I had the honor of being asked to lead the service this past Sunday at All Peoples Church Unitarian Universalist. It was a truly lovely and unique experience because I was asked to offer a message about the spiritual aspects of drag, and I got to do so in drag. After giving a lot of thought to what I hoped to share, I decided to honor the practice of narrative storytelling by sharing my drag journey. Below is an excerpt from my message “Picking Up the Costume Pieces.”
In Winchester, England, there is a cathedral with an immense wall of stained glass on the western side of the building, and I had the privilege of witnessing it when I was a teenager. In the 17th century, war broke out and the cathedral was pillaged and the window, with its many stories and faces of the saints, was shattered. The people of the town, who, in their grief, were unable to part with the window, collected all of the pieces of this broken glass. After a few years, they decided that instead of replacing the window, they would put the pieces back together, indiscriminately connecting the glass like a mosaic. It’s still the same window, though it will never look the same. You can still pick up the pieces and make something extraordinary out of it.
The first time I performed in a drag show, I began to pick up the broken pieces of what was once a curious, queer daydreamer, and I started to put them back together in the same way. Suddenly, I could wear pink, glue on a beard that fell to my knees, and dance to Shania Twain’s “Man, I Feel Like a Woman,” and I laughed. I laughed because it was absurd. I laughed because it distorted people’s understanding of gender and sex. And I laughed because people were looking at my body, and it didn’t terrify me. I wasn’t yet ready to live so unapologetically as myself, but in drag, I had given myself permission to reclaim the audacious expressiveness of the brave queer kid who still lived in my body.
Brock Bottom became my younger self’s fairy godmother. Brock quiets the doubts, soothes the wounds, and affirms the curiosity of the parts of me I thought I would never see again. Brock is a revolutionary whose refusal to adhere to hegemonic gender expressions is simultaneously an act of protest, and an act of love to any queer person who has ever been told they are anything less than astonishing. Brock is the wonder I felt in my heart when I imagined as a child what it might feel like to embody the entire world. Brock is a thread in the tapestry of my life, reminding me that I am intimately woven alongside all of who I have been, and everything I have yet to be.
This is a love letter to drag. This is a love letter to Brock Bottom, who was with me when I pulled the hurt teenager I used to be out from under the broken stained glass and told her I was sorry for leaving her alone for so long. This is a love letter to her, and the fragments of her face I still see when I glue on a lash, or attach a rhinestone, or convince myself that you can, indeed, perform in drag as the iceberg that sank the Titanic, and no one can stop you. This is a love letter to the ancestors, to the elders, and to the house mothers who took in their queer children off the streets and dressed them up for the ball like the princesses that they were. And finally, this is a love letter to myself for being brave enough to pick up the costume pieces of my life, to grieve that they were broken, but to know that we are not meant to be fragmented people. I am continuing to put myself back together again, but I know that there will always, always, be glue in the dressing room.
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