It's been a long drag...

Last Saturday I was at Pride Edinburgh, as part of my work with the Order of Perpetual Indulgence. Usually, what this involves is going to one of the Sisters’ houses at an early time in order to get ready (Manifest in the Sister parlance): in this case the flat of Sister Liza Vicious, my Mother in the OPI. However, this morning, there was a difference. Sister Liza was out in drag the previous night with April Adamàs, one of the local drag queens, who had stayed over in her spare bedroom, and had just got up to get ready for Pride. So, for most of time, everyone in the house was getting their make up on, and sorting out their look.

After Pride, (Don’t worry, I’ll get to that in other posts.) we got back to the flat, and April had met up with a fellow queen, and whilst we were de-Manifesting, they updated their look for an evening on the town, and said goodbye to us before leaving. It was kind of like a family parlour, with people going in and out.

So what, you might say. Drag nuns in the company of drag queens is not that big a surprise, especially given the extent to which RuPaul’s Drag Race has brought drag to the mainstream. And, indeed, despite some notional differences between the Sisters and modern drag performers, there is a lot of overlap. However, thinking back on that day has made me realise how much my attitude to drag has changed over the past 15 years.

It wasn’t that I was against drag, it’s just that my idea of it was restricted, as the performers I had seen were mostly the traditional old-school drag, the pantomime dame end of things. More importantly, my image of it was an outsider. I was still trying to fit in with this image of “Oh, gay people can be like the guy-next-door” (Never mind that you could say the exact same thing about most drag performers when they’re in their civvies.) In fact, in retrospect, I suspect I didn’t really believe it either, given what was to happen next…

Anyway, things changed when the alternative queer night Abnormals Anonymous started at the CCA. This was the first time I saw people properly dressed up in a “Club Kids” style, and that encouraged me to do the same myself. In fact, I suspect it was giving me permission to do it. It was a great underground queer night, which was only capsized when they decided to book an unknown group by the name of the Scissor Sisters, who then unexpectedely found themselves with a single in the UK top 10 by the time they arrived in Glasgow.

It’s descendent club night Utter Gutter was more club-orientated, and even more dressed up. I was now experiementing with loads of looks, which I was able to do as I quickly became a semi-official photographer for the night, and was there every month. Even though I was experimenting with looks, I never did drag, preferring to go for a genderqueer look. However, there were already a number of drag regulars, who were trying on looks quite different to drag queens I’d seen before. Including this one, who would change my world view of drag.

(Don’t worry, I’ve done far better photos since, particularly of this subject.)

This photo was taken so long ago, I completely forgot that this is my first photo of Lady Munter, and the first time I actually met her. Maybe because it was the early days of my club photography, where I was trying to do clubbing as much as the photography, which I soon discovered was not the best of ideas. My actual first recollection of her contacting me was a message through MySpace (!) from her, asking if I could come down and do photography at her club Valley of the Dolls. As it turns out, I couldn’t make it, and the club stopped after that. But when sometime later, Lady Munter started up a new club, I was off like a shot.

I’d already seen online flyers for the new club (Which was called Menergy) on her MySpace page by the time I’d bumped into non-drag Lady Munter at two seperate events in Glasgay 2009, (A Peter Tachell talk, and a performance by David Hoyle.) so we were able to talk a bit about the launch night.

So I went to the launch night of Menergy, and basically stayed for the duration of the club’s lifetime, seeing it grow from a simple club night that played tastefully curated Italo-disco, to a period of experimentation with link ups from Lock Up Your Daughters, to John Pleased coming out of retirement to spin the decks, to Lady Munter starting to do lip-synch, to other performers starting to take to the stage, moving to the Art School, moving to the basement of a strip club with a disco runway and pole, inviting queens from an unknown show called RuPaul’s Drag Race, to becoming one of the biggest monthly LGBT+ nights in Glasgow.

What was amazing was that even in the early days, the club was drawing a lot of people new to drag, with new ideas, and of course I was taking pictures of them all, and starting to get better at it. Around about that time, a friend of a friend was talking to me on the night of his birthday outside a pub. One of the more old-school drag queens, we talked about things, and then he said, conspiratorally. “I see you are involved with the alternative scene.” The funny thing is: although I could see what he was saying in a logical sense, it didn’t feel like an alternative scene to me. I suppose I can point to this moment as when I first started realising my attitudes were changing.

It’s actually quite amazing to think of the number of performers on Glasgow that got a start doing a spot in Menergy over the years. Quite a big chunk of Glasgow’s vibrant and diverse drag scene is based on Menergy alumni, and their work is similarly raising the next generation of performers. For the eight and a bit years I was involved with the club, I saw how people grew into their persona, and how it grew over time. And course they saw me with my camera. So I ended up knowing quite a lot of the drag scene, and the diversity of approaches.

With some queens, (Lady Munter being a very good example) drag was an extension of their personality. For others, the character and personality came with the drag. I’ve lost count of the number of times people who appeared to be complete strangers came up to me on the street and said “Oh, hi, Michael!”, and we’d begin a conversation, and it would be about a minute into it that I realised I had met this person before in drag, but their drag persona was different enough that I didn’t recognise them immediately when they were in their civvies.

I still didn’t do drag when I was at Menergy though. Well, OK, I tried it once, and I was awful. I knew there was going to be trouble when I starting to try on wigs in the shop, and nearly every one of them made me look like the lead singer of a Norwegian death metal band. The actual final look at best made me look like Gwen Cooper out of Torchwood on a girls night out in Cardiff town centre. Other times, I looked like Jeff Beck in a dress. I think I’ve managed to destroy all photos of that night, Thank goodness phone cameras then weren’t as good as they are now. I tried drag though, and it didn’t suit me, so that was that.

Or so I thought.

I can’t really deny that what I’m doing with the Sisters is social activist drag, to use Sister Liza’s phrase. It’s definately a step up from the genderqueer looks when I was in Menergy- more colourful, more out there, more fabulous . Indeed, when I first Manifested, Novice Brother Frank Lee looked at my eye-shadow pallette from the Menergy days, and commented that it was “too restrained”. You couldn’t say that about my eye shadow pallettes now…

So, what’s changed? Well, I suppose before, when I was on the drag scene, although I knew everyone, and so I could claim to be an insider, I was still approaching it as a photographer, so I was still outside of it in some ways. Now, when becoming a Sister, I feel like it’s inside of me.