part0006

Alright, maybe we don’t, but thank goodness there’s a lot of fabulous that’s possible in the world. And goddess bless the people who make the fabulous. And goddess bless you, because you appreciate fabulous. I’m sure you look for fabulous wherever you might be, or you wouldn’t have picked up this book. But honestly now, is there anything fabulous in philosophy?

Well, yeah. This book is pretty fabulous. It’s not all about the philosophy of drag, mind you. Although some of the essays dive right into that one. Other essays in here examine the ethics of competition in drag; the various modes and styles of the language of drag; how venue and audience both effect the performance of drag … and so much more.

We live in a day and age when drag queens are out in the open. Well, not so much on the streets—that’s still pretty dangerous for drag queens no matter where they live. But the big deal is that real, radical, queer-ass drag queens have entered the popular culture on more or less their own terms. How fabulous is that?

Some of my best friends are drag queens. No, really. Or they were drag queens and now they’re something else. Or they’re sometimes drag queens. I’m a sometimes drag queen. My drag name is Trannie Hall. La-de-da. Some of my best friends either are or have been contestants on RuPaul’s Drag Race . Some of them have even won. I drop their names in public with deep respect, sincere reverence, and lots of love. In the worlds of gender politics, gender activism, and gender anarchy, each and every drag queen is gender royalty. Period. All that being said, welcome to the at once challenging and satisfying collection of appropriately deep, reverently irreverent thoughts about RuPaul’s Drag Race . Welcome to the runway at the heart of postmodern gender theory: drag, the proudly flamboyant performance of a broken binary.

All of us live with some idea of what’s a man, and what’s a woman. Every single one of us carries around rules and regulations for those two genders. Enter the drag queen. None of us grew up knowing rules about drag queens. Is there some queen out there who calls herself Terra Incognita? Oh please if you meet her, give her my love. Right, so there are no rules in drag, but there are values that many queens share; and as a queen, you can learn those values, and you can choose whether or not to embrace and embody them.

Since values are so much more profound than rules, learning a value is more profoundly life-changing than learning a rule. That’s what every drag queen in the world is doing, nearly every moment of every day: they’re learning how to be better drag queens. And that’s what we’re watching when we are watching Drag Race : They aren’t men, well not all the time anyway. And they aren’t women, not all the time. On RuPaul’s Drag Race , we get the amazing opportunity to watch people who are learning their gender at the level of values, and on their own terms and that is precisely why drag queens and drag kings are Queer royalty.

Traditionally, drag has been a phenomenon that takes place in a discrete moment of time. Used to be, going to a drag show meant you’d go to some sleazy little bar and get drunk and cheer and hand the performers as many singles as you could afford. Then you’d go home, and all you’d know about those queens would be their performance. Drag Race is the first pop phenomenon to present drag life and performance as a continuum. Over the course of a season, we watch queens rise and fall before our very eyes. Over the course of a season, we get to watch the casual way they slip back and forth across pronouns when they’re talking about themselves and others … and all the reasons for those pronoun shifts, oh my! (Theorygasm!—the first of many in this terrific collection of essays.) And, more profoundly, we get to watch as drag queens of all ages, races, and backgrounds develop life affirming values in a gender that is only these days learning to speak its name.

And speaking of names, allow me to drop one of the best: RuPaul. At this writing, Ru is the reigning Queen of Queens … literally around the world. I’m a complete fan girl and loyal subject. Mama Ru and I met once on the street in New York City. The memory of that moment, that flash of recognition that I felt when I realized … there she was! And that hug! Oh! I’m still smiling. For some, Ru is a lightning rod for … well, for just about anything you ever want to say about gender, sexuality, or activism. Me, I think Ru isn’t so much the lightning rod as he/she/they is the lightning. The authors in this book have all been struck, and now they’ve written about it.

Yvie Oddly, Drag Superstar of Season Eleven, says, “It’s people who have different views and different aesthetics and different feelings that really show us all the possibilities of the human experience.” Well that’s what we’ve got in this book, and all these points of view, and all these aesthetics are focused on fabulous, freaky, royalty. Enjoy the read, relish the possibilities.