Drag Me Around

Underdog Kristy Blaze collapses the folding chairs and picks up the empty glasses from the tables and floor in her black latex jumpsuit and bubblegum pink heels. Fire Island’s Logan Hardcore just finished her stellar set on the second floor of the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. “I don’t mind doing the bitch work,” says Blaze, “That’s going to be me up on stage soon, and I’ll pass the bitch-work torch to the next queen.” Blaze has only been doing drag for about four months and finds comfort and community at the Stonewall. Thursday through Sunday, the Stonewall hosts up to five drag queens including Ms. Hardcore, Marti Gould Cummings, and the legend, Fifi DuBois.

The red brick building is a resting place for the rainbow lights and gay pride flags hanging from its walls. The energy that flows here is similar to a home town bar, but there is something different. Everyone is in their own world, enjoying themselves, laughing, singing, and drinking. There are a few tables, music playing through the speakers and advertised 50th-anniversary t-shirts for sale behind the counter. The four-story liquor shelf is nudged between two small televisions playing Celine Dion and Madonna music videos on repeat. There’s a pool table, but the men here have no interest in playing the game; its purpose is an exaggerated love seat. It doesn’t take long for the ABBA karaoke to becoming overwhelming, so we travel upstairs to see the reason for our travels.

The hallway is soaked in bright red paint that I am pretty sure helps the sound travel better from room to room. The stairs are narrow; they fit one person walking up comfortably. The passing of people forces me to walk with my hips and shoulders up against the wall. There is a gentle sorry and lite touch with every interaction. I admire the men whose shirts are, and pants are skin tight; I know I’m getting closer to the main event. Tile floors reflect the red light coming from the ceiling. Down the hall and around the bend takes me to the destination, “Logan Hardcore’s Throwdown.”

I take my seat on the couch lining the wall, near the corner of the stage. The fabric color of the sofa is a mystery. I can’t tell if it’s purple of black because of the flashing lights reflecting off the disco balls. The DJ plays some early 2000s throwbacks, Usher, Chris Brown, and Brittney Spears, to get the crowd loosened up. The crowd’s energy is loose and free.

Before I know it, Hardcore is introduced by the MC, and an original mash-up is blasted through the speakers. She struts out from behind the curtain in her gold, six inches, open-toed heels, green and black striped one-piece drenched with sequins, an overly teased and curled blonde wig, eyelashes that I could swear are fanning me from across the room and cheek contour that could ruin my life. She radiates the confidence of a true queen and knows how to command the room. She performed three or four songs, one of the including Bad Romance by Lady Gaga, but I was too in the moment to remember any of the other tunes. After each song, Hardcore thanks her audience for coming and adds some light humor about the struggles of being a drag queen, even in New York. Her performance is a fabulous spectacle that everyone should see once in their lifetime. From the effortless splits and leg lifts to the error-free lip singing, Hardcore is engaging, and the people respond.

Located on Christopher Street and across from Christopher Park in the Village of Greenwich in the city of New York, the Stonewall Inn is a symbolic location that is home to the beginning of the gay liberation movement on the East Coast. On June 28, 1969, several undercover NYC police officers raided the Stonewall and verbally abused, physically assaulted, and arrested patrons of the bar. It was not uncommon for police to raid gay bars. They would stop transvestites and harass customers.[1] Once news spread of the discriminatory acts of the police officers, allies and supporters of the community came together and protested to demand reform and respect from the authorities.[2] In Toby Marotta’s article, “What Made Stonewall Different?”, He dissects the reasons why the efforts for equal treatment for gays and lesbians succeeded in NYC, “As far back as the 1920s, Greenwich Village had been known as a bohemian enclave whose residents included prominent homosexual artists and intellectuals. By 1969, so many of the district’s residents and visitors were gay, and so many of its commercial establishments gay-oriented, that the Village effectively functioned as a gay ghetto” (35). Gays and trans people are the majority of residents of the Village and also the primary customers of the Stonewall. In the tri-state area, there are over three-quarters of a million people who identify as gay, lesbian, trans and queer.[3]

Much like the Newark Riots, the Stonewall Riots were not rioting. They were protests to create change and bring light to the injustices and discrimination the gay community has faced for decades. Because minorities in society are advocating for it, the majority translates it as a threat, so it is consequently labeled as a rebellion against the norm. The drama of the riots was not as significant as the aftermath. There was a surge of activism and organizing for lesbian and gay rights that empowered a new generation of activists and led to a new approach of lesbian and gay politics. Marotta summarizes the three-day demonstration, “It started as a disorganized rebellion against oppression, but it triggered a chain reaction of community-building and political organizing that emulated across the country and publicized throughout the world. Overnight this unprecedented surge of organizing transformed what had been a largely underground vanguard movement into a highly public mass movement for gay pride, power, and community” (35). The grassroots efforts of the thousands of participants throughout the movement were transformative for society. On June 24, 2016, almost 47 years after the riots, the Stonewall Inn became the first US National Monument dedicated to LGBT history.

Greenwich Village, home to the Stonewall, has a population of 2,045 people who are a median age of 37. It has an individual poverty rate of 10.8% and a family poverty rate of 9.0%. 64.4% of residents are homeowners, and the rest are renters. For education, 94.9% of people have a minimum of a high school diploma, and 31.0% received a bachelor’s degree. Greenwich has a 96.8% white population. In 2017, only five black people were living in Greenwich that makes up 0.2% of the total population and 101 Hispanics that make up 4.9% of the community. Because of the diversity of New York City as a whole, I was surprised that this neighborhood does not reflect the difference that the city fosters. Marshall mentions a trend and is a direct observation of the “newly renovated” Greenwich Village, “The gentrified urban neighborhoods…are an ornamental world, built for the amusements of their patrons, with their collection of fancy cooking shops, art galleries, and bookstores” (91). Demographics and residential clientele have shifted from what they were thirty years ago. Expensive real estate has created a visible boundary between rich and poor. 19.3% of Greenwich Village’s population, make somewhere between $100,000 to $149,000/year. As Lizabeth Cohen writes in her New York Times (2002) article, “Shopping centers aimed at what Macy’s Annual Report for 1955 called “middle-income groups” explicitly distanced themselves from consumers deemed undesirable because they were too poor, black, or young and unruly.” With boutiques, beautiful brick face condos, monthly subscribed nail salons (starting at $89.95/month), and vegan French restaurants lining the blocks, you can feel that business owners are providing storefronts for niche markets. There are exclusive “A” rated restaurants and bars that have their newspaper and magazine features framed and hung on the front window highlighting their quality and above average prices.

Stonewall has a distinguished history within the gay and lesbian community, but drag queens have a difficult time finding a sense of belonging. RuPaul is a multitalented superstar whose, outrageous outfits, and higher than life presence, has catapulted him into stardom. In an article produced by The Guardian, Decca Aitkenhead interviews RuPaul to get an inside scoop of what it means to be a queen. When asked about clothing choices, his response was, “…We are wearing clothes that are hyperfeminine, that represent our culture’s synthetic idea of femininity”. He has a love for drag clothes and people who want to be included in this space. “For people to do drag and make it their profession in a male-dominated culture, they have to go through so much emotional tug-of-war, because society says, ‘You’re not supposed to do that’” (Aitkenhead). The intersectionality that men in the drag queen community are an everyday struggle. They are biologically men, have a sexual attraction to men, occasionally dress as women, plus take on other identities to define themselves. He recognizes the societal judgment that all drag queens have to cope with, and the internal battle they face to be comfortable with themselves. RuPaul’s Drag Race is on its 11th season and has no plans of slowing down production. A majority of drag queens are within the smaller community of gay men, so the fact that the Stonewall is providing a space for these showgirls to practice and create a community is transformative, and more of these places should become of access to people across the country.

RuPaul created a platform for competitive drag queens to show the world their talents, but the military was one of the first to publicize cross-dressing through a screen. To boost morale, the Army during World War II helped soldiers stage their theatrical productions. Props, scripts, and costume designs were shipped out from New York to bases around the world. Because most productions have some female presence on the stage, the military brought female impersonation back to the stage in New York. Most of the actors were gay men, and in the early years of the war, men of the army put on what mainly was a drag show; men dressed in feminine clothing and acted like women. The film “This is the Army,” was adapted from the stage play that traveled across the country, and the world, to perform for audiences. It featured an all-male cast that cross-dressed and was the original drag show before Drag Race was ever a thought. Despite the full acceptance of gender-bending performances, World War II marked the first time the military explicitly discriminated against homosexuals in recruitment and discharged those it discovered.

After the war, America had an influx of urban gay communities. Lesbians and gay men had dreams of starting a new life for themselves in seaport cities such as New York, San Francisco and Chicago.[4] They were on a mission to find, or create, a community of people who were homosexual. In a New York Times article written 25 years after the Stonewall Riots, the author discusses the struggles that gay cross-dressers face because of preconceived societal judgements.[5] “The religious right uses (cross-dressers) to fan fear and hatred. Gay moderates and conservatives, even organizers of the Stonewall parade, seem to feel a constant obligation to divorce themselves from gay flamboyance, to assure the country that the vast majority of gay people are “regular” people…A just society must offer the same protection to men in leather and chains as to those who wear Brooks Brothers suits”. Gay people felt that they could not associate with drag queens because if straight people thought gay people were radical, drag queens were clinically insane. They have continuously been suppressed even by the people who share the same sexual identity as them.

Writer and poet Richard Bruce Nugent said in the film “Before Stonewall” that, “New York is a place that everyone comes to.” It is a melting pot of cultures and communities where people travel to find themselves, and acceptance. Logan Hardcore has the confidence of Cher, but she faces the challenge of developing a sub-community within an already minority population. Within a few hours, she transforms herself from man to woman to performer. She, and the many that came before her and will come after, must find more places, like the Stonewall, to show off their talents, even if they seem unconventional.

[1] Remember Stonewall! But how? (1994, May 6). New York Times [2] Varga, B., Beck, T., & Thornton, S. (2019). Celebrating Stonewall at 50: A Culturally Geographic Approach to Introducing LGBT Themes.

[3] Leonhardt, D. (2015). New York Still Has More Gay Residents Than Anywhere Else. [4] Scagliotti, J., Schiller, G., Rosenberg, R., Brown, R., Lorde, A., Hay, H., … Ginsberg, A. (n.d.). Before Stonewall the making of a gay and lesbian community [5] After stonewall: Pride and prejudice. (1994, Jun 26). New York Times