The Fourth Key
TELL YOUR CRITICS TO SASHAY AWAY
“I don’t care what you think about me. I don’t think about you at all.”
—Coco Chanel
Although drag queens are celebrated for their performance art, they are also magnets for criticism. Anyone who is flouting gender norms seems to ruffle feathers in our still heteronormative culture. Also, though there are no rules in drag, as many of the drag queens I (Jackie) interviewed for this book proudly told me, that’s never stopped one queen from giving her opinion on another queen’s makeup, wigs, costume, dancing, and so on. All of this criticism has bred a kind of tough-as-nails culture in the drag world. Successful queens learn to shake off the haters and not worry about what other people think. Over the years, drag queens have also developed a set of “give as good as you get” rituals known as reading and throwing shade. Reading is when you incisively expose a person’s flaws, often exaggerating or elaborating on them. Throwing shade is when you assume a superior attitude and subtly criticize, demean, or insult. In the words of drag queen Dorian Corey from the seminal 1990 documentary on drag-ball culture, Paris Is Burning: “Shade is, I don’t have to tell you you’re ugly, because you know you’re ugly.”1 Shade is often so subtle that one sometimes doesn’t realize one was insulted until later. To show the difference, a read would be “Your dress is ugly”—direct and to the point. Reads can be long or short. If someone were to say in a very condescending tone of voice, “Oh honey, I’m so glad you saved up to buy that dress,” that’s shade. You and your dress weren’t insulted directly; the insult is implied by the voice and the context of what was said. You know it’s ugly.
You don’t have to be Hillary Clinton to know what it’s like to receive as much criticism as drag queens. For female celebrities and politicians, commentary on everything from clothing to hair to bodies to personality is fair game for the media. In the workplace, the same is true. Research conducted by Kiernan Snyder, a linguist and tech entrepreneur, that looked at performance reviews for high-tech companies showed that 59 percent of the reviews received by men contained critical feedback, whereas 88 percent of the reviews received by women did. In the critical reviews of men, 2 percent mentioned negative personality feedback. For the women, it was 76 percent.2 That’s quite a disparity. Actually, it’s shocking.
Not only do you have to deal with external critics, you also have to deal with your own inner critic. That’s the voice that tells you that you aren’t good enough, smart enough, or skinny enough. It’s the negative self-talk that can prevent you from taking risks or trying new things. Women often have louder inner critics than men because we have been socialized not to stand out, so when we seek to do so, our inner voice challenges us. You need to find a way to neutralize the criticism coming from inside in order to move forward and grow. So let’s look at how these queens have taken on their inner and outer critics and told them to sashay away!
Lady Trinity’s Disquieted Debut
“But I’m not ready!” I told my drag mother Kelly Kline. After I’d spent four months learning theatrical makeup, practicing with my backup dancers, and lip-syncing in front of my mirror, Kelly pressed me to set a date for my first performance. “You’re never going to feel totally ready,” she told me. “You just have to get out there.” I was going to have to actually perform in drag and stop procrastinating. It seemed like forever ago that I had come up with this wacky idea to actually do drag myself as research for this book. Finally we set a date in December to perform in her weekly drag show at Oil Can Harry’s. Cue the panic. My inner critic went into overdrive. “What if the audience doesn’t like you because you are a woman? What if they think you aren’t ‘draggy’ enough? What if you forget the choreography and freeze on the stage? What if you forget some of the lyrics?” To make matters worse, I had invited all of my friends, many of whom had never been to a gay bar or seen a drag show before. No pressure!
It was the night of my debut performance and I was backstage with my backup dancers, Cameron and Bastion. Luckily I had convinced Kelly to put us on second in the lineup so I could get the damn thing over with quickly. I didn’t want to be hanging out backstage for very long because I knew my anxiety would grow with every passing minute. I had triumphed over my fear of doing a full-out burlesque performance in front of my class of five people, but this was a whole new ball game. Now I would have to perform in front of more than a hundred and fifty people alongside seasoned local queens. The stakes had gotten much higher. I was trying to channel the courage I’d gained after stripping down in burlesque class to this new challenge, but my uneasiness was reaching new heights. Bastion could sense it. We were minutes from going on, and he brought my face a few inches from his own, pressed both sides with his hands, looked straight into my eyes, and said, calmly but forcefully: “You got this. We’ve practiced and practiced. You got it down cold. Now go kill it.”
We heard Kelly introduce me. There was applause and cheering as the music started. Then it was just sheer panic for the first ten seconds. Instead of entering from the back of the stage (which is really just the dance floor in the club), I thought it would be cool to emerge from the front of the stage, passing through the crowd. What I didn’t anticipate was that the club had put a VIP table right in the place where I wanted to enter the dance floor and since the club was packed with rows twenty people deep around all the sides of the dance floor, we couldn’t see the table from the back of the crowd. My dancers went ahead of me and parted the crowd, but they couldn’t get through when they got to the table. Meanwhile, because I couldn’t figure out what was holding them up, I began flat out pushing them forward, screaming “Go!” But they couldn’t. The lyrics were starting and I wasn’t even on the dance floor. “Shit! The whole thing is ruined!” I remember thinking. It had seemed like an eternity before we were able to literally fight our way through the crowd, but in actuality I only missed about ten seconds of the lip sync.
I turned to the crowd, assumed a power stance, and began to lip-sync mid-lyric. Like a quarterback who had just thrown a horrible incomplete pass in the end zone, I had to shake off the entrance, turn it the hell out, and throw a touchdown pass. It was just sheer willpower that made me move forward and get the performance going. Everything was a blur after that. I remember collecting some tips from people, mostly my friends. The song ended. People were cheering. We left the stage. Oh my god. What just happened out there?
Later I watched the video footage of me performing, and you know what? I didn’t totally suck! In fact, I uploaded it onto YouTube, tweeted it to a few of the drag queens I had interviewed, and many of them said that they wished they had looked that good at their first performance. Wow. That really made me feel good. I am proud that I—literally—pushed through the adversity and kept going. I almost succumbed to my inner critic but was able finally to shut her up. My ability to tackle new and bigger things outside my comfort zone was steadily growing. I was slowly building a reserve of confidence that I could tap into to try new and bigger things. When my inner critic started injecting doubt into my mind, I remembered how I had already conquered some pretty big fears; and you know what, I survived. Not just that, I kicked ass! And so can you. But you have to push yourself to try new things in order to feel that rush of achievement and channel that feeling later.
notes FROM THE STAGE
Love Her or Hate Her, Trixie Mattel Is a Standout
When Brian Firkus performs in drag as Trixie Mattel, it’s impossible to look away. Trixie looks like a mutant platinum-blond Barbie with huge exaggerated proportions, clad in a range of pink hues and wearing giant white pumps. The makeup is jarring, to say the least. Brian explains the origins of Trixie’s look: “I was looking at vintage dolls from the seventies and began painting my face the way they were drawn. The more Trixie embraced comedy, the more I wanted her to be a fifty-fifty split between a clown and a living doll. If you’re supposed to paint for the back row in drag, I like to think that I paint for the Denny’s down the street. The cheeks are strong because I want you to know that I am a man. I want you to be like, ‘This idiot has paint on his face.’ ”3
Trixie Mattel
(Photo by José Guzmán Colón)
The inspiration for his drag character came from dark times in his childhood growing up in a small town in Wisconsin (Silver Cliff, population 529). “When I was younger, I had an abusive stepfather. He would call me a Trixie when I was acting too feminine or gay or being emotional,” explained Brian.4 He took the name Trixie, a slur his stepfather derisively called him, and turned it into something to celebrate in drag. By doing so he took the derogatory voice of his loudest critic and turned it around into something positive. That is one surefire way to gain confidence! Trixie’s last name is Mattel from the company that makes Barbie dolls. As a young boy, Brian had wanted to play with Barbies and other girls’ toys but couldn’t because of his stepfather. He decided that if he couldn’t play with dolls as a child, he could become one in drag.
To say that Brian stands out from other queens when he performs in clubs around the world is an understatement. A skilled makeup artist and trained actor, comedian, and singer, Brian told me: “Nineteen out of twenty drag queens are going to put on a pretty wig, a pretty jumpsuit, and do a popular song. That’s not the type of drag that leaves a mark either. I picked up on that early on. I knew I was too weird to get booked, but I never saw it as a bad thing.”5 In the early days in Milwaukee he did have a hard time getting booked in local gay clubs because of his out-of-this-world look. But he stayed true to his artistic vision. Brian says that there is an advantage to not conforming to what is expected: “The presence my look commands is huge, because the look is unlike anybody else. Because it’s so far away from a face you would see anywhere else, even if you hate it, you can’t really look away from it, and that’s where a lot of the power comes from.”6
Brian’s strategy of standing out worked. The one and only RuPaul took notice and selected him to compete on Season 7 of RuPaul’s Drag Race after his first audition. His look was instantly polarizing. Drag Race had never cast a queen like Trixie before, and the worldwide fan base was vocal on social media, either loving or hating his Barbie-on-steroids look. But his quirky sense of humor made him a fan favorite, and he finished in a respectable sixth place despite being eliminated early and brought back again (long story). The show has given Trixie a worldwide fan base, and she now travels the world, delighting fans with her offbeat performances.
If Brian had listened to the cynics early in his career who cautioned him to tone it down and look more human, he would not be having the mountain of success he is having today. I asked him his advice for anyone who is dealing with criticism and doubting him- or herself:
You have to be in love with what you’re doing. When you are in love with what you’re doing, you don’t give a fuck what other people are saying, you really don’t. That sounds so cliché, I just don’t care.
I tweeted a couple of weeks ago, “If you’re not feeling my look, I’m feeling it enough for everyone, to be honest.” I fucking love the way I look in drag. Even though it is weird, that’s exactly what I like it to look like. If you don’t like it, that is so not important, compared to how much I love it.7
I’ve heard this advice from more than one drag queen: you have to be in love with all that you are presenting to the world. Because if you truly are, no one else’s opinion will matter to you. The key here is that you need to give yourself permission to be who you truly want to be. Once you start listening to critics and conforming your look, your personality, or who your friends are, you lose your sense of self. You become merely who others want you to be. It’s easy to become insecure when this happens and succumb to negativity. Don’t let that happen. Be like Trixie and love yourself enough for everyone.
note FROM EVERYDAY QUEENS
No One Can Drag Down London’s Fierce Female Queens
Can women do drag? This question generates an enormous amount of discussion—potentially divisive discussion. It’s true that, for our culture, the practice of drag has long been embraced and claimed by the gay community. It’s been a way for the men who were ostracized, bullied, and attacked for expressing themselves in ways that the dominant culture labeled effeminate to parody that and take it to the extreme. These men were so good at dressing as women that they frequently fooled the straight community, and it was (and is) a delightful way to say “Fuck you!” to the haters. In fact, part of the appeal of drag is the unexpected paradox—the eyes say, “What a sexy woman,” while the brain says, “Wait—that’s a man!” And then the audience members who don’t feel threatened by the conundrum or their own latent homosexual stirrings are able to laugh and enjoy the performance and to appreciate the artistry involved in this transformation.
But what happens when women decide to do drag? Suddenly, the tacitly agreed-upon structure has shifted, and some people, especially those who consider themselves purists, get offended. London, England, has a burgeoning scene of female drag queens, and they have dealt with this type of criticism before. One of London’s female drag queens, Victoria Sin, explains, “The worst misogyny that I’ve encountered has been in gay spaces, basically looking me in the eye and telling me, ‘I hate you because you’re a woman and this is not your space and you don’t belong here.’ ”8 Lolo Brow, an award-winning neo-burlesque and female drag performer in London, has felt the sting of criticism as well: “I have had [audience members] on stage find out I’m a woman half way through. They refuse to listen to anything I say after that.”9 Holestar, a female drag pioneer in London with an eleven-year career, has dealt with the “vile misogyny” of some “bad” queens. “Women doing drag is still not mainstream,” she says. “Recently I got called a cunt and ‘some chick who thinks she’s a drag queen’ by a queen who I called out for plagiarism. Who the fuck says drag is owned by men? It never has been. It was carved out that way through pantomime and tradition, but if you look at old music halls you’d have lots of gender performance by both men and women.”10
The London female drag queens aren’t afraid to claim this space loud and proud as “drag feminists” (our term, not theirs). There doesn’t seem to be as much discrimination in Austin, Texas, as the queens in London have experienced, but the struggle is real. Their ability to shake off the criticism and claim the art form as their own is impressive. Instead of letting the misogyny and hateful comments wear them down, they’ve formed a community of female queens who encourage each other to keep performing the art they love. They don’t stand alone; they have the support of each other. Lolo Brow notes how this performance art form is changing with the times: “Drag isn’t necessarily a man dressing as a woman anymore. It’s become an art form. It’s become a culture. Women have a place in that as much as anything.” Eppie, a newer female drag queen on the scene, says: “People might assume that I’m a guy just because I’m dressed like a drag queen. I don’t mind that, because I don’t think my gender should matter. It’s not like we have to ask permission to do anything, we just go ahead and do it.”11
You don’t need to ask for permission. This is the lesson to be learned from female London queens as they fight to make inroads into yet another male-dominated profession. How ironic is it that the profession is all about dressing up as a woman?
notes FROM THE COUCH
The Psychology of Internalization and Rumination
Why are we so hard on ourselves? Almost every client who comes to see me (Shelly) has at some point realized that he/she is his/her own worst critic. I find myself saying time and again, “I bet that critical voice that sounds like you started out as someone else’s voice. Let’s figure out whose it might be.” Because that is how internalization works. We take those early, constant criticisms that we received in life and begin to tell ourselves the same damned things. And, over time, we start to believe that those statements about us, which might just have been the insecure projections of other people, are true. It becomes an internal dialogue that keeps us from shining the way we are meant to.
Negative internalization usually starts when we are very young, and for women especially, it starts with the way that girls have been socialized to “be nice.” We’ve been taught this since we entered pre–Mean Girl stage (around third grade) and realized that popularity matters. One way to stay in the popular group is to try and be extra nice and sweet to everyone. In her book Queen Bees and Wannabes, parenting educator Rosalind Wiseman calls that tactic “Going for the Miss Congeniality Award.” Her seminal book changed the way in which adults view girls’ friendships and conflicts, showed the way they interact in cliques, and suggested ways in which parents could help girls navigate those minefields. It even became the basis for the movie Mean Girls. In the book, Wiseman writes that, unfortunately, this is how girls are trained to internalize negativity:
• When you’re with your friends, always put yourself down, especially in comparison with them, and compliment them. (When you’re not with them, you can say what you think.) Picture what happens when one girl tells another girl how great she looks. Does the recipient of the compliment thank her? Rarely. Instead, the response is usually some variation of “Oh no, I look so fat and horrible. I can’t believe you would say that. You look so much better than me.” Girls must degrade themselves after being complimented in order not to appear vain.
• Leap to your friends’ defense when they put themselves down; they’ll leap to yours when you put yourself down. So you say you’re fat? “OMG, you look so good!” Girls literally competed with each other about who’s the fattest. (“You’re so much thinner than me, compared to you I’m such a cow.”)
• And don’t do any of the above too much because then it will look like you’re begging for compliments all the time, and that’s annoying.12
Not only have we been taught to be nice, put ourselves down all the time, and compliment others at our expense, this kind of criticism (both from others and from ourselves) takes a toll on our very health. Daniel Goleman, Harvard-educated psychologist, author, and current director of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations at Rutgers University, has written over twenty books about social and emotional intelligence that address the impact of human interactions. In his book Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships, he writes about the sensation of “hurt feelings” and how our brains register social rejection in the exact same part (the anterior cingulated cortex) that is known to generate the sensations of bodily pain.13 Furthermore, he states that
being evaluated threatens our “social self,” the way we see ourselves through others’ eyes. Our self-worth comes from all the messages we get from others about how they perceive us. And a threat to our standing in the eyes of others is almost as powerful to our survival as a physical threat. If we receive a hostile reaction that triggers our fears of rejection, our bodies produce some of the highest levels of the stress hormone, cortisol, than any other factor that has been tested. And this is just as true if the judgment exists only in our imaginations! Because the moment that you think it, you create an internal representation, which then acts on the brain exactly the same as it would in real life.14
To make matters worse, internalization is often accompanied by rumination. Rumination is the “compulsively focused attention on the symptoms of distress and on its causes and consequences, rather than on its solutions.”15 Rumination tends to sound like this in our minds: “Oh no! I really screwed that up and now they all think I’m stupid. This always happens, and now I feel like crap. My stomach hurts. Oh, god, my heart is racing. What’s my pulse? Is it high? And now I’m starting to cry. I always cry. What a baby! My nose is running and my face is turning puffy and ugly. Now my head hurts so bad. Oh, no!” This negative feedback loop in our minds can completely derail us from finding a solution to the problem that triggered it in the first place. Even worse, the rumination loop can actually cause us to become ill.16
It is so important to find ways to end that internal dialogue that keeps us from being our best selves. So when we find ways to combat it, as the next section shows us, we are able to rise above it!
How to Tell Your Critics to Sashay Away
This is where you put that knowledge to work for yourself. For your Drag Diary homework, you are going to work on how to curb the inner critic and dismiss the external dissenters.
Take a Self-Talk Inventory
Get out your Drag Diary. Open to a clean page, where you are going to keep track of the things you say to yourself for a week. Date the top of the page and draw a line splitting the page in half. Label one column “Critiques” and one column “Affirmations.” For the next seven days:
• Put a tick mark in the “Critiques” column every time you find that you are thinking something negative about yourself, along with a word or phrase that you used. If you use that word/phrase again later, add a new tick mark beside it. Otherwise add the new word/phrase to the column.
• Put a tick mark in the “Affirmations” column every time you encourage yourself or say something positive to yourself with a word or phrase that you used. If you use that word/phrase again later, add a new tick mark beside it. Otherwise add the new word/phrase to the column.
At the end of the week, make a list of the top five self-criticisms and the top five self-affirmations. Don’t be discouraged if your “Affirmations” column is a lot shorter than your “Critiques” column. It just means you’ve started the process of self-improvement. Congratulations!
Now, above the list of those top five self-criticisms, write in all caps FELICIA.
Your Inner Critic’s Name Is Felicia: Tell Her Bye
Yeah, that’s right. We just gave your inner critic a name. And we think her name is Felicia. Most of you know what happens next: we get to tell her, “Bye Felicia.” For the uninitiated, “Bye Felicia” is a line from the 1995 comedy Friday, in which actor/rapper Ice Cube coolly dismisses an unpleasant mooch named Felicia. The catchphrase is now used in pop culture as the ultimate kiss-off or dismissal of someone or something one finds irrelevant or stupid. For each of your self-criticisms, you are going to imagine that it was this bothersome person Felicia who uttered it. You are going to create a response to each particular criticism and read Felicia to filth. In fact, you are going to imagine if you were a drag queen how you would respond to Felicia’s critique. Legendary drag queen and LGBT activist Sylvia Rivera once said, “Hell hath no fury like a drag queen scorned.”17 Well, you are a queen and your negative self-talk, aka Miss Felicia, just pissed you off with her nasty comments. Time to put that bitch in her place!
Now let’s look at those top five self-critiques from the previous step that nasty Felicia has voiced. For example, let’s say Felicia’s criticism is about you being too fat. Now we ask ourselves, WWDQD? Or “What Would a Drag Queen Do?” with this comment? Your response might be: “So what if I’m fat? Is skinny a requirement for being fabulous? Must not be, because FAB-U-LOUS is what I am. Bye Felicia!” Do this for each of Felicia’s criticisms. Write them down in your Drag Diary. And even better, say the responses out loud to a mirror with all the verve and sass you can muster!
Your External Critics Are Also Named Felicia
Yes, it’s true! This idea of taking a criticism and responding with a positive comeback works for both our internal Felicia and our external Felicia. That dude in your department at work who is always criticizing you in front of the team is a Felicia as well. So when you’re on the receiving end of a derogatory comment from someone, don’t let it get you down. Before you grow angry or start obsessing about the comment, just stop. Remember, it’s only Felicia spouting off her negativity again. Just as you did with your internal Felicia, write down the person’s comment in your Drag Diary followed by your witty retort with a “Bye Felicia” at the end of it.
WWDQD? Reminders
Write WWDQD? on your bathroom mirror in red lipstick. Put it on a 3″ × 5″ card and tack it up on your bulletin board at work. If you are looking for something a little more fancy, head over to EnterTheQueendom.com/WWDQD for free printable templates and other fun items you can use.
Rumination Stopper
As you learned earlier, rumination is when you compulsively focus attention on something that went wrong and why and how it shouldn’t have happened rather than accepting it and moving forward. It’s like a downward spiral of emotions that makes you just want to sit on your couch and eat an entire pint of Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey in your pajamas all day while watching Golden Girls reruns. Not good! If you find yourself starting to ruminate on something, here’s a surefire way to stop it:
1. Acknowledge the situation. The first step to solving the rumination spiral is to admit that it is happening. You are spending way too much time on it and it isn’t helpful.
2. List three things that went well that week. To break the negative cycle of rumination, think of three things you accomplished in the last week that you are proud of. This will help reroute your thinking toward positivity.
3. Get moving. Exercise will help you get the body moving forward, and the mind will follow. Dragercising, anyone?
Dealing with criticism is never easy, especially when some of it is coming from inside one’s own head. There are no better role models than drag queens from whom to learn how to shake off skeptics. When you stop yourself from internalizing negativity and ruminating about it, you free yourself to try new things outside your comfort zone. You will be ready to take risks like a drag queen. Can you imagine the things you could accomplish if you learned how to relish the risk?