Well, spring has rolled around again, and for me, that means only one thing: I get to see colorfully dressed man-ladies strut their stuff up and down the catwalk in the Reitz Union Ballroom.
UF Pride Awareness Month’s drag show is Wednesday, hosted in honor of Pride Awareness Month for the LGBT community.
This might win understatement of the year because what better way to make someone aware of pride culture than with 6-foot men in gowns, 7-inch heels and hairdos to the roof? Try letting that go unnoticed on your radar.
Headliners for the show are former contestants from “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” which is a TV show that stormed in with padded hips sashaying and wigs a-blowing and stole my heart. Hosted by the fabulous RuPaul, the show selects drag queens to compete for the title of “America’s next drag superstar,” and each week, the contestants have to compete in challenges and walk the runway in gloriously over-the-top costumes.
It’s just like “America’s Next Top Model,” but better in every single way.
It takes all the fun of reality competition shows and ramps up the camp factor by a thousand. I thoroughly applaud whatever producer in Los Angeles got behind this idea.
From what I have noticed, most of RuPaul’s fans are women and people within the LGBT community, which I found a bit baffling at first.
Why would women, most of whom aren’t gay, really enjoy watching a show about drag queens? What’s the appeal?
Drag queens are men who looked at the world of womanhood and got to pick and choose which parts they wanted to keep.
Glamorous ball gowns and slinky mini dresses? Check. Sky-high heels? Double check. Dramatic hair and makeup? Nailed it. Catty back talk and sassy put-downs but also shared feelings of sisterhood? Of course.
These men live out this dressed-to-the-nines fantasy not just in clubs or on girl’s nights out, but every single weekday — for a living. What girl wouldn’t be a little jealous of that? It would be like prom night and karaoke at the club rolled together, and you could get paid for it.
As a girl who wobbles in heels, is inept in makeup and owns a severely limited wardrobe of T-shirts, I watch these queens with mixed feelings of awe, admiration and inferiority because they look like they are having more fun as gals during a two-hour show than I have on a daily basis of being one.
Drag queens, for me, always remind me of a quote from the play “M. Butterfly” in which a character explains, “Why, in the Peking Opera, are women’s roles played by men? Because only a man knows how a woman is supposed to act.”
It hits a paradox where most women wish their lives looked a little bit more like the lives men have impersonating them.
Watching “RuPaul,” I’m looking at women through the perspective of men trying to be women, and at some point, I am not sure which one is looking to the other for inspiration.
Drag queens look to women as the models and inspiration for their work, and women look to drag queens as hope that a life that fabulous and glittery can exist in the real world.
Sometimes drag gets criticized for perpetuating exaggerated stereotypes about women, the LGBT community and especially transgendered women, but I think drag teaches women and the LGBT community some important lessons.
Mainly, remember to not always take yourself so seriously, but to always be proud of who you are and what you do — and to be fierce and fabulous as hell while you’re doing it.
As the always lovely RuPaul once said, “We all came into this world naked. The rest is all drag.”
Amen. Enjoy the show tomorrow.
Lauren Flannery is a business administration sophomore at UF. Her column runs on Tuesdays. You can contact her via opinions@alligator.org.
