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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
One by one, the performers take the stage: baby-faced Ken Las Vegas (who is no longer with the tour) channels Prince for the tortured ballad "The Beautiful Ones," sporting a purple and black smoking jacket, playing a miniature rhinestone piano and provocatively thrusting his pelvis; Christopher, all flat abs and floppy hair, does David Bowie's Berlin-fueled satire of male privilege and paean to homoerotic friendships, "Boys Keep Swinging," swaggering and gyrating around the stage, stripping from a suit to a Boy Scout uniform to a leather vest and black briefs.
By the time Pat Riarch comes on for the last act of the show, the audience is totally turned on, cheering and hooting at the performers. And Pat's final act pushes them over the edge: He appears onstage as a Catholic priest, wearing a brown robe and holding a Bible. Carlos Las Vegas, in a white robe, is his reverent altar boy. As George Michael's "Father Figure" begins, Pat and Carlos steal forbidden glances at one another over their theological texts. Then Carlos discovers Pat's hidden gay porn, and they eventually shed their robes to reveal leather gear; it becomes an S/M scene, with Pat topping Carlos. The lyrics "I'll be your daddy" are more than apt. Turn-on? Yes, but not the comfortable kind.
"Basically, I try to have some political message that's paired with humor and sensuality, set to early '80s music," says Pat Riarch, the alter ego of Amy Neevel, 30, a freelance consultant and Web site tester from New York. "That's kind of my bag."
Discussing the meaning of drag kinging can quickly become a virtual Gender Studies 101 course, with lots of talk about "safe spaces" and "gender-fucking" and "dialogue." It's a feminist statement that simultaneously steals, mocks and exaggerates male privilege. It's a parody of the ways our culture still thinks of masculinity as infallible.
"I think of Pat as someone who is deeply troubled by his existence as a white male, who's ultimately embodying a really harmful system," says Neevel, who's also serving as the de facto manager of the tour. "So when I'm Pat, I'm trying to take on an understanding of that male power, and what it is to feel that cockiness. But, at the same time, what it is to feel the pain underneath that cockiness -- the restriction of expression and sexuality."
The kings are reluctant to detail the differences between kings and queens ("They're my sisters!" says Winnipeg's Reece Lagartera, 27, aka Carlos Las Vegas. "We have a similar love of fabric and lamé!"), preferring instead to talk about the ways they can work together and support one another in queer culture. But the politics of drag do create a divide between queens and kings. For one thing, says Halberstam, American culture accepts the idea of appropriating femininity more easily than appropriating masculinity. "Femininity is not protected provenance in a culture that's geared towards male hierarchy," she says. "When it comes to taking on, parodying and performing masculinity -- that sort of scene is more serious, in a way. You can even see it in the acts; the acts don't look as campy as the drag queen acts."
While anyone can be a drag king -- femme lesbians, straight women, men, whoever -- the majority of kings are masculine offstage, too. "For some of these guys, they're butch or transgendered, and their masculinity is real," says Halberstam. "But some of them are feminine women offstage and for them the act is all about transformation."
Neevel "really, really" wanted to be a boy in elementary school. "I'd lie to kids about being a boy and play with them for a month, but then they'd find out," she says. Now, as the über-political Pat Riarch, she can be. Kinging, she says, is "the culmination of my young desires and my adult political ideals. I'm able to be the cute guy I always wanted to be back in fourth and fifth grade. And that's really satisfying. When I came to New York I was still struggling with [the fact that] I'm a biological female," she says. "There were certain ways I was supposed to dress and conduct myself. But I was completely miserable. For me, [kinging] is liberating: people are really excited to see you and really celebrating what you're looking like and doing onstage."
Maybe they were bullied as children for wearing boys' clothes, or maybe they wish they could go to work wearing a suit and tie: As drag kings, masculine women are allowed to swagger, strut and be as queer as they want to be. What might be read as confusing and strange outside is rendered sexy on the drag king stage.
And that's exactly what's threatening to the mainstream, says Halberstam. It's the reason why drag kinging ultimately might not infiltrate straight culture the way drag queens have. "Straight women find it threatening because it's like, Does this mean I'm a lesbian if I think this guy's cute? Straight men find it threatening because, after all, that's supposed to be their domain. And lesbians find it threatening because it seems like this is the stereotype of what a lesbian is -- a women who wants to be a man."
