Art of illusion reviews how to#

The book ends with the quintessential Brooklyn queen Aja defying the haters by deciding to make rap music – and to transition.

Art of illusion reviews how to#

But How to Get Famous also asks whether attaining mainstream acceptance is even a goal worth pursuing, especially when fame as a drag queen seems to entail heaving enormous suitcases of costumes around the world while getting non-stop abuse on social media, or a lifestyle of constant nightclubbing that is bound to catch up with you eventually. Pasulka touches on the popularity of drag queens among children, with events like Drag Queen Story Hour taking place in libraries around America – a favourite target of conservative ire. The explosion of trans, drag and queer culture over the past decade, of which this book examines one particular aspect, has been remarkably effective in putting previously marginalised groups in spaces that were once closed to them. After a lot of social media pressure, Drag Race has become more inclusive – non-binary performers come along every series, and the most recent season of the UK version featured Victoria Scone, a cis woman from Cardiff. That shut out transgender queens – Pasulka reports that some even delayed their transition so they could compete on Drag Race – drag kings, non-binary performers and cis women. The problem for the Brooklyn queens was that for all the show’s sass and subversiveness, RuPaul himself – as exemplified by his own glamazon persona – was a traditional kind of drag queen, who prioritised, as the book puts it, “cisgender men dressing as hyperfeminine women”. This gameshow, which started out in 2009 as a camp parody of Project Runway and America’s Next Top Model, is now an Emmy-winning cultural juggernaut that has been franchised around the world. The question of how drag queens actually did get famous, relatively speaking at least, leads inevitably to RuPaul’s Drag Race. Pasulka’s book follows a handful of Brooklyn queens from their first days jumping subway turnstiles in heels to their graduation as fully fledged drag stars, and what it meant to them personally and to the culture at large. While the drag they performed was rough and messy, low down and dirty, they had artistic aspirations that were higher than just a flawless face or a super-convincing tuck – though if they could manage those as well, all to the good.įame as a drag queen entails heaving suitcases of costumes around the world while getting non-stop abuse on social media These queens – mostly young, often people of colour – wanted to use drag not just as a means of performing a gender illusion, but in order to express their personal history, cultural and racial identity or penchant for gross-out humour. While modern drag was born in prohibition-era Manhattan, as evidenced by dances like the Hamilton Lodge (also known as Faggots’) Ball where men would frolic dressed as showgirls, it took 80 years and a trip across the East River for drag to get supercharged by a new generation.

Nicole Pasulka’s book How to Get Famous sets out to explain why that happened. Bushwig confirmed that drag had become the pre-eminent performing art of the decade, and that Brooklyn was its spiritual home. A dizzying variety of ages, genders and aesthetics were represented, with music ranging from heavy metal to diva classics. There was bawdy comedy and performance art so out there it was almost extraterrestrial. O n a Saturday afternoon in September 2018, I went to Bushwig, a drag festival in New York, where, over two days, 150 queens appeared in front of a highly enthusiastic and somewhat unhinged crowd – perhaps channelling Britney Spears at the 2001 MTV awards, someone even brought a live python on to the dancefloor.