decline and
fall
by Douglas Messerli
Todd Flaherty (screenwriter and
director) Chrissy Judy / 2022
I’ll confess, never having been
personally interested in or particularly fascinated by drag queens, I find that
world somewhat entertaining, and obviously writing this book I have entered
that world in terms of cinema numerous times. But I still have felt apart and
removed from it, finding it difficult to imagine what a female impersonator
does throughout his or her regular day. Is it a world totally devoted to that
role-playing or is there another self, another being who alternates or even
dominates the periods off-stage?
I’m not sure of the total credulity of Todd Flaherty’s 2022 gorgeous
black-and-white film Chrissy Judy, but it certainly has given me a
better sense of that world and of the individuals involved in it through the
film’s characters, the energized and almost magnetically appealing Judy (played
by Flaherty) and Chrissy (Wyatt Fenner), and if there was ever a film that
might help one enter that world and empathize with the gay and straight men who
are involved in drag it is surely this movie.
Let us begin with the language or the patois used by these individuals.
The effeminate chatter we witness on stage and in the movies when the character
is in drag is similar in this film, reminding me of a gay patter that used to
be employed, when I was first coming out, by many gay men gathering with others
of an evening: an exaggerated, queer female-oriented banter—most
participants were awarded like the
characters in this film female names—and the language was purposely camp, an over-the-top rendition of
reality that included numerous words, expressions, and metaphors known only to
gay communities, sometimes even limited to the local chapter. It is also a
language of wit, demanding that each participant throw off statements and
comebacks that seemingly “put down” or “dismiss” the other participants,
offered in part as evidence of one’s knowledge of their weaknesses and well as
their strengths, and positing the idea that your love for them is based on
knowing both their failures and gifts only too well. And finally, it depends on
the moment, who enters the room at what moment, what has just happened the
world about gleaned through news or gossip, and whatever history (individual or
political) that is appropriate to the moment, bringing that into the world of
cut off, separated, and dissociated world into which the speakers belong. It
short, even speaking is an utterly exhausting experience.
For the outsider, moreover, it is nearly impossible to assimilate or
even translate since it is precisely meant to keep others out. It represents a
private world fought for tooth and nail by individuals who are not permitted
into more normalized living rooms and parlors. Beyond language, accordingly,
behavior can also be unusual, outré, or even purposely offensive, particularly
if one is told that something is off limits or one is visiting a different
clique or outsider gathering. People can be hurt, accordingly, abused because
of their relationship to the others.
It is a world most other young gay men coming of age in the early 1970s
and I quickly abandoned, at a time, long before Stonewall, when many of us
realized that we were no longer on the outside mocking ourselves for our
position in the world, but actually were beginning to be accepted into the heterosexual communities
from which we had so long been banned. Talking in patois of our creation,
accordingly, no longer made sense. Even behaving badly to prove we were after
all the bad boys that society had defined us as, was no longer useful.
In many respects the drag world, a least as presented in this movie, has
retained a sense of otherness that most of the LGBTQ world has long abandoned,
particularly those of us who have been comfortably accepted in the
heteronormative worlds of arts, education, entertainment, and other fields of
endeavor who, at least outwardly, have seemingly assimilated the quirks of
LGBTQ individuals.
And in large part, that attitudinal difference is what the film Chrissy
Judy is all about. Beautiful as a
male specimen and able to attract sexual partners, Judy is still of the “old
school,” a gay man surrounded by his own kind and also, in that respect,
trapped at going-on-30 in a world that is gradually disappearing. He (the
pronoun I’ve chosen since most of the time “Judy,” real name Jack, performs as
a sis male bottom) lives with his long-time friend Chrissy in a world that is
made up of close gay friends. At one point, indeed, another friend of theirs,
Samoa (James Tison) declares that she no longer even has time for heterosexual
beings.
The drag team of Chrissy and Judy begin the film with a familiar trip to
Fire Island, a weekend celebration where Judy hopes to get to kiss another man
and both hope for a deep tan and perhaps even a little rest in their schedule
which is a busy one without much financial renumeration.
Mostly what these early scenes simply
reveal is the intensity of their friendship, as they drunkenly dance together
declaring that there is no one in their lives that they love better and
insisting that if by 40 they have still found no one to whom they can devote
their love they will marry one another.
But here also, Judy begins to perceive
that Chrissy is not his usual self, and soon after discovering him at a dive
bar where they are performing, he realizes that his life-long friend is about
to abandon him, to go out into the real “gay” world that has grown up around in
order to try out a relationship in Philadelphia with his long-distance
boyfriend Shawn (Kiyon Spencer). Judy cannot believe that his friend would
truly leave him, and when it happens his world begins to fall apart.
First of all, his drag act is stale. No
one is interested, he is told, in the old drag act of singing campy versions of
vintage songs as he does. Today drag queens dance!
Judy attempts a dance class with a
younger group of individuals, but is out of sync—as well as out of rhythm—and
gets winded when the others are just ready to continue.
A visit to an older friend Samoa who has
become a successful businessman (or woman, since we cannot quite discern
whether Samoa now identifies as fully transgender or as a cis male who dresses
daily in drag and as Judy retains his female name at all times), drops him into
different world of patois, filled with faux-psychological, spiritual, new wave,
and other babble that is as radically inexplicable to Judy as his “sissy talk”
is to some others. Feeling as isolated in this world as others feel in his, he
behaves badly, letting himself be fucked by Samoa’s “hands off” boyfriend,
Marcus (Joey Taranto) who happens to also to have been a member of the audience
in his last drag performance who dismissed and totally ignored his act.
In some respects, Judy’s behavior is a
reaction to both Samoa’s and Marcus’ disdain and disrespect. But at heart it is
obviously a performance in anger for Chrissy having gone off and left him
alone. A phone call from Sissy in the closet where he has just had sex, with as
he informs him “cum dripping from my ass,” livens him up, especially when
Chrissy invites him to come and share a Thanksgiving barbecue with Shawn and
others in the city of brotherly love.
But that visit proves even more
disastrous as Judy is forced to look on at the apparently kissy-lovey life of
Chrissy and Shawn, surrounded by gay men who are so conservative and
uninteresting—who talk in yet another language about their bird-watching
habits, sports, and jobs—that they might as well be married heterosexuals.
Getting drunk, Judy performs in this “polite” society an act that Bette Davis
might envy as he mocks the city and its values, their empty conversations, and
performs an almost drunken Medea-like dance of disdain. Even Chrissy cannot
bring him to his senses, and Judy is shipped off in the very next greyhound
bus.
Gradually, Judy’s world as he knew it is collapsing, a sort of decline
and fall of his drag-centered empire. Without the ability to find new drag
venues, he is forced to take part-time jobs such as handing out samples in
stores. For his bad behavior, most of his friends seem to have abandoned him or
left for the “other” worlds they have realized that it is time to embrace.
Trying out a sexual tryst with Marcus once again, Judy realizes that he is a
“fuck ‘em and leave ‘em kind of guy,”—no sleepovers for him—finishing up his
sex and telling Judy that paper towels are on a nearby table while he goes
upstairs to shower. He is startled when he comes out of the bathroom that Judy
as strayed on the balcony and curtly sends him off.
Out of despair, Judy dresses up in drag, seeing “herself’ in the mirror
finally as a washed-up figure from a time that no longer even exists. Trimming
away his beautifully peroxided hair, he finally takes a job he once mocked as a
latrine-scouring, bedmaking houseboy in a Provincetown bed and breakfast.
Now a shortly shaven jet-black haired young man he behaves as seriously
as he can earning a living in P-town while enjoying the company of his fellow
houseboy-servant Pedro (João
Pedro Santos). Pedro would certainly like to break the rules of the B&B
owner, but for the first time ever Judy follows orders, allowing himself fun
with the cute boy with whom he works, while staying out of his bed.
Besides, he’s now busy, working nights
at Ryan Landry’s famed gay performance space preparing a new drag act as Sweet
Lorraine (a new persona suggested by Marcus) who now sings seriously—and I
might add quite beautifully through Flaherty’s performance—old torch songs.
On the very day he is to finally
premiere the act, Chrissy turns up in town. The two spot one another but don’t
dare acknowledge each other’s existence. Yet Chrissy does show up the
performance and is clearly moved by Judy’s new show; after all her act wins
Landry’s “Miss Congeniality” contest, and Judy is mobbed by admirers after.
It’s the last night in P-Town for Judy,
and Pedro convinces him to celebrate in a bar, but Judy leaves early, wandering
the beach where he unintentionally on purpose confronts the waiting Chrissy,
who admits he’s gone on vacation alone since Shawn had no more free days left.
But we also recognize that he has gone
off alone to think things out.
Now recognizing that his friend has,
after all this time, found himself, he wonders if he has discovered his own
purpose in the relationship to which he has seemed to be so devoted. But as
Judy admits, he too has no idea what the next day will bring. For both of them,
it has become another world than the one they formerly inhabited, a world which
doesn’t have the safe corners of clique in which one feels fully at home. The
family members have fled one another, leaving
each on his own to discover who they
might possibly be or who they might become.
Chrissy and Judy, once so close you mightn’t ever imagine them apart,
share the ferry back to Boston. Chrissy, clearly not the happy “married” man he
once seemed to be, lays his head upon his friend Judy’s shoulder. But it is not
an invitation to renew the past, but simply a recognition that they have each
gone their separate ways to places they no longer recognize.
Los Angeles, October 19, 2022
Reprinted from World Cinema
Review (October 2022).
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