjects to gain something from the research experience as well.  It became clear to me that some kinds of cultural meanings may only be accurately understood by one who has learned them without realizing it (Wolf, 1992).    I think living between the contradiction of inclusion and socialization on one hand and those lonely drives home on I-94 at 2:30 am defined my experience.  I was alone and at the same time hardly realized how welcome I’d become.   I have come to understand the meaning of ethnographic responsibility.  I feel like my subjects trusted me enough to allow me to search for meaning in both myself and them.   And, although I feel like there would be endless ways to write about, feel, and live the experience I can only tell one story, my own.

What happened?

“Are you there?  Lindsey?  Hello?  Where were you last night?”  Her high pitched voice sounds like fireworks exploding in my ears.  I’m holding the receiver, and my hands and face are sticky.  I’m glued to the phone.  I roll over slowing wondering what I wore home last night.  The crumpled pile on the floor is evidence enough:  white undershirt, men’s dress pants, and someone’s cowboy hat.  I went home as Luke.

“Hello?  Lindsey, where were you last night?”

“Stiletto’s”

“I’ll be there in fifteen.”

“Hey, bring me some rubbing alcohol ok?  I’ve got to get this shit off my face.”

I park in the grass lot one side street over and take a deep breath.  Nervous energy rushes over my body even though I know what’s waiting for me inside.  I can hear the bass, and it propels me out of the car.  I look ahead and see a crowd of women standing around a black pickup truck.  I start to walk faster because I hear anger in their voices.  Suddenly I see two of the women get into the bed of the truck and start to jump up and down, and out of nowhere there are blue and red flashing lights.  Before I even know what happened I become the only witness.  It’s late and I’m itching to get inside, where it’s warm, where the kings are already performing.  From out in the front porch, as some of the regulars call the entrance way with the pointed ceiling, I can hear Trixie Deluxxe announcing the next act.  I’m not paying attention, and answering “yes” and “no” to their endless questions.  The walls are littered with colored fliers announcing the upcoming shows.  There are pink papers advertising the turn about show, lavender for Michelle Malone who I saw in Atlanta last summer, and bright orange for Half Looking, a lesbian folk-rock band.  The two young officers finally release me and I burst through the front entrance way so fast that I forget to pay my cover.  It’s the same old, crabby women.  “Five dollars!” she squawks, and I throw a crumbled bill on the counter.  To the left is the dance floor side.  It’s light up from all the young women, under 21, who are required to wear neon glow necklaces.

The ratio is low tonight, like every other night.  There’s not a person of color in the bar.  I look through the open doorway to the show side and see a drag queen I’ve never seen before singling along with Madonna.  Her hot pink leather go-go boots and shorts appear as if they’ve been sewed on.  I slip in the room and notice KB is working the lights tonight.  I glance up and she meets me with a bored face.    Kevin strides out onto the T shaped stage and stands in position for the music.  I dart to an open stool along a wet bar on the right side of the room.  The music is too loud, it always is.  The first few notes blare and Kevin tips his cowboy hat in my direction.  I’m mesmerized by his movements.  He’s a baby Garth Brooks seducing the audience with his shy smile.  Kevin is the type of king that has the moves down.  The walk, the sway, the stance, he’s all man.  The song ends and he collects a few dollars he missed on stage, tips his hat, and walks offstage.  A queen comes out next, and I can finally look away long enough to survey the stage.

I spot Bryan in the vestibule.  He’s wearing a black suit and leaning with one elbow on the bar chatting to bartender with a perm that looks like it’s been growing out for years. A chunk of his brown hair falls across his forehead, resisting the globs of shiny black hair gel.  I slowly make my move, never taking my eyes off him as I cross the room.  I suck in a quick drag off my cigarette and stammer, “Hey.”

“Oh, hey.  Lindsey, right?  He doesn’t wait for my answer, cocks his head to the side and asks, “You’ve been around here enough, come help me get ready for my next song.”  It felt more like an order than a question.  And then we’re weaving through the crowd and I’m eyeing the back stage room.  Suddenly he takes a detour right into the unisex bathroom.  The line is out the door the room smells like warm urine.  I step on the tile and look down to see a wet footprint my boot leaves behind.  Bryan turns to face the six other people in line.  He calmly informs them that we’re doing an interview and he needs to get ready.  No further explanations are needed to justify our use of the only other stall.  I’m afraid either they’ll riot or I’ll gag from the smell, but this is definitely the drag king domain, and nobody says anything.  I wonder if we were to go on the dance floor side bathroom they would be so obedient.  I can’t ever remember seeing a King go to the dance floor side of the room, never if they were performing.   Then we’re in the stall and I’m suddenly aware of how small the space is.  Bryan notices to, and seems to like it.  I can feel the heat from his body as he loosens his tie and begins unbuttoning his shirt.  Standing in front of me in his undershirt I search for curves, for some familiar recognition, but I’m lost.  His goatee is . . .

“Do you pack?”

He throughs his head back and laughs, hard, “is that what you’re studying?”

I’m not sure of if he means my project or the bulge in his pants. I’m also distracted by the laugh, which is high pitched and ends with giggles.

“So you want to know why I do this, right.”

“You’re making this pretty easy for me,” I say, and I realize that I’ve yet again lost control.  I don’t fight it this time.

“This is me during the day,” Bryan says pulling out a small picture from his wallet.

Staring back at me is a woman with spiked hair and lots of eyeliner. “I’m a concert promoter”, he says, as if the
“uniform” needs some sort of explaining.

“I always show people this picture because it’s just such a contrast.  But it’s just me, all of me.  I have all these different parts, and they all need expressing.  It’s a thrill, and it’s about making people uncomfortable.  I want those straight women out there to say, wow, that’s a woman under all that, and she, I mean he, got me going.  There’s this quote, uh, I think it’s something like; gender confusion is a small price to pay for social progress.  You know what I’m saying?”

I think I do, and I’m starting to feel confused.

“Hey, I don’t have a lot of time.  Grab that shirt out of my bag?

I wonder why we’re in a bathroom stall, I mean, how private of a conversation is this really. Bryan steps closer and I move back, an inch, and the backs of my legs are pressed up against the toilet.  He looks me in the eyes, and I can smell the smoke and beer on his breath.  I bend over and reach for a black shirt from his open duffle bag.Then I hear the sink and the line of people and the toilet flush, and someone finally pounds on our stall door.

 “Hey groupies wait over there.”  I spin around to see Kevin.  Tonight he’s was a heartbreaker, a cowboy, and a gangster.  It was a busy night.  He’s tall, blonde and lanky and his 501’s are tight.

“You know I’m just messing with you.  So, you want backstage or what?” he says with his hands on his hips.

“Sure”, I say.  It’s hot, and my tee-shirt sticks to my back.  It crowded and the kings crowd around and congratulate each other.  Kevin playfully places his tan cowboy hat on my head.

“I think it’s time to dress you up,” he declares.  I settle into a folding chair, content that I have three kings fussing over me.  It’s makeover time.

 The show is over and I’m leaning against the cigarette machine.  The bar had cleared out.  The blonde bartender is wiping down the tables and collecting empty beer bottles.  Kelly and Michael Jacobs come out of the dressing room.  Michael is still flushed from his last performance.  Kelly whispers something in his ear, and brushes the hair out her eyes.  His hand disappears down his pants and he emerges with a handful of jolly ranchers.  I’ve never seen anyone pack with hard candy before, although I could defiantly see the irony.  He winks at me as they pass and says, “She couldn’t wait to get home to suck on something.”  And I want to say he’s brilliant and a pig at the same time, but I just nod, and say, “see ya next week.”

Conclusions:

Ultimately I found that the varying kings experiences with drag allowed for little replication of uniformity.  My own experiences at Stilettos were different each time.  Some nights the Kings were hyper-sexualized entertainers out for tips, and other times they were brilliant gender activists subverting the dominant paradigm.  Drag Kings have gained popularity and notoriety in the past 10 years.  Their performances are a distinctly queer cultural production.  I set out to answer questions in my research like:  what does drag accomplish?  How do drag performances construct identity?  How do king performances reinforce gender as a social construct?  Instead I found that there is much more research to be done.  Directions for future research include the analysis of race, audience participation, interaction between kings and queens, the use of names, and location or venue.  Through this research I only know that I came closer to understanding drag and the role it plays in my life.  I can only hope that I helped some kings think about what drag means to them.