Dirtier Pop: A Weekend with Drag Boy Band Earls2Gearls
Elyssa Goodman on queering the boy band and her new book GLITTER AND CONCRETE: A CULTURAL HISTORY OF DRAG IN NEW YORK CITY.
The screaming was unbelievable.
The first time I saw Earls2Gearls perform at a 2023 drag competition at Brooklyn queer bar 3 Dollar Bill, swells of sound rose from the crowd, eclectic and alive in color. There were only opening beats to a song, but they were so sonically recognizable from the boy bands of our collective youth that it seemed all anyone could do was roar with delight. And then entered these three drag kings kitted out in orange chest plates, not unlike the Backstreet Boys in their “Larger Than Life” music video almost 25 years prior. Y2Kaleb, Justan, and Donnie Pearl were here to save the world with pop music. I wasn’t just reliving my youth—I remember screaming my head off at *NSYNC’s “No Strings Attached” Tour in 2000 (yes, I still have the concert shirt, thank you very much)—it felt like I was reliving part of drag history.
When the Backstreet Boys’ single “I Want It That Way” was released in 1998, it inspired the birth of another New York drag king troupe, the Backdoor Boys. They performed Backstreet Boys songs as they were released, hilariously queering them for audiences of screaming fans. When I was working on my book, Glitter and Concrete: A Cultural History of Drag in New York City, troupe co-founder T Cooper, now an established writer, told me they decided the song was about anal sex. Performances blossomed from there, each lip sync evolving into a makeout session (or more) between members T-Rok (Cooper’s character), A-Jack, Harry Ballerina, and Billy Starr. It was boy band parody, comedy magic so strong it eventually led them to a wealth of performances and press up and down the East Coast.
And here I was, a quarter of a century later, watching a similar magic come alive. Y2Kaleb had a gold tooth with shiny, slicked forward hair and a thin goatee around his jaw à la AJ McLean. Justan parted his hair down the middle so it flopped in his face, a combination of JC Chasez and Kevin Richardson. Donnie Pearl was a Lance Bass/AJ mashup, tall with spiky blond hair. They all wore chains, had moves like they fell out of *NSYNC’s “Pop” video, wore bouncing slinkies as genitals, and then stripped down into tighty whities. Earls2Gearls lore tells us the band had been cryogenically frozen in the early 2000s and were ready for a new lease on life. It was completely ridiculous, totally absurd. It was perfect, and the crowd ate it up.
Drag is truth manifested as creation. I believe that by “dragging” something, we allow truths to reach the surface that might otherwise be left unrevealed.
I remember learning a long time ago that fashion and culture trends move in 20-year cycles, but what isn’t talked about as much is how it feels to watch them come full circle. I turned 12 in 2000, when I saw *NSYNC at what was then the National Car Rental Center in South Florida with my friend Kacey and our moms. I remember buying the concert shirt a size too large because that’s all that was left, putting it on immediately and proceeding to scream my face off with hundreds of other chaperoned tweens. It’s what we were taught to do from the rise of teen stars immemorial, videos of Elvis and Beatles fans burned into our memories. I lived it once, but I didn’t think I’d live it twice.
So it was an honor a few weeks later when Francis, aka Y2Kaleb, reached out to me. Earls2Gearls would be working on creating a boy band musical at the North American Cultural Laboratory, a space in the Catskills where artists are given a week to spend developing their work full-time. NACL was just starting its writer-in-residency program, where writers would be invited to engage with the artists’ work in development. Knowing my background as a drag historian, Francis was kind enough to invite me. At the end of July, I joined them.
We did it on the white wicker couch, where I ate you out…
I was at NACL all of 30 minutes and I was already laughing. Francis was sitting at their laptop in the theatre, fans spinning, white wires connecting their music equipment to the laptop to the floor. The Earls had already been at NACL for four days by the time I got there and had written three songs, one of which involved—yes—a white wicker couch.
Unlike the Backdoor Boys, the Earls are not hearing songs and deciding they’re about anal sex. They’re writing the songs to actually be about that.
I wondered aloud how Earls2Gearls arrived at this persona. In my memory, boy bands were so wholesome, or at least they pretended to be. Francis was quick to correct me. They weren’t, they said. They taught girls to be straight, to like all the same things.
I dug further into my memory. The lyrics for *NSYNC’s “Digital Get Down” popped into my head:
Digital, digital get down, just you and me
We may be twenty-thousand miles away, but I can see ya
And baby, baby, you can see me
They were talking about cybersex, which I’m sure my 12-year-old brain understood on some level, but somehow it felt okay because they seemed like such nice boys. Woof. They tricked us all, and we loved every minute of it. Francis was right.
Boy bands had to be sexy but untouchable, they had to be the boys you could bring home to your parents but also fantasize about fucking when your parents were magically out of town for a weekend like in the movies. Earls2Gearls don’t have to do that. They can just be overt, lovable, horny idiots. They don’t have to pretend they’re wholesome in flame crop-tops, Tommy Hilfiger wraparound sunglasses, and red tear-away pants that reveal penises made like sock puppets. If John Waters were in charge of boy bands, this is what they’d look like, all their attractive qualities amplified, easily recognizable as parody and commentary. You know, drag.
Drag is truth manifested as creation. I believe that by “dragging” something, we allow truths to reach the surface that might otherwise be left unrevealed. In making an actual boy band, there’s a choreographer, a composer, a lyricist, a publicist, a tour manager, and the list goes on. A person becomes a product. But with drag, with Earls2Gearls, a boy band is a product of their own design: they are superheroes, crooners, and fairy tale princes all at once. In doing this, they show how the sausage is made, if you’ll pardon the pun—they remind us how boy bands were just a production all along. They take the sting out of what it means or meant to live in that body, or, as Francis says, they get to be joyful idiots and reject shame and shame culture.
“I guess it was just about exploring those fantasies that we’d had about being those boys, admitting that we fantasized about being those boys as kids and then being like, well, we can be those boys,” Bell, aka Donnie Pearl, says. “Growing up, there was a kind of infatuation with them and the confusion between whether you were attracted to them or wanted to be them.”
Drag is also an extension of the Earls’ long careers as theatre practitioners. For example, Bell and Nessa Norich, aka Justan, both studied clowning at esteemed physical theatre schools in France like École Philippe Gaulier and École internationale de théâtre Jacques Lecoq. Bell, Norich, and Francis have appeared as artists on avant-garde stages across New York and the world, including those at the Brooklyn Museum, the New Museum, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the Louvre, the British Film Institute, and countless others.
By showing us absurd versions of gendered behaviors, drag asks us to consider their validity. It shows us everything is made up, that everything is a production, that gender is a costume that can easily be put on and taken off by anyone, all the time.
For Norich, whose work as a theatre artist is dedicated to subverting social norms, drag is a natural fit. “When I studied cultural anthropology, I remember learning about colonized communities who would dance into a trance and become possessed by the archetypes that oppressed them. Drag can be a kind of cultural exorcism in the same way,” they said. “We get to become the powerful ideal, while saying fuck you to that ideal…I have been able to exorcise sociocultural conventions of power and beauty and conformity from within myself, while laughing at them. But at the same time, I’m becoming more like Justan in positive ways, like finding more confidence in my expression of masculinity.”
By showing us absurd versions of gendered behaviors, drag asks us to consider their validity. It shows us everything is made up, that everything is a production, that gender is a costume that can easily be put on and taken off by anyone, all the time. In doing so, there’s the opportunity to live beyond the walls of expectation and convention, to embody a voice of your own choosing.
I remember myself in the audience at the *NSYNC concert. I remember wondering why I was screaming. It just seemed like something you did, something you were supposed to do. It felt fun some of the time, but it also felt kind of stupid. Engaging with the premise of gender is, overall, similar. Why do we have to move that way? Why do we have to wear that thing? Why do we have to talk that way? What if we didn’t?
In the “Superhero Song” the Earls created during their residency at NACL, there’s a section with no lyrics that serves a purpose: “It’s a dance break where we escape from a cult and get lobotomized.” Maybe drag was always about escaping from the cult of gender and conformity, by making fun of them with a voice of your own. Maybe that voice is a millennium era boy band, freshly unfrozen, ready to take over the world.
Five Questions for the Author
It wouldn’t be a Black Lipstick interview without this question—walk us through a full beat. What are your holy grail products?
From start to finish: first I use Oil of Olay Complete All Day UV Moisturizer. I’m a Clinique girl, and their All-Over Concealer is life giving. I almost never leave the house without it. Then, I’ve been using the ColourPop Smoke N’ Roses eyeshadow palette almost daily for moods both matte and sparkly. I top it off with a cat eye, also a Clinique moment—their High Impact Easy Liquid Liner doesn’t move, nor does their High Impact Waterproof Mascara. These are the next step, usually followed by Clinique chestnut blush. Top it all off with a swipe of KVD Beauty Everlasting Liquid Lip in either a bright red or magenta. If I feel like it, I’ll fill in my brows with Maybelline Expert Wear. I finish it all off with a spritz of Tom Ford Soleil Neige Shimmering Body Oil my boyfriend gave me for Chanukah. It has glitter in it!
Glitter and Concrete is not only a cultural history of drag in New York City, it is the first cultural history of drag in New York City. What made you fall in love with drag, enough to take on a project of this magnitude?
It’s funny, I don’t think I ever thought about it in terms of magnitude at first, I just knew it had to get done. I had a photography professor in college who used to say, “Elyssa, you take on these projects…” and I don’t remember what he said after that. Maybe it’s better that I don’t!
But drag has been a part of my life since I was about seven or eight years old. I saw the movie To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995) and that was it. I was in. Drag was glamorous and beautiful, and as I learned more about its rebellious spirit and use of glamour as resistance throughout the decades, my love of it grew even more. It was beauty and power. It stayed with me since then, for almost 30 years and counting. It’s one of the defining art forms of my life.
When the legendary drag queen Flawless Sabrina passed away in November 2017, I wanted to make sure we weren’t losing her story or anyone else’s. I discovered this John Berger quote at the time: “A story is always a rescue operation.” It stayed with me as I worked on the book. I think if you want to write a book, you have to want to live in a place for a certain number of years, so to speak—you have to live that topic day in and day out. Drag was always a place I wanted to live.
As the first book of its kind, Glitter and Concrete obviously had to be deeply researched. What was the most difficult part of your research journey, and the most rewarding? Is there anything you’d like to explore further, in subsequent books?
I think the most difficult part was actually due to circumstances outside of my control. I got my book deal in March 2020, so I wasn’t able to physically get my hands on archival materials until the project was well underway. Luckily, so much had been digitized that by the time I began writing, I was still able to dig deep into research texts. Praise be to the technology goddesses for making such a thing possible!
Some of my favorite moments came from doing my interviews—I did 93 of them—and the stories people would tell me about their lives, how they wanted to share and take me into these moments with them: what it was like to date Mafia trade, seeing shows at the Pyramid, performing onstage after a fisting show and trying not to slip on the Crisco…the stories were endless, and these are only a small sampling of those mentioned in the book! Anytime I can live in glamour and its power and tell those stories, I’m happy, so I’d love to do something like that again.
What do you think is the closest thing we have to boy bands today? Like, who or what gives you early 2000s boy band vibes?
I see it in young actors, male models and influencers, certainly. Social media plays a huge part in the commodification of individuals like these, and the need to maintain a persona of some kind publicly and constantly. Because of it, they also become people who can be consumed on a regular basis. I just hope they don’t get eaten alive like some of these boy bands did! Luckily, Earls2Gearls seem to be immune to that.
What’s next for you? Your writing, photography, reading series…everything!
I’m actively promoting Glitter and Concrete right now! I’m going on a book tour with events in New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Portland, and more, where I’ll be doing readings, lectures, and conversations. I’m also going to be on panels at the Brooklyn Book Festival and the Miami Book Fair. Alongside that, I continue to freelance—I write regularly about not just drag, but photography, art, fashion, food, and culture in general. When I can, I go out and photograph drag as well—I have a new camera I’m excited about and have been leaning into making more experimental images alongside performance documentation, and it’s been really rewarding. The Miss Manhattan Non-Fiction Reading Series, which I host and curate, continues as ever—we celebrate 10 years in April 2024!—and I’m excited to do a partnership with Black Lipstick in December…but more on that soon!