Rasher Report #2: The Rest Is Drag
Drag Race is Back!
Spoilers ahead for the first episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race season 15.
Which is lovely, because we all missed her. I’ve been watching this show since the very beginning, with the Vaseline lenses and the implications that this was not a serious reality competition but an extended goof on Tyra Banks. I miss the Logo years, in that I feel like all drag should have ratty edges and an air of “We’re all messing around, and none of this matters.” But I don’t miss the transphobia and fatphobia of the early days, nor the emphasis on conflict. Now, we have production values and ethical standards, and every contestant is spring-loaded with the awareness that her career will explode as soon as her workroom entrance airs on the screens of every gay bar in the world.
I’m not more than passingly familiar with any of this season’s queens, largely because the casting department didn’t bother with the Midwest. Usually, Drag Race draws liberally from Chicago’s fabulous drag scene, but this year, they cast every single queen from the state of Connecticut. I choose to believe this is an intentional dunk on Connecticut, which is a funnier state than it’s usually given credit for being. I lived there for seven years and occasionally miss it, so the contingent of Nutmeggers will serve as my hometown girls for the season.
As usual, the plus-size queens all look like contenders in the first week, and I can only assume they won’t make it to the end because Ru has never let a big girl get the crown in American Drag Race. I also have to assume that the legendary Sasha Colby will not win, because that would be boring, and because her skills and talents don’t lend themselves to what the show demands. That’s disappointing, because she is a legend who I’m honored to have on my television. I’m delighted to see the show exploring the growing divide between old-school stage performers and queens who build their whole drag careers on TikTok and Instagram. I’m frustrated to see so few out trans women among the contestants, although I suspect we’ll have some tearful coming out moments mid-season or some attention drawn to the numerous queens who identify as non-binary or genderfluid.
My early favorites all represent types of queens I love, but they’re all pretty different from each other. Marcia Marcia Marcia looks like this season’s top comedy queen, the girl who everyone will be afraid of in the Snatch Game. It also looks like she’s going to get shade for her makeup and styling – a bit annoying, since she’s not a glamour queen and doesn’t claim to be, but Ru likes her comedy queens to go high-concept on looks. Jax has spectacular energy and creativity, and I hope she gets credit for the amount of effort it takes for a queen of her size and stature to command a runway. Mistress is a stone-cold professional and a big girl who knows how to use her body, both as she moves across the stage and in the construction of her looks. Her first week was cautious, though, and I’m concerned that she’ll play it safe for too long and make herself vulnerable.
It’s hard to tell whether this will be a great season or one of the ones I forget as soon as it ends. There are several queens whose names and faces I have no memory of after two hours – and one of them is the winner of the first challenge, Anetra. I remember her performance but could not tell you what she looks like. It does appear that we will see queens actually getting eliminated on a more-or-less weekly basis, which will help the momentum. In any case, I’m happy my show is back and continuing to raise the profile of drag as an art form.
Basically, I’m in Drag Right Now
Well, maybe not right now, since I’m currently in sweatpants and a Black Widow t-shirt liberally dusted with cat hair. But one of the reasons drag is so important to me is, it’s helped me throughout my life as I’ve negotiated my Gender Stuff ™. This is true for a number of trans, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming people, including a lot of Drag Race contestants. I first encountered drag in high school through movies like The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Torch Song Trilogy, as well as through RuPaul herself. They were probably the first examples I ever saw of people giving the middle finger to their assigned gender and defining themselves on their own terms. As a kid who’d known since pre-school that I was neither a girl nor a boy, but had internalized the repeated admonitions that “I don’t know, something else” was not an option, drag cracked open the door toward a world where I was allowed to know myself better than society did.
Still, I’ve spent most of my life dressing at odds with my gender, especially in professional and formal settings. Friends from grad school might remember that I taught all of my classes wearing a sort of writing teacher business glam: heavy eyeliner, dark knits, A-line silhouettes, knee socks, and platform flats. One semester, a group of my students conspired to write on their evaluation forms that I should wear more colors and less black. Professor Rasher was both a persona and a look.
When I moved on from academia and teaching, I was happy to leave Professor Rasher behind, but I didn’t know what to replace her with. The pandemic gave me a lot of time to think about what I would wear when I rejoined society, as did planning a wedding. (What does a non-binary person wear to their own wedding? Whatever absurd thing is in their budget.) Unfortunately, most AFAB non-binary people are steered socially toward a drab masculinity, as illustrated this week by a New York Times article (de-paywalled) on non-binary professional dress in which all of the AFAB interviewees describe their style in terms like, “That’s not weird. That doesn’t make anyone want to punch you” or “[yearning] for the day when her ideas in the workplace matter more than her clothes.” All of them are in beige menswear.
I’m happy to rock a tailored black suit on occasion, but beige menswear feels like the saddest possible drag for me. My ideas are the most important, of course, but I like to make a visual statement, too. Last month, faced with my first large in-person professional event since 2019, I had to put together a persona fast. I had some black dress pants and long-sleeve dress shirts that would work, but even with cool shoes and a splash of makeup, that would read as just menswear. (Indeed, most of my male colleagues attended in ironed button-downs and khakis.) I brought some sweaters and some ties, hoping I’d figure it out when I got there.
On the plane, I wore jeans, a pink and green brontosaurus sweater, and rainbow checkerboard Vans. I got to the hotel in time to race to the welcome dinner, if I didn’t change my clothes. The outfit drew compliments from colleagues. The next morning, I put on a strawberry patterned sweater vest over my dress shirt and pants. It was a little twee, and definitely more of a performance than sweats and licensed Marvel merch, but more authentic than anything I’d ever worn in a professional setting. I also got misgendered less than I ever have at work. I guess this means I’m going to have to buy more sweater vests, but that’s a small price to pay for going to work feeling like I’m representing myself as I am.
Some of My Favorite Movies: The Project Continues
In late 2020, at the height of pandemic boredom, I made a list of my 124 favorite movies of all time and set out to watch them all in alphabetical order by title. From then until about March 2021, I rewatched a ton of movies and wrote a paragraph on each. After that, there started to be new media coming out again, and I started having to do things like go to work in person a few days a week and plan a wedding. As a result, I’m still at it two years later, although I’m getting close to the end of the list. During this time, I also drifted away from The Finer Sports site as a venue for my writing, mostly because I wanted to write about things that weren’t sports. I did post summaries of my first 32 films, from 12 Angry Men through Captain America: The Winter Soldier – first ten here, 11-21 here, and 22-32 here – in the hopes that I'd get them all added to the website sooner or later. Meanwhile, I shared a bunch more, friends-only, on Facebook. After that, there is a further set that I only discussed on a private friend-group Discord. My goal is to put two summaries per week in this newsletter, starting with the first of the summaries that appeared only on Facebook. As a result, for a while, you’re going to be reading summaries of movies I rewatched a couple of years ago. If we catch up to the present, and I watch to the end of the list, that alone will justify a weekly newsletter.
Casablanca: I don't need to tell you that Casablanca is a great film. It's part of the fabric of our culture, and there are even more famous lines in it than I remembered. It made me think about why I dislike so many movies about World War II, and it boils down to the fact that most WWII movies make the audience feel like they'd be on the right side of history because Nazis are so obviously evil. Casablanca was released in 1942, in the middle of the war, with its outcome still a terrifying uncertainty. So it depicts people who see themselves as ordinary, trying to figure out what the right thing is and then working up the courage to do it. The film's use of music stood out to me this time, not only because the scene where the whole bar drowns out the Nazis with La Marseillaise made my eyes well up, but because of how music makes Sam the narrator of much of the film. He's the only Black character, and his Blackness is visible and important - his is the story I'm left needing to know.
Cedar Rapids does a small thing perfectly. It captures the alternate reality you step into when you travel for business, with the maze of new social rules and instant friendships, and the balance between taking a vacation from everyday life and doing some of the trickiest work your job requires. It's a calm comedy that doesn't have to reach for its jokes because the reality it's holding a mirror to is hilarious in itself. I forgot that it was helmed by a director of color until the moment near the end where that makes a massive difference. It's not a masterpiece, but it's a delight.
And Another Thing
Song of the week: "Forever in Sunset" by Ezra Furman, which feels like it's on topic.
The definitive table of Mountain Dew cocktails.
And some photographic evidence of my cat defying physics.
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