«La primera drag»: drag as a party, not a costume

I have a song called «La primera drag» (The first drag queen). I won't tell you what it says, because the full lyrics are on the website and I'd rather you read them there without my summary getting in the way. But the title gives me an excuse to talk about something that matters a great deal to me and that sometimes gets explained terribly: drag as celebration.

I'll start with my favourite word in the title, which isn't "drag". It's "first".

There's always a first

Everyone who's ever got close to drag remembers a first time. The first queen they saw in a bar, up on a stage half a metre high in a wig that nearly brushed the ceiling. The first one they saw on telly, at some ungodly hour, when they shouldn't have been awake. The first time someone in their group of friends dared to try it, in borrowed make-up and heels that hurt from minute one.

That first time is a small revelation. It doesn't change your life overnight, but something shifts. You see someone who has decided to exaggerate everything, the mouth, the lashes, the gestures, the attitude, and instead of looking ridiculous they look brave. And you wonder, if only for a second, what you'd do if you gave yourself permission to exaggerate.

That's why I love the title so much. Because everyone will read it with their own first in mind.

Celebration, not mockery

Some people still see drag as a joke. A man dressed as a woman so people can laugh at him. That idea goes back a long way, to a kind of television humour that used dressing up to poke fun, and it still surfaces in some after-dinner conversations.

The drag that moves me is the opposite. It doesn't laugh at femininity. It celebrates it to excess. It takes everything that for years was used to single out camp boys, the gestures, the way of speaking, the love of sparkle, and turns it into a show. What was an insult in the school playground is applause up on a stage.

That reversal is the same one I try to pull off with humour on PLANETA GAYFOLK. Take what made you small and put it under a spotlight. But drag does it with the whole body, with hours of make-up and a dress that weighs as much as a suitcase, and that strikes me as a level of commitment few art forms can match.

There's humour, of course. Lots of it. The queens I admire most are also some of the funniest people I've ever seen on a stage. But drag humour doesn't punch down. It punches up, at the rules, at the seriousness with which the world takes gender, elegance or beauty. It laughs at the rules, not at whoever breaks them.

From the outside, drag looks like a one-woman show. From the inside, it's the work of many. Whoever sews. Whoever styles the wigs. Whoever lends the heels. Whoever holds the mirror in a dressing room that's really a bar's storeroom. The queen walks out on stage alone, but she arrives with company.

That reminds me quite a lot of how I work, even if my team is an odd one. I write every lyric and produce the music with artificial intelligence tools that I direct. I also direct the music videos, more than 280 of them. From the outside it looks like it all comes from a single pair of hands. In practice there are piles of decisions, tests, rejects, versions that didn't work. Like a dressing room. What reaches the audience is the final thing, the shiny thing, and behind it lies a floor covered in glitter and attempts.

Pride in heels

In Madrid drag is everywhere at Pride, in the streets, on the stages, in the old-school bars. And that's where you really see that drag, as well as an art, is a way of taking up public space. A drag queen in the street, in broad daylight, surrounded by people, is saying something that goes beyond make-up: that this place is hers too.

I think a lot about the GAYFOLK trilogy when I think about that. The third album is called «El día de la liberación» (Liberation Day). For me that day has something of a parade about it, a party where nobody hides, people out in the street just as they are, or just as they want to be that night. And in that picture there are drag queens. Lots of them. I can't imagine a liberation without wigs.

I don't want to romanticise it all either. Drag has its feuds too, its competition, its egos, its nights when the crowd doesn't respond and the number falls flat. It's a trade, with all the precariousness that comes with it. The queens I've seen work incredibly hard for very little money, and that's worth remembering when we cheer them at a party.

For anyone who hasn't had their first yet

If you've never seen a live drag show, I recommend you go. You don't have to like all of it. Some numbers may strike you as over the top, others as brilliant and others as frankly baffling. That's normal. All I ask is that you watch without the joke in your head. That you watch the way you'd watch someone celebrating themselves right in front of you.

And if you've already had yours, think about it for a moment. About what you felt. About whether it scared you, made you jealous, made you laugh or made you want to get up there too. I think we all keep our first drag queen somewhere, even if we never give her a name.

I gave her a title. It's what I know how to do.

«La primera drag» is at mikesaintlouis.com, with its music video and full lyrics.