Why Drag Queens are Canaries in SF's Coronavirus Mine
Originally published on The Bold Italic.
I went for a walk in Corona Heights Park in the Castro a couple Fridays ago after I heard the gay bars were closing due to the shelter-in-place order. Next to the fence where highly groomed dogs chased after each other, I saw a dead butterfly. And it felt like a poetic moment, like there was a rhyme to this city’s history. We have a coming plague of our own.
I came to San Francisco in 1993, right after high school graduation. People were dying, but I didn’t know them very well. I was young. Back then, the plague overwhelmingly afflicted gay men. Larry Kramer, a writer and LGBTQ rights activist, was screaming on TV that we were screwing ourselves to death if we didn’t practice safe sex.
I asked my friend Ed Wolf, a fellow writer and activist who worked in Ward 86 (the University of California SF’s AIDS research institute) during the early 1980s, whether my sense of déjà vu of the AIDS crisis rang true for him as well.
“It definitely brings up feelings of the early days, when there was so much uncertainty—the not knowing,” said Wolf, a sprightly raconteur with size 17 feet (a running theme in his one-man show last year, reciting a collection of stories on his experience during the AIDS pandemic). Since shelter in place began, he’s been isolating in Russian River, leaving behind his nurse practitioner partner in San Francisco. “It’s so much easier to get it this time, and suddenly I am the one that’s in the high-risk group.”
This time around, the plague could infect all of us. Its deaths will be mainly (though not only) limited to older folks (will damn viruses just leave people who went through the AIDS crisis alone?). But it will inflict its cruelest economic sufferings upon the young. Especially the young ones who need the magic of this city the most, the doe-eyed dreamers whose journey in life lay off the beaten path.
The speed and reach that coronavirus has decimated entire industries in San Francisco is particularly acute for the queer community.
San Francisco is the patron goddess who beckons to her misfit and nerdy kids the world over. This is the space that Mother Nature carved out, with her cackling Bay winds and enchanting foggy mists, and said, “Yes. You. Come. Come live your authentic lives here. This is the land of beauty for everyone who’s ever felt like they don’t belong.”
The speed and reach that coronavirus has decimated entire industries in San Francisco is particularly acute for the queer community. Bartenders, waiters, hairdressers, hotel staff — many, many of my gay friends are steeped in the profession of making the rest of us look and feel a little more fabulous.
I wondered, what will happen when the most fabulous among us — our beloved drag queens — are suddenly stripped of their jobs? How will they recover? Will they be able to stay?
Before I’m laughed out of town by the drag establishment, let me say that I don’t consider myself a drag queen — more of a glamorized cross-dresser. Friends and I will dress up in drag every so often and “queer” the fancy straight restaurants around town (pre-Covid-19), but the last time I competed in a drag pageant I placed dead last (a very sensitive subject). I think of myself as a drag queen writer instead and use the bigger voice this persona affords me.
To answer my question, I interviewed a half dozen drag queens. Some I met through Burning Man, others from my brief foray into the drag pageant scene, but most of them I know just from going out — drag queens populate the constellation of stars that illuminate most gay communities. I shouldn’t have been surprised at their answers, but I was. Every one of them said, “I’m going to be okay. It’s the other queens I’m worried about.”
Scarlett Letters, one of San Francisco’s most promising drag queens, said, “Even if every gay bar is closed forever, I’ll still be doing drag. Even if society crumbles. Even if I can’t buy makeup. I’ll forage stuff from my backyard.”
We’re in the middle of a change to society that is so sudden, so monumental — so global — that our history will be broken down into the period before, and everything after.
Such sentiments do not surprise Snaxx, winner of Mother Star Search 2019. “The queens that I know are resourceful. And resilient. You have to be to afford living in the Bay Area. When you’ve made a living based on scraping tips together, you can pretty much overcome any crisis.”
Photo courtesy of Snaxx
“It’s about being willing to change and adapt,” opined Miss Letters. “Log on to Instagram and you’ll see 12- and 14-year-olds playing with makeup in their bedrooms. There is an entire economy of bedroom drag. People are becoming famous without ever having been on stage. It’s an interesting phenomenon and changing medium that drag queens have to be ready for. Let’s see how queens approach the technical confines of putting on a show in their bedrooms.”
Or, you can say fuck it, like my friend Devlin Shand, a six-foot-four bearded queen who gallops across town in size 14 women’s stilettos and burgundy lipstick. He’s decided he won’t be paying rent while this city’s shut down.
“I am fucking out of work. It’s straight-up classist to lay off the entire service sector and still expect us to give money to landlords. I want to make sure it’s passed up the line to those who have more than we do,” he said.
We’re in the middle of a change to society that is so sudden, so monumental — so global — that our history will be broken down into the period before, and everything after. I don’t think anyone saw this revolution coming. Just like no one at Stonewall in June 1969 was expecting one drag queen to say to her transgender friend, “Watch me throw this damn brick…” Or so we can imagine.
I wonder if I would’ve been at the Stonewall riots, when low-income sissies and sex workers launched the modern fight for queer rights. I think so. I sure hope so. But I think I would’ve definitely started running when the cops came. “Not the face. Not. The. Face!” I’d scream if one of them caught me.
Then again, I could definitely see myself throwing a brick.
I ain’t scared.
A decade after Stonewall, San Francisco Supervisor Dan White shot the city’s first gay supervisor, Harvey Milk, five times — the last two with the gun at his skull. The jury said it wasn’t murder, and we rioted. By the time those “White Night” riots occurred here in San Francisco, most gay men had it in them to throw a brick and torch a cop car. And you know who entertained us the next night to keep that fire lit?
Sylvester. The flamboyantly androgynous black queen of disco best known for his hit, “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real).”
Drag queens are the canaries in San Francisco’s coronavirus mine because they represent all the weirdos and misfits here. They remind us there is a drag queen inside all of us. When they start disappearing, so too does the magic of this city.
There’s a photograph of Sylvester in a wheelchair at his last Pride march before dying of AIDS. He couldn’t walk. He probably had more change in his pockets than he had T-cells, but that pure, guttural laugh on his face — the way he just put aside his fears of death (because even death couldn’t steal his moment in the spotlight) — that’s a drag queen for you.
“So what’s the difference between this pandemic and the AIDS crisis?” I asked Ed Wolf.
“What’s different is that we know this is going to end… and end much sooner than AIDS.”
This plague will end. We don’t know when. The Orangutan said possibly August. But for those of us who love this magical city, will there still be drag queens left here to throw a brick? When people become homeless due to the pandemic, and Whole Foods makes their staff trade sick days with each other, will there be someone pissed off enough (with sweaty balls in triple layers of pantyhose) to show what it’s like to fight back?
Drag queens are the canaries in San Francisco’s coronavirus mine because they represent all the weirdos and misfits here. They remind us there is a drag queen inside all of us. When they start disappearing, so too does the magic of this city. Male, female, young, old, trans, straight — we all have an alter ego. Drag is beautiful and powerful because when we see someone else bring their inner spirit to light, so vividly and gaudily, so forcefully demanding our attention, it gives us just a little more permission, a little more push, to let our own light shine.
Don’t dream it; be it.
Be you. Find your inner drag queen.
Be this moment.
