Everything a Drag Queen Taught Me About Parenthood

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/01/opinion/sunday/gay-pride-drag.html

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My son has a scar. It’s a pale line down the center of his nose that’s visible only in certain light, but I know it’s there. He got it at a park in Brooklyn, where no dogs are allowed, but where an unleashed pit bull charged at him, full speed, when he crawled a few feet from our blanket onto the grass.

He was just a year old then, and it was the first time I saw my child hurt by the world we live in. As I talked to the dog owner — more calmly than I thought I could — while our son’s face was streaked with blood, I thought of how much he loved dogs. The moment revealed to me one of the most important acts for a parent: protecting your children while still preserving their sense of freedom.

Last June, I held my husband’s hand in front of the Stonewall Inn in Manhattan while our son, then 3, sat atop my shoulders. There was glitter on the street, drumbeats in the air and a man in a yellow wig holding out rainbow flags. Our boy grabbed one. But as the crowd snapped photos of him waving his flag, I felt an involuntary need to protect him from judgment.

We were at the annual drag march in Greenwich Village that honors the origin of the rainbow flag, a proclamation of visibility for L.G.B.T. people. We’d come to celebrate, but I was concerned about letting my kid hold up a symbol he couldn’t fully understand. It was a surprising feeling for me. And it was especially surprising to be feeling it while surrounded by drag queens.

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Once upon a time, drag healed me.

My scar is an internal one. Unlike my son, I wasn’t a rough-and-tumble boy with skinned knees. I was terrible at sports, I spoke with a lisp and walked with a swish. When I was 8, I asked my dad to explain a word I was being called at school.

He didn’t answer and went back to paying the bills, but the explanation came a few weeks later on a TV show called “Real People.” That night’s episode featured a man roller-skating through a city wearing a ball gown, horn-rimmed eyeglasses, and a ’50s-style pillbox hat. She called herself Rollerena. I thought she was fabulous.

My dad stormed to the television — we didn’t have a remote. He looked me straight-on, “That, is a fag,” he said. He shut the TV off, and Rollerena was gone.

Years of fear-based counseling and child therapy followed, and I ended up in a fiery and apocalyptic religion. My worldview became dark as the message from each of these authorities told me that something in me was abnormal — they wanted to cut it out, to erase what made me different.

The first time I experienced those wild teenage feelings for another human being I realized it was my heart, the one that feels and gets broken, that was the abnormality. This tension in me grew, I couldn’t sleep, and my posture became shrunken and slumped. But the image of the queen in the city lived in my memory, and when I turned 22 I got on a bus.

I arrived in New York in 1992. I didn’t see Rollerena, but I wound up living in a hotel populated by artists, hustlers and drag queens.

The drag queens of New York showed me that there was value to the parts of me I’d been told were not normal. They taught me the art of not conforming to another’s expectations. One night I stole a pair of Vivienne Westwood high heels, found my backbone, and never walked with my head down again.

Now I was a grown adult whose life was a product of that self-expression, standing on the ground of the Stonewall riots that made this life possible. Judging myself.

Evening faded to night and the music grew louder, signaling the arrival of the queens. When they got to us, they brought feathers, sequins and, for me, a sort of homecoming.

The finale of the march was an ornate carriage pulled by a bicycle. Inside was someone I knew but had never met. She was older than I remembered. I was older, too. She wore a ’50s pillbox hat and cat-eye glasses. A crowd had gathered around her, and I stood mesmerized. She motioned for me to come to her.

“Rollerena?” I asked. “Speaking,” she said.

I wanted to tell my story, but the tambourines were loud, and I became shy. She pulled me close and asked if I was with my boy. I told her he was my husband. She pulled me closer.

“The little one with the flag,” she said. “That’s our son,” I said. The rhinestones on her cat-eye frames sparkled in the night. “Listen to your boy,” she said. “Listen.”

Her carriage started to move again and she was gone, again.

My fear came to life on one of those lamp-lit West Village streets when a man walking toward us scowled at my son’s flag. He shook his head and, after he’d passed, he turned and yelled at us, “Some life for that kid.”

It was like I was 8 years old again. I felt that darkness. I wanted to retaliate, to reciprocate the hurt. Even worse, I wished I’d taken away the flag.

I became aware of a small inner wish that my son would not be like me, that he would blend in and not suffer the way I did. My scar is rooted in anger and fear — and shame, the part I thought was gone but is still there.

This struck me, and right then I understood. My own parents’ instincts all those years ago, the therapy and religion, was their attempt to protect me — they saw me in pain and did what they thought would remove it. That wasn’t a cure, of course. The real cure was a pride so fearless it eventually was embraced, and ignited applause from both of my parents.

There’s no guarantee what kind of person my boy will become, what his dreams will be, and I can’t expect his path to align with mine. I can’t protect him from prejudice. He will have scars. But I can choose not to pass my scar on to him.

The power of drag confronts the idea that any human should hide.

“Listen to your boy,” Rollerena told me. As the parade moved on, I could hear the distant howls from the queens, but even closer were the joyful shouts from my son, proudly waving our flag.

Corvette Hunt is a hairstylist and a writer who is at work on a book about New York night life in the 1990s.

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