Faces, Beautiful by Leah Mell
Tuesdays were drag nights at Chasers: “Where the happy people party!” And by the fall of 2018, we were all piling into this gay club behind the Dominos’ dumpster at least twice a week with a pound of makeup on our faces. The stage was sticky, the floors stickier. The scent of cheap fruity vodka hung in the air. The owner kept promising she would stop keeping all the cash in the ceiling tiles and fix the place up, but the sign out front was still flickering and the linoleum tiles on the stage were still loose. A few wilted birthday decorations clung to the walls months after whoever’s party had ended. Chasers wasn’t the swankiest gay bar in Charlotte, but it was ours.
That night, a queen in a floral housedress worked the door, calling everyone “honey” and “bitch” and “Miss Thing,” and the leather-clad femme behind the bar poured the strongest drinks in town—plastic cups brimming with vodka, just a hint of Red Bull. It was HoT (Haus of Terror) Tuesday, my drag family’s signature show. Vegas and Vanity arrived first. The dream couple: Vegas playing horror monster with thick eyebrows and fangs carved out of wax, Vanity playing soft ingénue dusted with glitter in pink faux fur. Vegas hosted the show every other Tuesday, starting at midnight if we were lucky. She was our mother, the center of our drag family, of our little world.
I drove forty-five minutes into Charlotte from my apartment up north after I got into makeup and costume, transfiguring into someone opaque and glamorous, without a past or a future. Into someone who smoked Marlboro Reds out of a costume-store cigarette holder and pretended her diamonds were real. Into Tallulah.
My sisters began materializing, fashionably late as usual. Lychee, bright yellow wig glowing around her face, stumbled in from the gravel parking lot showing off her new holographic pink platform boots, already bickering with Vegas who insisted that she was borrowing those shoes next week and Lychee could shut up about it because she was her mother and what was ours was hers already anyway. Lychee was still rolling her eyes when she pressed a little kiss to my cheek; she almost reached my height in those towering shoes. Another sister walked through the door tossing back her new blue wig and belting something from Phantom of the Opera. Then another toting her giant dollhouse prop, another out of drag in yellow beanie, and the last with her ass out and a blunt in her purse hurried into the club. There still weren’t stall doors in the bathroom, but at least the owner propped up a curtain rod so we could pee half-shielded from the eyes of strangers.
Vanity and I were on the back patio chain-smoking and drinking warm whiskey from our hot pink flask inscribed with “Male Tears” just out of view of the only functional security camera when we heard Vegas muffled on the mic inside:
“How are we doing tonight, Chasers?”
A pause for effect. No response.
“Okay, fuck y’all, you can do better than that! I said, how the fuck are we doing tonight, Chasers??” Her gravelly southern drawl amplified.
Dim shouts and applause vibrated behind the door.
“Much better! Showtime is in five minutes, so get your dollars out! It costs a lot of money to look this cheap!” She cackled.
“Fuck, Van! We gotta get inside, Vegas is going to kill us.”
We stomped out our cigarettes on the cement under our stilettos and stashed the flask back in Van’s purse. There was no need to push our way across the floor; there were only about fifteen people in the bar if we counted the house drug dealer brooding in the corner behind the pool table, and we always counted him. It wasn’t horrible for a Tuesday. With the two of us rushing in, we all barely fit in the small dressing room. Someone needed to borrow lash glue; a queen in day-glow green was humming the song she was about to perform under her breath. Lychee was trying to re-hook a safety pin to her tattered t-shirt dress. Wigs and fabric and limbs, everywhere.
Lychee was still rolling her eyes when she pressed a little kiss to my cheek; she almost reached my height in those towering shoes.
Vegas, covering the mic, hissed: “Tallulah, are you ready? I have you first on the lineup, and we need to start, like, half an hour ago.”
“We’re running on drag time, baby!” Lychee cackled from her cramped corner, her reflection flashing conspiratorially in the streaked mirror.
I nodded, adjusted my bustier, and stuck another few bobby pins in my huge blonde wig, just for good measure. Losing a wig was a crime against humanity in our world.
Vegas stuck her head out of the dressing room curtains and nodded to the DJ in his adjacent booth.
Cue the intro music.
She parted the curtains and strode out into the crowd, her tulle cover-up billowing out behind her, turning her regal.
Uncovering the mic, she laughed, then said, “Okay, Chasers! It’s time for our first entertainer of the evening. Everyone give it up for your favorite slutty Hollywood starlet: Tallulah Van Dank!”
I’d been going out to the bars and watching shows for a few months before I performed in my first drag talent show at Chasers. I had never spoken to any of the performers because I didn’t feel like I could mingle with these sparkling powerhouse personalities. I was just a local college student who spent too much of my time alone in a barren apartment. I watched as these gorgeous creatures glimmered in the spotlight. I loved them from afar. I was stagnant, searching, finally coming more fully into my own queerness.
I started to research drag and its history on my shitty laptop night after night, cigarette ash collecting on my blanket. I eventually came upon the celebratory balls of queer Black folks in the late 19th century that evolved into a vibrant queer and primarily Black and Latinx ballroom scene in the early 20th century and beyond, documented in Paris is Burning, How Do I Look?, and elsewhere. Balls offered spaces where trans and queer folks of all varieties could embody identities, personas, and presentations that were often inaccessible to them in the violence of the external world, where they could live out their dreams in front of an audience, where they could become themselves more completely and maybe even take home a trophy for it. Ballroom culture, despite not always explicitly involving performing in drag, informs so much of current mainstream drag performance, culture, and vocabulary—from “hauses” of queer chosen family to dips and spins and voguing to saying “Category is..” and “Why you all gagging so?” and “Reading is fundamental!”—that trying to imagine a history of modern drag without ballroom at the center feels false and disrespectful to these innumerable queer and trans elders.
As with much of queer history, there are relatively few concrete records of the lives and experiences of drag performers, so we, as a community, have had to make do with those that we do have access to and often operate on stories passed down from older generations. Of course, the U.S. context does not define drag globally, and there are many other rich histories and traditions of drag and similar queer performance art forms across the world, but I was particularly ravenous for the history of the community that I was getting to know.
Drag came to feel like a natural extension of myself. I was raised as a girl, yes, but my exuberant, camp, queer, and sometimes vulgar femininity and sensibilities—my personal brand of femme lesbianism—were certainly not in line with heterosexual societal norms for young Southern ladies. Yet drag embraced them. And drag in the Bible Belt felt like a huge fuck you to the zealots and fascists and “respectable” folks who wanted us all to die or disappear, who decreed that queer and trans people were sinners and perverts, out to corrupt the children and destroy traditional family values. They didn’t want the freaks out in public. It wasn’t good for their image or their immortal souls. But if they were going to call me a freak, I wanted to surround myself with as many other freaks as possible.
I had to try it, just once. To know how it felt to be fully disembodied and then re-embodied into something entirely apart. To become something beautiful and mangled and new.
I pictured myself in a cheap nightclub boudoir, surrounded by feather boas and beaded costumes, dripping in pearls. My mirror was smudged with lipstick, gin and tonic sweating on the wooden vanity. I was Sally Bowles or Velma Kelly or Roxie Hart. I had a string of lovers, a tragic backstory, a drinking problem, a murderous streak.
A name emerged from the imagined cigarette smoke, charged: Tallulah. Tallulah Bankhead had always been my idol—my father always warned me about men and booze, but he never mentioned a word about women and cocaine—taking her name was like slipping on a fresh, custom-fitted skin.
I was browsing the Chasers website again one night and saw a flyer for a drag talent show the last Wednesday of July, so I figured I would just show up and see what happened.
The night of the talent show, pressed into my cramped bathroom after the sunset, I glued down my eyebrows with alternating layers of purple glue stick and loose setting powder and shaped my face with grease-paint contour, like the queens did in their online tutorials. White on the tops of my cheek and brow bones, deeper brown carving shadows into my forehead, jaw, and nose. I drew on pencil thin eyebrows that arched in slight surprise. Trying to blend eyeshadow over the eyebrow glue felt like a losing battle, so I just did a little smoky eye and hoped no one would notice the hairs starting to peel up underneath. I glued a single 301 strip lash to each eyelid. Every eyeshadow palette, contour stick, brush, sponge, facial mist, tube of lipstick, and highlighter I owned was scattered across the counter and in the sink. I only half-knew what I was doing. When I applied the last smear of lipstick, I examined myself in the mirror. I definitely looked different, but “good” would have been a bit of a stretch.
If they were going to call me a freak, I wanted to surround myself with as many other freaks as possible.
I shimmied into one pair of shiny drugstore pantyhose, some fishnets, a black tuxedo vest that I had lifted from my college theatre department for this occasion, tight leather shorts, and a red blazer. I didn’t even put on a wig—I was already running late. I just tied up and pinned a thin black silk scarf around my head, hoped it looked vaguely 1940s Rosie-the-Riveter chic, and was on my way.
It was a Wednesday night, but the gravel lot was almost full when I arrived at Chasers. I had to park in the grass. It was never this busy on a weeknight, and the Carolina July heat was not particularly conducive to layers of thick cosmetics. I could already feel my face melting; I did not have a strong enough setting spray for this.
I pulled open the heavy door for the first time as this fledgling persona, and my red heels clicked against the chipped tile. It felt like power. I slipped the queen working the front my driver’s license while I wrote my new name on the posted sign-up sheet in sparkly purple pen: Tallulah. I drew a little heart next to it for good measure. No cover tonight. She handed me back the license and buzzed me in.
When Vegas called my name into the mic, I carefully climbed the rickety stage and walked into my light, center-stage, trying to remember the simple choreography I had practiced in my small bedroom earlier that day. I did my best not to look scared shitless. My music started. As the intro played, I pressed back onto my heels and bent my knees slowly, sinking closer to the ground.
You have to understand the way I am, mein herr.
I peered through the bright spotlight and into the mass of bodies, eyeing the judges table.
A tiger is a tiger, not a lamb, mein herr.
I ringed my overpainted, red lips around each syllable.
You’ll never turn the vinegar to jam, mein herr.
I winked at Vegas, my giant eyelash heavy on my lid.
So I do, what I do. When I’m through, then I’m through. And I’m through…toodle-oo!
I slipped out of my blazer, let it fall to the floor with my back to the audience. And, for the first time, I transcended. I became Tallulah.
I performed the rest of “Mein Herr” from Cabaret in a blur, this packed crowd of other queers screaming along. I even managed to fake the whole verse in German. And when I dropped into my final split with dollar bills suspended around me like confetti, I was born again. Baptism by cash and glitter.
Everyone in the bar, all strangers, congratulated me on my finish as runner-up, wanted to know when I would be back, celebrated my fledgling lesbian drag queen persona. They wanted me here. And I was so hungry to be wanted.
Vegas pulled me aside, wanted to know if I would come back and compete next month. Eventually, she invited me into her family, the Haus of Terror, as one of her daughters. I cried, thick mascara streaking my blushed cheeks.
“Yes. Absolutely, a thousand times, yes.”
My journey into this prismatic queer underworld had begun.
The Haus began with Vegas and her friend Jinx Matthews in 2014. Vegas had been performing in drag in Charlotte and elsewhere in the Carolinas since 2011 and as a club kid go-go dancer before that, but the scene had rejected her initially because she was too “out there,” performing punk rock and metal, wearing giant scene-hair wigs and costumes covered in safety pins. Vegas wanted to embrace a femininity that didn’t hinge on classic beauty or perfect silhouettes. She wanted to be too much and dirty and bloody and loud. She wanted her eyeliner to take up half of her face. She wanted to stomp the stage in her towering platform shoes. She wanted to fuck shit up. And she definitely didn’t fit neatly into the dominant Southern drag pageant systems or their expectations of queens wearing perfectly coiffed hair, stoned costumes, glittering nails, reasonably sized hip pads, and boobs at every event. But when she met Jinx, another outcast of the drag scene at that time, something sparked.
When I dropped into my final split with dollar bills suspended around me like confetti, I was born again.
They were called the “Twin Terrors.” They got into fights, and threw drinks at people Bad Girls’ Club style. But they also dominated newcomer talent shows, brought groundbreaking club kid fashion into Carolina clubs, and changed what drag could look like in Charlotte. They refused to be quiet or invisible.
A few months after the two of them met, Time Out Youth, a local LGBTQ+ nonprofit was staging a protest because a trans woman was harassed and detained for using the women’s restroom at the local community college in the lead up to North Carolina’s infamous “Bathroom Bill,” the first of its kind in the country. Vegas and Jinx went to the protest and met an eighteen-year-old, recently out of the closet and starting to flirt with the idea of drag. Vegas wanted to take them in, guide them, but couldn’t do that if she was lashing out at the bar every week, blurring her pain in the bottom of another whiskey Coke. She and Jinx decided to come together and officially establish their own family that would foster art that deviated from the regional expectations of idealized female impersonation and would allow them the space to heal from their own wounds, to help others heal.
The thing that bound the family together wasn’t a particular uniform aesthetic, though many members tended toward horror and avant-garde influences, but a punk spirit, a “fuck everything” energy, a fierce love for the art of drag and for one another.
It was just a small group for a few years, then they started bringing in more family members. These communities and families are not always stable for many reasons—everyone is navigating their own traumas and identities and sometimes those things are not compatible long term. But even when people walked away from the family or from drag altogether, Vegas stayed: the mother at the center of our family’s orbit.
Lychee’s snoring woke me up at nine AM on Vegas and Van’s bedroom floor the morning after a show. She was passed out in a pile of blankets next to the bed, cuddling a greasy brown paper McDonald’s bag. Babs, my sister who prided herself on being a glamorous alien business woman, was curled next to me at the foot of the bed, stray flecks of glitter stuck to her cheek. Warmth radiated from her in waves, and sweat gathered sticky at my hairline. My back was pressed firmly into a wooden dresser, and my hip ached from lying on the thin makeup-stained carpet all night. Vanity was getting ready to go to work at the salon, smoking a cigarette in the ensuite bathroom. Vegas was also awake, not amused by the freight-train snoring.
“Get the fuck up, bitch!” She yelled, throwing a dirty plastic knife from her nightstand at Lychee’s head.
Lychee shot awake, one of her eyes still half closed, and spotted the cutlery on the ground.
Even when people walked away from the family or from drag altogether, Vegas stayed: the mother at the center of our family’s orbit.
“Oh my god, this slut is trying to kill me!” She whirled around, searching for a corroborating witness. “Did you see that, Tallulah? She tried to stab me in my sleep!”
Even Babs was half-awake now, clawing at the carpet for her glasses. Our dramatics didn’t stop off-stage.
“Vegas!” I gasped. “How could you attempt to murder my sister like that? I’m calling CPS.”
“Can you guys please just calm down? I’m trying to wing my eyeliner in here,” Van called from bathroom.
Suddenly, we could not stop laughing.
We slipped immediately into an easy intimacy. I never doubted if these radiant people were my family; it was as obvious to me as breathing. It made perfect sense to be waking up on a floor in a townhouse I had never been inside before if I woke up to their laughter.
Our Haus was a family. We were more together than we were apart. We had family meals every week. We shared makeup. We shared whispered dreams. We pooled resources when one of us was too broke to buy groceries. We held one another when we cried. We were each other’s worlds. We saw one another for exactly who we were. As queers, even if we weren’t fully disowned by our biological families, many of them would never fully see us, fully understand us. The gay thing was okay, but the drag thing was too much. The drag thing was okay, but the trans thing was too much. Just don’t talk about that here. Don’t cause a scene. Don’t make anybody uncomfortable. Why does this need to be in everyone’s face? Why are you so visible?
If we were lucky, they could love us, but usually not all of us. Just the parts that fit into their imaginings.
Vegas, Vanity, Babs, and I all moved into the same apartment complex next to an outlet mall a few months later. We threw a party at Vegas and Van’s place under the Balsamic Moon. Everyone was there—an official family gathering—screaming along to Slayyyter’s new song, taking shots of Aristocrat whiskey out of measuring cups in the kitchen. Wigs and costumes were scattered throughout the apartment; it was hard to walk without stepping on something drag-related.
The edges of the night started to blur. I was in Vegas and Van’s empty bedroom dancing with Lychee. I was singing show tunes with Babs. I was listening to Vegas tell stories about her brief bout in the local pageant scene. The kitchen was a problem we would deal with in the morning after we had all stumbled to the gas station for Gatorade and new packs of cigarettes.
I stumbled out onto the tiny front balcony with Vanity, lighting the last Marlboro in my pack. I blew smoke into the icy parking lot air and tugged a throw blanket tight around my shoulders.
I turned to look at Van, her soft features wavering in the low light.
“I can’t imagine my life without y’all. Seriously, it feels like y’all are attached to my organs, like I would die if we were separated,” I said, my breaths appearing in little puffs of vapor.
I stared into the dark trees beyond the apartment complex fence and took another drag.
“I never thought people like this, a life like this could happen to me,” I confessed.
“Honestly? Me either,” Van whispered. She wrapped my hand in hers.
Naming our legends and elders is critical in our world. Remembering those who came before us, in whose stilettos and combat boots we stand. Because no one else will do it for us, because these folks are the reason we can exist. I want to name some of these many legends here as a type of imperfect record: Boom Boom LaTour, Toni Lenoir, Kasey King, Jamie Monroe, Tia Douglas, Tiffany Storm, Amber Rochelle, Brandy Alexander, Teri Lovo, Brooklyn Dior, Tracy Morgan.
Showtime at Chasers again. That night, I was missing hairspray or bobby pins, I don’t remember, and dragged Lychee by the hand out to the parking lot to help me find it in the car. We either found the missing item or we didn’t, but we figured we had time for a quick smoke before the show started. The car was parked on the edge of the lot by the street, and we lit our cigarettes leaned against the door, backs to the wind. I was focused intently on not lighting my synthetic candy-floss hair on fire. I had done it once before, and I was not trying to have to stomp my wig out again. The shit was super flammable.
I was in Vegas and Van’s empty bedroom dancing with Lychee. I was singing show tunes with Babs.
Someone in a blue Dominos uniform tossed a trash bag into the dumpster, the stoplight flashed yellow, then red. Chasers was its own island, tucked away discreetly in a plain brick building, no rainbow flags flapping out front. I scoffed at something Lychee said, and her eyes glinted under the streetlight. An old beater rolled up the road, slowing near the parking lot.
A man leaned out of the passenger window and screamed, “God hates fags!”
He hocked a loogie and launched a large water bottle toward us. Thankfully, he had shitty aim. The bottle exploded in a fountain when it hit the gravel.
Our reflexive chorus of “Hail Satan!” rang out as the car peeled around the corner, engine whining.
“I’m a dyke, asshole! At least get the slurs right!” I shouted, as the squealing of tires was swallowed by the night.
I hoped he wouldn’t turn around. We were not in any state to win a fight, and no one could hear us from inside.
Even living in the city, scenes like this were not uncommon. Getting drive-by-faggotted was practically a rite of passage—that, and getting called an abomination in Walmart. Us queers could do whatever we needed to do behind closed doors, but folks didn’t take kindly to us being flamboyant in the streets. What if the children saw? What if the gay was contagious, catching? What if we enacted mass mind control and hysteria by breathing their air?
Lychee and I locked eyes and dropped our cigarettes, each of us trembling almost imperceptibly to the untrained eye. I kicked the water bottle back into the street with a momentary violence. We blotted the liquid off our tights with napkins strewn across the back seat and hurried back into the bar. Waves of heat from the crowd rolled over us as we folded back into the cocoon of Chaser’s dark walls. The show had just started. I squeezed Lychee’s hand, and she pushed through the tightly packed bodies to the lower dressing room. Those fuckers weren’t going to ruin our night.
After the show, we took off our costumes and extensive underpinnings and crowded into Vegas and Van’s bedroom. We stayed in makeup, looking absurd in our sweats, faces still contorted in high-whore drag, but we didn’t have the energy to crowd into the tiny bathroom and scrub off a layer of skin. Bundled up on her bed with Van, Lychee, and I and a bottle of whiskey to pass around, Vegas sank into reverie, monologuing:
“I’m just, like, trying to understand how I got here, how we all got here. I was in high school during peak Myspace era, when skinny jeans and hair extensions and long square nails were in. The rednecks and jocks and whatever at school didn’t get it, but I had the girls gagged online. Being more feminine was kind of accepted, even in my bullshit hometown.”
We blotted the liquid off our tights with napkins strewn across the back seat and hurried back into the bar.
She grew up in rural Shelby, North Carolina, where the center of the town’s activity was a Walmart and a mostly vacant mall.
“I really thought I was thriving. Like, I wasn’t broken. I wasn’t going through the gay thing like the movies where you suck and you hate your life. Bitch, I was eating people up! Girls were quitting school because of me!”
She laughed and tossed her nonexistent hair over her shoulder.
“I was a mean girl. I was a cheerleader and no one could tell me shit. I couldn’t exist anywhere in that town without people knowing who I was. I was always the faggot, the queer, the cheerleader, the this, the that. And, I had to protect myself from the boys, so I was mean to every girl at school that dated a boy and made them feel less than so that they would be scared of me and make their boyfriends not beat me up.”
She paused to hit the blunt that Lychee passed, and her face briefly disappeared into the smoke, shimmering under her twinkling colored lights. To me, perched on the edge of her pink bedspread, she looked like some kind of postmodern angel.
“But, within my family, I learned I was wrong really early, when I was, like, four. I cried because I wanted a pink Power Ranger costume. And, I argued, and I tried to plead my case, but I had to accept the white Power Ranger costume, right? Cause I was a ‘boy,’ and I was being forced to be that. But, I wasn’t a boy. I have never been a boy.”
Her raspy voice shook, her eyes turned liquid. She took a swig from the bottle.
“Nothing about me was ever okay.”
Lychee wrapped her in a hug. We all leaned in. She was trembling, her eye makeup melting into salt tears.
“I love you, Mom,” Lychee whispered. “It’s okay.”
Her eyes turned toward the ceiling, Vegas continued, “I made a space for myself. I lived. And, I’m very powerful. Even when I don’t feel it, I have to tell myself that I am because of what I’ve done. When I started drag, I knew I would be something special. I knew I was gonna change the trajectory of what North Carolina drag looked like. And I have. I have done that.”
She passed the bottle to me, and her fingers wrapped into fists.
“And, by making a space for myself, I made a space for a lot of people.”
She wiped at her eyes aggressively, streaking black across her cheeks.
“Our family is closer than any queer family I’ve met in my whole life. People don’t get that, they think we all just wear a lot of eyeliner and do this weird thing. But, I don’t need any of that. Haus of Terror is built by the amount of love we have for each other, and I’m proud of that shit.”
We touched any part of her that we could reach, grasping at her shoulders, her legs, her back. She had always been our center.
“Thank you, Mom,” I said quietly.
“Oh god, sad Vegas is out tonight. Fuck this whiskey! Let me get it together.”
She hid her face behind her hands, rocked gently back and forth for a moment. When she looked back up, she smiled.
People—both queer and straight, trans and cis—who aren’t from the South or haven’t spent time in community here often look from the outside and see only the tragedy and rejection and persecution of queer and trans people in this region. They imagine that our experiences are made up exclusively of hate crimes and repressive laws and violence. They see us as backwards, as sob stories. They tell us to leave, to “make it out,” that our only option for happiness and fulfillment is to move elsewhere, somewhere they see as more enlightened or progressive, somewhere like where they live. And, these people are usually well intentioned, but they are also usually wrong.
Most queer and trans people here do not have the money to move across the country. Poverty and lack of resources are very real and permeating parts of Southern queer experience, especially for people who are visibly queer and trans and have other marginalized identities. While homophobia and transphobia are absolutely a significant part of life here, so is racism, and when someone is visibly queer or trans and is also Black, Indigenous, or otherwise a person of color, their ability to be stable financially is even more challenging. And, these issues do not magically disappear in a more “progressive” city. New York and Los Angeles and San Francisco and Chicago and Boston and Portland are not utopias.
We touched any part of her that we could reach, grasping at her shoulders, her legs, her back. She had always been our center.
Relocation is also not desirable for some, or even most, of the community. Leaving a place that we call home for somewhere where we do not have community or family is not a simple choice. The circumstances in the South do not define us. There is so much life and beauty and joy in our communities here, and we are uniquely close and supportive precisely because of where we live. And, queer spaces in the South, at least the ones I have been a part of, are predominantly working-class and made up of people who were born and raised here, people who understand and appreciate our backgrounds without explanation.
I eventually left North Carolina after almost three decades there to enroll in graduate school in Las Vegas, with the financial support of a scholarship and stipend that covered my moving and living expenses. I could not have made that move on my own. But, I do not feel like I miraculously “made it out” or escaped or that my life is immeasurably better now. I would not even say that I am somehow “fortunate” to have left. I miss those spaces and communities every day. I miss my drag family every day. I am still a part of the family, but being away from them is a deeply fraught experience for me. I often wonder if I made the right choice or if I would have been better off having stayed close to them, if leaving is somehow a betrayal. I still don’t know.
There are many reasons that someone may want to leave the South, and those are legitimate, but there are often equally as many reasons to stay. Queer folks exist everywhere. We are loving and fighting and fucking and dancing and building our own worlds and our own families everywhere, especially in the South. And, that is meaningful. That can be worth staying for.
Drag show after-party, but make it sleepy. Vegas, Vanity, Lychee, and me in our pajamas. Our bodies were starting to suffer from being in drag so often. My knees were retaining fluid, and I had permanent blisters along my ribs from tight-laced corsets. Vegas kept pulling muscles in her hips. We definitely did not get paid enough for this, but we didn’t know how to do anything else. The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills played on the TV. Van was scrolling Facebook in the loveseat, a wig precariously perched on a Styrofoam head behind her.
As Vegas took a makeup wipe to her face like a power tool, she said, “Lychee, remember when you were still Lilianna and you tried to tell us that you smoked ten blunts by yourself and were totally fine and drove yourself to Waffle House for an All-Star Special? I don’t think Tallulah is fam—”
“Oh, don’t even bring up Lilianna, you whore,” she shot back.
Lilianna was her first drag name. She had changed to Lychee just before I met her.
“I am not, in fact, a whore, I am your mother. Try again,” Vegas said, her eyebrows raised in a mock dignified expression.
“Oh, don’t even bring up Lilianna, my darling mother.” She rolled her eyes petulantly. “Is that good enough for you?”
“Much better. But, it doesn’t change the fact that you just love to lie, girl.” Vegas cackled. “We all know you did not smoke ten blunts in a row. You would have passed out after three.”
“Listen, you know I’m not good with details, diva. It felt like ten.”
“Oh, I’m sure,” I chimed in with a wicked grin.
“Fuck, Tallulah, not you, too,” she groaned, covering her face with her hands.
I kissed her on the top of the head with a drawn out, “Love youuu.”
“Love you, too, bitch,” she said, finally giving in to laughter.
Lisa Rinna and Lisa Vanderpump were getting into it over some fancy dinner again onscreen. Even though I lived in the next building over, Lychee and I fell asleep on the couch in each other’s arms.
One of the stories I was raised on in the Charlotte drag community was about how the Legendary North Carolina queen Tracy Morgan died at The Scorpio in 2007. She was on AZT, which was then the primary treatment option for HIV positive people at the time, but the drug frequently caused thinning of the arterial walls and vascular dilation. Her heart gave out onstage right at the end of her performance. She had just finished collecting tips in her glimmering silver gown, and the crowd was roaring. She stumbled at the top of the stage, hunched over, something clearly wrong. A few people from the club rushed to help her backstage to the cramped dressing room. The crowd went silent. The EMTs arrived and pronounced her dead on the scene. They carried her body out on a stretcher. The next week, the community held a benefit show to raise money for her funeral expenses.
On October 6, 2020, Lychee’s heart also stopped unexpectedly, but in her sleep. Natural causes: preexisting heart abnormality. My body went numb when I got the message, my vision speckled with black. I was gasping for air. Eventually, I screamed and screamed and screamed. I threw my phone across the room, screen splintering when it hit the wall. I pounded my fists into the mattress. I tore a chunk of hair out of my scalp. She had just texted me for boy advice. Her warm hand had just picked up the phone and dialed my number in the middle of the night. I was supposed to see her on Saturday.
The whole family went to Vegas’s apartment immediately without coordinating. We couldn’t exist anywhere else. We sat in a circle on the carpet, our tears hot and coursing. Our ragged breathing was the only sound.
“I don’t want to forget her,” I said into the quiet. My voice was raw.
“You won’t. We won’t. She is so important to us and everything that we are,” Vegas replied.
“I know that, but we can’t help it. We will forget the small things. She’ll start to warp and fade, and little pieces will break off until she is something else, someone else. She is just some electricity in our brains now. We can’t keep her the same way forever,” I whispered, my lips shaking.
I had already forgotten the details of our last conversation. We had talked about drag and this boy and her boss, but it was fuzzy. Now, I can’t even remember what cigarettes she smoked. I bought them at the gas station for her so many times when she looked too horrifying in drag to go in for herself, but the information has disappeared.
I threw my phone across the room, screen splintering when it hit the wall.
We tried to direct our energy, to mobilize. In the days before the funeral, everyone in the family drove down to Rock Hill in shifts and helped Lychee’s mother, Danielle, make memorial photo boards to display at the service, covered in pink glitter and rhinestones. We helped prepare meals. We listened to Danielle tell childhood stories about Lychee, how exuberant and brilliant and ridiculous she had been, even as a child. Danielle saw Vegas as one of Lychee’s mothers, too, recognized how singular their relationship was, that it extended beyond friendship or mentorship and into her soul.
Danielle celebrated every facet of her child: the queer, the tender, the unusual, the exquisite. She made sure that, even in death, Lychee’s entire self was acknowledged and beloved. If any biological family members had a problem with her drag or her queerness or her femininity, she wanted them to know that they could fuck right off.
The Haus dressed as an opulent coven for the funeral, all in black with dark wide-brimmed hats. We could not disappoint. The service was held at a small brick funeral home in Rock Hill. We, and other members of the Carolina drag community, filled an entire section of blue padded pews. The chapel was so full that some people had to stand in the back. As the crowd filed forward to say our goodbyes, to see her for the last time, the song “This Is Me” rang through the speakers.
When I made it to the casket, I saw that Danielle had dressed her in black jeans, a black sweatshirt, a black baseball cap, and her favorite holographic pink platform boots. A classic Lychee look. I remembered her walking into Chasers on a Tuesday night right after she bought those boots, Vegas insisting that she borrow them. I remembered her little body curling against mine on our blanket palette in the drag room at Vegas and Van’s old place, rhinestone stuck to her cheek. I remembered her practicing liquid latex prosthetics in front of the mirror. I remembered her demon crawling across the Chasers stage. I remembered her scaring away the normie patrons. I remembered her yelling Miley Cyrus songs out of a moving car window. I remembered the warmth of her lips on my cheek. Her face was frozen and stiff now, but she still looked like my sister, like my best friend. I smiled as a sob wrenched from my chest.
She wanted people to recognize something bright in her.
While we gathered in the parking lot after the service and stared across the street at the old cemetery, the sky splintered open and rain drenched us to the skin. The bitch had obviously not lost her flair for the dramatic.
In the weeks that followed her death, the family cycled through one another’s apartments and retold stories and held one another as the sun rose behind crooked window shades. Wash, rinse, repeat. She had been so vibrant and alive—our little monster—making extravagant plans for her comeback. She wanted to be loved. She wanted to be somebody. She wanted people to recognize something bright in her. I did. We all did. I just hoped that somewhere, by some miracle, she could know that.
An innate part of queer life, queer family, is loss. A kind of organ-twisting loss that seeps out of our skin—awake, asleep, it doesn’t matter. In some ways, it’s part of our lineage, or if it isn’t, that history is long gone or erased. Our story is woven from absence, from missing pieces and gaping wounds. We have lost entire generations. We have lost friends. We have lost family. To hate and disease and suicide and tragic accidents and natural causes. It doesn’t stop. But this is what we have. We remember. We keep loving anyway.
I say, Maybe next time. Or I love you. Or Goodbye.
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