Queer Folks’ Tales II - Representation Matters

Edinburgh, we’re so back! It’s been so long and I’ve missed you oh so much. Are we all having a good time? I’m very glad to hear.

Now, as I discussed at great length in the first half, what I do for a living tends to inspire several many questions in those yet unacquainted with the art form of drag. While many of them are funny or about my appearance or something similar, a lot of them can be quite sincere. One of the questions I get asked most often, usually couched safely in a laugh or a self-deprecating comment, is

“Where do you get your confidence from?”

And it’s a good question, really. Drag is so inherently about confidence, it’s basically a physical manifestation of it - it’s about publicly presenting yourself in a way that is considered abnormal or even abhorrent regardless of the consequences, it’s about showcasing and drawing attention to sides of yourself that socially you’re told to repress or deny, for men, femininity, and for women, masculinity. But it’s easier said than done to unlearn everything that the world tells you not to be. I’m a very confident person now, but it took a long time for me to get to that point - while it may surprise you, I used to be pretty insecure when I was younger (we’ve come a long way since then, clearly).

Learning to be confident in my queerness is something I’ve had to actively teach myself, or rather, reteach myself, since I’ve been a Class A fag from day dot. I lost a lot of that childhood confidence at school - I became really fixated on what other people thought of me, of how I came across, and though I was proud of my queerness, I definitely tried to assimilate as much as was possible for a flaming eighteen year old who grew up doing ballet and actively sang in the school’s a capella group. One of the main things I struggled with during this period was a distinct lack of queer role models to look up to. In typical style, I’m the token gay of my family - I really decided to go balls to the wall with that role, I’m not only the token gay but also the token crossdresser, go figure - and my parents didn’t have any queer friends or anyone I could talk to about anything I was feeling. So, in the classic tradition passed on from queer generation to queer generation, I had to figure that shit out for myself.

And I’m sure many of you can relate, it’s kind of a tale as old as time - there’s no Homosexuality for Dummies to read, there’s just being thrown in the deep end when you get a boner watching a gay sex scene in the TV show Torchwood - Captain Jack Harkness was in fact my gay awakening, that’s a fact.

Eventually, I finished school, and I felt that I’d really be able to get to the bottom of these questions if I got the fuck out of there for a wee while, and so I decided to go travelling by myself for a bit. Can’t recommend solo travel enough, by the way, just as a heads up. Our story finally begins about four months into travelling, and we now find ourselves in rural Thailand of all places. I was in a hostel having some drinks with some of the other people I’d met there that night, and we were all having a lovely time. It was a real melting pot of cultures, people from all over the planet from wildly different backgrounds with wildly different experiences all grabbing a beer together and shooting the shit. Travelling by yourself teaches you a lot of valuable life lessons, and the main one I learnt was that you’re never going to get on with everyone, and it’s okay if you don’t see eye to eye with someone in life - by that I mean, I’d met a lot of dickheads by that point, and my patience for people was starting to run very thin.

So we’re there in the hostel, and we’re talking about another backpacker who’d already gone to bed, when one of the men unfortunately starts piping up, and while describing some facet of the absentee’s personality, used the phrase ‘that’s so gay’ in an obviously derogatory tone. This guy was also clearly tone deaf as well as I distinctly remember me sitting there wearing a pink lacy floral shirt I’d just bought that day, and he’s out here being homophobic - like, mama, read the room, know your target audience babes.

Now, for those of you who don’t know me, let me provide some context for you - I’m an Aries, I’m the youngest child in my family, and I’m gay, so when something pisses me off, I have a really hard time hiding it. Something about this man made me so irrationally angry, angrier than I should have been, that I started really going off on him. And too right, he deserved it, but this was deeper than just him. I’d had so many instances of casual and not so casual homophobia while travelling, and I’d dealt with so much of that at school beforehand, that all in that moment it reached a breaking point.

I snappily demanded why that was a bad thing, and out of frustration started ranting about how pissed off I was, and how bored I was of people saying that (because it is boring - if you’re gonna be a homophobe, at least be original). It went on for a while, and the beers probably didn’t help. The guy tried to defend himself, of course, and we went back and forth for a bit, but I only realised in hindsight that this man wasn’t coming from a place of anger, or hatred, or fear, or disgust - when I called him out for what he was saying, he was genuinely surprised.

Looking back, I don’t think he’d ever been challenged for saying that kind of thing before - for this guy, I was probably the first queer person he’d ever met and interacted with, certainly the first one to tell him the shut the fuck up. First of many, I’m sure. I’d spent months and months travelling, years of my life before then as well, trying to find someone who I felt represented me, who I could see myself in and be proud of who I was and who I was going to become. And I never found anyone. So I felt lost, and I felt sad, and I felt angry at the world. And this man represented all the things I was angry and annoyed about. And then it dawned on me, that to this man who pissed me off, I was that person I was looking for. After the fact, I would be that man’s frame of reference for what a queer person was, how they acted, what they represented. And though it was a tough pill to swallow, and in some ways it felt unfulfilling as a culmination, I realised that when you don’t feel represented or seen, it’s your responsibility to become that person you want to see in the world. I needed someone confident, someone assured in their sexuality, their gender, their identity, someone who was proud of who they were, unafraid and unashamed to authentically be themselves, and when that person failed to appear, I had to step up and be that person, for myself and for other people around me.

That, for me, is the secret to confidence, both generally and in queerness specifically - it’s all about faking it till you make it. I had to tell myself I was that confident person for a long time before I actually started believing it, and then eventually, I did believe it, wholeheartedly, and I’ve not looked back. I mean, look at me - I’ve got a wig on my head and I’m wearing a hot pink tartan dress with an eight-pack, I truly am the physical manifestation of faking it till you make it.

So to anyone who asks me where my confidence comes from, this is what I tell them - tell straight men to shut the fuck up, and you’ve taken the first step.