Ford Fairchild | Drag Queen / 2023 [music video]

celebrating drag queens

by Douglas Messerli

 

Chris Housman (performer and composer), Ford Fairchild (director) Drag Queen / 2023 [3 minutes]

  

For his Blueneck album, country-western singer Chris Housman did an extremely brave thing by celebrating the very notion of a drag queen after Tennessee had adopted its Adult Entertainment Act, and other states were delimiting the appearance of drag queens, particularly those who might read appropriate books to young people in libraries.

  The very idea that some men might dress up and perform as women suddenly became an issue in a nation in which, as I have established, had a true theater and cinematic tradition going back to at least to the 18th century, played out in early performances of Fatty Arbuckle, Charlie Chaplin, and dozens of other major film and theater figures. What had suddenly happened to so terrify conservative Americans? 

       There is, quite obviously, no sane answer. Suddenly the society, particularly the Trump MAGA world, became so terrified of any differences in behavior that they could no longer accept in their tiny narrative framework of experience anyone who didn’t behave as absurdly as they did. The US suddenly seemed to have lost all comprehension of those who didn’t fit within the strictures of religious and political values into which frightened US residents had retreated, fearful of any further loses of their ignorant and hateful identities. When someone as “down home” as Housman sings of and praises their joyful presence, accordingly, it truly does mean something, even if it won’t change the minds of a single unthinking MAGA individual.

     His lyrics, and the presence of several Nashville drag queens, Arsyn, Perplexity, Sasha Dereon, Ivy St. James, Vanity, Deception, and Obsinity, however, truly questions through popular music the legitimacy of these narrow-minded people’s viewpoint. The song’s lyrics say it all:

 

He's teacher of the year

And royalty as well

'Cause every now and then

Michael becomes Michelle

A little red wine

To wind down his day

With a lot of eye shadow

But he never throws shade

He reaps what he sows

And sews his own dresses

The wig glue of the family

Always cleaning up messes

Puts on a face

And one hell of a show

And everybody round here knows

She's a drag queen but she ain't no drag

Lace-up front with a pony in the back

People try and knock her down all the time

But in her high heels she's still 6'5

She wouldn't hurt a soul or kill a fly

But she murders on the stage every Saturday night

The kind of woman lotta men wish they could be

 

Los Angeles, March 21, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2025).