RuPaul is back! Again! With something called “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” Though we all know old drag queens never really “go away,” they just take extended holidays to Mexico for unlicensed medical procedures or whatever. Anyway! It is a cable teevee reality show in which contestants compete to be the next top drag queen or female impersonation or gender illusionist or whatever term is the pc thing to say these days. And, true to form, there is a catchphrase at the elimination round: “chantez, you stay,” to those who’ve made the cut and “sashay, away” for those dismissed. There are the requisite “celebrity” judges, in this case former Destiny’s Child-er Michelle Williams and king of the sequin Bob Mackie. Uck! But! Having not seen the show, I’m not out to critique. I’m just rather struck by this weird, I suppose cyclical, drag revival. I was all prepping to live 2k9 like it was 1982, given our current economic clime, and now I’m sucked into some ’90s k-hole with all this drag race business. It makes me thing of college, Orlando, Florida in the mid-nineties, and the Club at Firestone.
The Club was housed in an old tire factory, natch, and was the — given the alternatives — place to dance to electronic music, back when we were all high on ecstasy and maybe believed to our error that the stake had been put in the heart of rock ‘n’ roll for good, so it was all about pills and hugs and beats. Hahahaha, folly. So, the club. It was around this time written up in Rolling Stone, and imported “superstar” DJs (I blame the ’90s for elevating every seemingly pedestrian occupation to superstar status– models, DJs, x-treme athletes, etc.) like Keoki and DJ Icey and whoever happened to be passing through. And usually it was 18 and up, so I could go with my older college friends and not have to worry about being carded. Though, for a time, I had a fake ID; fake in so much as I did not seek it out and pay for it to be made but found it by the side of the road after a fender bender likely caused by a girl known at the time by the sobriquet “the Sequined Beasty” — who is now a happily-married mother and a lawyer to boot, proving people change! Well, the fellow in this ID, he was over six feet tall with black hair and blue eyes, I was, at the time, about five-foot-ten with ash blond hair and a good thirty pounds lighter than the guy. The license worked when buying beer at the corner gas station but the diligent bouncers at the door of the club rightly called foul and asked me to recite the vital stats, birth date, etc., from memory, of which I could not. Good sports they, they took the ID away and said I could gain entrance when I came back with my actual driver’s license.
But to the point! On one of the “official” gay nights, cause really at that time it was all a little fluid, the club had this thing called the Drag Race. It went as such (if memory serves): contestants would come onstage, and the first (timed) challenge would be to assemble an outfit from the tat in the costume trunks. Then: take a shot. Next, there would be the applying of make-up. Then: take a shot. Finally: each contestant would lip-sync thirty seconds to a minute of a song of the DJ’s choosing. My roommate Jason was a frequent participant and a frequent winner. Theater majors! We know from make-up and costumes and showmanship! There was a cash prize that was always applied towards rent. Or maybe pot. Or both. Victory loot in hand, Jay would join the rest of us and we’d celebrate dancing with the rest of the shiny-shirted (nary an natural fiber to be found on those terrible rave tops) and JNCO-jeaned revelers.
To this day, when someone says “drag race,” I”m more inclined to think of a man hurriedly applying lipstick and wigs than two cars gunning their motors at a stoplight, ready to peal out.
I heard later that the club owner had started narc-ing on the the petty dealers who trafficked in the club, and the vibe took a nasty turn as it did with much of that scene across the country, the monster took over the party. But by that time interest had dissipated for the most part, who could afford the cost of the ecstasy and the cost of the recovery time the next day?
I’m sure Ru’s show is as entertaining as any formulaic reality show can be, but I’d rather watch a drag race in a sweaty, dark nightclub, with participants chugging jewel-colored shots, swerving in and out of their respective lanes in the race to the finish. I like the danger and spontaneity, not the Klieg lights and camera marks, when it comes to the races.