'Can We Say Penis at the Mall?' My Drunken Afternoon at a Shopping Center Drag Show
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Some of my earliest memories are of watching MTV footage of Tiffany Darwish on her 1980s mall tour of America in my middle of nowhere Louisiana living room. She sang from balconies to hoards of screaming teenaged fans in far-off, exotic sounding places like Paramus, New Jersey, red mane fluffed to a feathery, ginger halo, collar of her jean jacket popped to the gods. This is glamor, I, for better or worse, decided at four years old.
It was an epiphany similar to the one I’d have 12 years later, when a neighbor and I snuck into my first drag show with fake IDs. Our town’s one gay bar was in a former train station, and dark creaky stairs led up a back hallway to a disco ball-lit room about the size of a train car with a tiny, mirror-backed stage.
No this is fucking glamor, I finally understood, as I saw my first evening gowns cinched to Dolly Parton proportions on queens who towered over me, hair high enough to get them closer to Jesus than any bouffants I’d ever seen in Baptist church pews.
I haven’t been to church in two decades, but the morning I was invited to see Violet Chachki, Ginger Minj, Bob the Drag Queen, and Kim Chi at the Beverly Center in Los Angeles, I woke up while it was still dark to iron a Laura Ashley for Urban Outfitters dress before my weekend Jezebel shift with all the care I used to save for putting myself together on Sunday mornings when the Lord and all his earthly agents would see me in the aisles of Cypress Baptist. On the way out the door, as an afterthought, I grabbed an oversized denim jacket covered in pins I’ve collected from hipster record stores and weed shops—this was a mall tour after all.
I’d never been to the Beverly Center, but I knew it from Clueless, and inside, it was just as absurdly huge and mercilessly white as I’d seen on TV. Sun streamed through a glass roof. There weren’t many people around. It felt like a sitcom joke about dying and going to some capitalist heaven where Ralph Lauren was god all along, and I reminded myself that after the drag thing, I needed to swing by Bloomingdale’s and look at sale panties.
“Fifty years after Stonewall, and I’m doing drag in a mall, right across from a Sunglass Hut,” Bob said at one point
A week before, I’d been shunted to blogger hell, at the back of the press line for the MTV TV and Movie Awards where organizers seemed annoyed I’d even bothered to show, but in the glowing, empty mall, the hosts of this event were excited to give me my press credentials.
“Where do I go?” I asked, same as I had asked the harried MTV crew member the week before.
“Anywhere you want,” said a person in head-to-toe black with the sort of angular haircut that makes me hyper-conscious of how very uncool I am. Inside it was just me, a few rows of white couches, cater waiters, and an open bar. I drank a glass of white, listened to Ariana Grande’s “7 Rings” on the mall speakers, and read Lady Bunny’s thoughts on capitalism commodifying pride and drag while I waited to watch TV-famous queens perform inside a mall. When a waiter offered me some yellowfin crudo, I hate it with a full understanding that I am part of Lady Bunny’s problem.
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