Drag

Jimmy Stevens

Writing drag permits many stages of elaboration: cabaret, burlesque, gender fuck—as well as poetry, novels & filmscripts.

Sometimes drag just happens—it’s spontaneous like a gay cheerleader’s pretty pirouette up into the air waving pom-poms so gayly.

The first out-of-the-closet drag queen I met and got to know in person—was way back when in the depths of my faggy bildungsroman beginnings in closeted high school.

There she was, Jimmy Stevens—displaying, flaunting her true talents as a flaming drag-queen during basketball and football games.

Nobody except maybe me really thought very much about it—Jimmy the Drag Queen doing her thing in front of the bored, ho-hum mob.

I had seen Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel—I loved the way she sang “Falling in Love” to the Weimar cabaret crowd. But beyond that drag and transvestites was, well—terra incognito. Or rather terrifying cognito—something nobody talked about.

Later Jimmy graduated and got outta town—going to the university in Lawrence. I heard he was in the choir up there—and probably doing other things as well.

Like the steam baths in Kansas City—or maybe even trips to New York City. He ended up with aids though—and died in late-1990’s. I often wondered what he was like—once he bloomed from his small-town closet. Did he do drag—burlesque?

It’s a sad kind of gay story—somewhat like the one with Vernon Sheffield. What do small-town gays do in the stuffy Red State Midwest—there in stoic, gothic Kansas where drag is much too much?

Jimmy Stevens got out of town—but ended up dead in his thirties. Vernon Sheffield stayed there—and lived into his seventies. How did these gay men lead their lives—what was it like to be gay back then?

Like Jimmy Stevens—I got out of town, then I headed for SF and the West Coast. But a part of me stayed back there like Vernon Sheffield—a kind of Tall Grass Prairie Other.

A sad doppelganger—there beneath the shadowy elm trees. A James Barrie double—haunting Peter Pan Park.