Who Would Play Her?
Bev Hargrave, Jr. on the crush of caregiving and finding joy through drag.
Costco-size bins of Trixie Cosmetics lippies and palettes, multi-generational family trauma, Amazon.com lacefronts, H&M nightgowns, and Elmer’s purple glue sticks do not make a drag queen—but maybe they make a man-adjacent, queer, butch, non-binary, fuck-around-&-find-out gaytriarch.
At three years old, I lived in Superman pajamas with what I would describe as a full-on, choking-hazard af, knot-around-a-toddler’s-neck red felt cape. Even at three, that cape could never have been my tool for flying (I thought capes meant heroes could fly and so I was confused that Batman needed a car), but its main function was this: if I tied it around my head, it became my bright red hair. My wig disappeared when I was about nine or ten. It had seemed like the proverbial “40 inches” to a toddler, but by my preteens it was more of an economic bob.
This cape/wig was my first gender play, my first experience of euphoria beyond how I was born. As a complete narcissist, I’ve always thought I was just supposed to be myself. I didn’t get the signals twisted about who I was supposed to be until I moved to Texas and experienced rejection for the first time as an elementary school kid.
By the time my wig disappeared, I was already scared. After years of de rigueur rejection, I’d become colder and desperate for love. I thought my bullies were idiots and assholes, but that didn’t make me feel any safer, and anyway you can’t ask for love from someone if you hate them.
I was freshly 19 (she’s a mid-October Libra, if there ever were) the first time I went out in full drag to the Halloween Block Party in the gayborhood of Dallas, Texas. The gayborhood is a sprawling intraurban neighborhood blurring queer, straight, black, brown, white, rich, and poor lives. Its gay bars and bookstores are (and were, rest in peace Crossroads Books) among the oldest in Texas and the US.
The gayborhood is probably 15 or 20 city blocks between downtown Dallas and Love Field Airport that revolves around a two-block nucleus on Cedar Springs Road composed of mostly queer-owned and operated bars, restaurants, beauty shops, and retail (underwear, sex toys, formerly books). For the past 30 years, Cedar Springs has been dominated and dictated by Caven Enterprises, which owns the four oldest anchor bars—JR’s, Sue Ellen’s, The Mining Company, and Station 4 (formerly Village Station and home of the world-famous Rose Room drag stage)—and organizes unifying events such as “Cruising the Crossroads,” 2-hour windows every Friday and Saturday meant to lube up the locals on cheap well drinks for 30 minutes at each bar.
The Halloween Block Party is as close as Dallas has the balls to get to New Orleans’ Southern Decadence or Mardi Gras with our vast, Texas-wide, deeply puritanical blue laws. The Block Party is as hedonistic, narcissistic, and faggotastic as the Wright Amendment states can get without truly being in any way fun or subversive. If you can’t afford the drive to New Orleans, the next best bet for a good time is Dallas.
So, young, dumb, and full of sputum, I walked the “parade” down the middle of Cedar Springs in a hand-sewn, hunter green, crushed velvet A-line dress that some collaboration of my roommates stitched together for me in a fever the day before. As the cool October sky began sprinkling rain on us, I strutted down the street in a pair of strappy, chunky-heeled, four-inch women’s size 11 shoes from the literal Walmart, a red lip, smoky/crusty eyeliner and mascara, short bleach blond hair over dark, slutty roots, and a black thong. I don’t know how many times I was shouted at to shave my legs. I probably would have cried about it if I hadn’t shouted back fuck you.
By the time the night was over and the rain was falling in chilling, juicy drops, I was running through the streets in nothing but heels, hysterics, and the black thong. The well-intentioned, hastily made dress had disintegrated. I was invigorated.
I don’t know how many times I was shouted at to shave my legs. I probably would have cried about it if I hadn’t shouted back fuck you.
At 34, I got up in half-ass geish and won an amateur drag contest. It wasn’t much of a contest. I got up on the stage of the historic Texas Theatre (where they caught Lee Harvey Oswald) dressed in discount combat boots, a semi-sheer, thigh-length black H&M tank top, black Calvin Klein briefs, smudgy eyes, a hand-me-down red MAC lipstick donated by one of my favorite babies-mama, a close-cropped pate and full beard, and an innate ability to command a room to the tune of Rihanna’s “Where Have You Been.” Not only did I win, I made $25 in tips.
I was the second or third ever Miss CinéWilde Queen of the Texas Theatre, but the way I slayed that specific performance is forever seared in the minds of several witnesses. When I decide to be great at something, I actually can be. Some things are beyond my reach, but the things I can control inside myself—my rhythm, my ass, my face—I’ve got on lock. Sometimes.
The last time I got in drag in public was a couple of years later at the same occasion as my title year. That CinéWilde was also the first time I’d gotten out of the house in months. I was obsessing over “Red Bull & Hennessy” by Jenny Lewis at the time, so I went ahead and had a few too many of those backstage getting dressed, then proceeded to fuck up pretty much everything a bitch can fuck up. I fucked up the drag, the performance, the professionalism. Stumbling across the stage, popping my acrylics off groping for balance, forgetting the lyrics to the track.
The night I fucked up that performance came after six months of cohabitation with my mother.
For years before, mom had lived in Pensacola, Florida and I had lived so many other places before we ended up at the same address. She’d retreated to Pensacola after my father died. It was the last place he’d been stationed when he retired as a Commander from the US Navy after 21 years of service, and so it was the last place my mom had felt at home. She ran away from her grief to a tiny house on Navy Point surrounded by leafy trees and flower beds and sandy sidewalks. I ran away from mine to an MFA program in New York City, surrounded by dirty glass and piss-drenched gutters.
With our moves completed and thousands of miles between us, we both had cool projects to work on: she renovated the little house she bought and I got drunk in dive bars in the villages of Manhattan during two years of “creative writing” workshops.
Everyone kind of knew something was wrong with mom, but nobody besides myself knew there was a bunch of shit wrong with me, too.
By the time Hurricane Michael clobbered a stretch of the Florida panhandle just a couple hours from Pensacola, I’d been back in Dallas for a few years, mom’s memory was becoming less reliable, her neighborhood clique had begun to scatter, and it was clear that it was not good for mom to live alone so far away.
We didn’t know when I was 36 and my sister was 48 what was wrong with mom. We thought maybe mini-strokes, Alzheimer’s, or some other kind of burgeoning dementia. Whatever was happening to mom was playing a long game and would eventually make it impossible for her to live on her own at all. We decided she should move back to Texas, and as I was also making good money at the time, she and I could live together in a big house in a quiet neighborhood in a part of southern Dallas that was close to my day job, where the streets were an easy to navigate square grid without too many roads to get lost down while she could still drive. Everyone kind of knew something was wrong with mom, but nobody besides myself knew there was a bunch of shit wrong with me, too.
I’d been living in a little apartment in North Oak Cliff with only the Trinity River between me and downtown Dallas, ten minutes from any gay bar in the city. I’d been on PrEP for a couple of years (the first year on PrEP I did nothing with no one and convinced myself I had been revirginized, hymen and all). Then I started feeling my oats and boom. Chlamydia twice, gonorrhea once, three or four UTIs, and somewhere along the way the big syph. I never noticed a primary chancre, so, my diagnosis was secondary syph literally all over my face.
I’m still worried right fucking now that tertiary syph will come for me someday, despite the fat blob of penicillin they shot into my ass. Like, I think my mind might be vacating the premises as we speak, but specifically, then: it was clear mom couldn’t stay in Florida, but it also became clear to me that I couldn’t manage my life alone, and just like that I was ready for the stability of living with someone who was incapable of drawing a non-judgmental breath.
My first order from Trixie Cosmetics was the Insider Collection, which I remember as being all lippies. I was 38 and around the same time I bought my apocalypse-ready Sig Sauer 9mm.
I’m 41, almost five years after the Hurricane. I no longer make good money, I’m starting grad school again this fall, and mom is getting worse. Officially diagnosed with vascular dementia and on the “memory” pill Aricept/donepezil, which is noted for not improving memory by any standard, yet was specifically approved to maintain memory slash reduce memory diminishment (good fucking luck).
Mom’s gotten physically quite weak. Every surgery she undergoes to make her feel better (shoulder replacement, knee replacement) makes her feel worse. She’s prone to screaming out in pain when applying minimal effort, she’s tired and bored and bored of being tired and tired of being bored, and she’s not allowed to drive anymore. One day in the not-too-distant future, she will wake up and not remember anything.
All I can think is: this is not what my life is supposed to be.
My first order from Trixie Cosmetics was the Insider Collection, which I remember as being all lippies, but maybe I got some glitter on that order? I was 38 and around the same time I bought my apocalypse-ready Sig Sauer 9mm and taught myself a little bit about how to handle a firearm. Girl, I was sure we were going the fuck down whether it was in a hail of bullets or Fenty highlighters.
I was still working my day job. It was high COVID and I was the only person masking in a small public charter school administration office. None of them cared except me, most didn’t even take it seriously except to propagate racist laboratory conspiracies. I shaved my beard off to fit my knockoff N95 masks, and I masked all day, all the time, addicted to washing and sanitizing my hands, the driest and worst my poor fingies have ever been.
The Insider Collection spoke to that moment. Isolation, loneliness, capitalism. And even though I didn’t touch the box for, like, a week after it came inside the front door, when I finally did open those lip glosses, I fucking needed them.
But, like, I didn’t really need them, at all, for months, and never out of the house. Not even close.
It has recently come to my attention that I’m an old maid. I know this because my mother’s 89-year-old cousin, Jan, recently said to me, “You understand what it’s like to be alone.”
Which, like, fuck, I’m 41. It would take me 48 more years to reach her age. Kill me now.
But she said it because she has Alzheimer’s disease in the flavor of a very brief short-term memory loop, yet good access to long-term memory, and she is someone who lived with her mother for 20-odd years from about the same age I started living with my mother until her mother died 30 years ago, and who never married or had children.
This past spring, mom and I realized we hadn’t seen Jan in a while. So, we made plans to see Jan. For lunch. We made plans to visit Jan for lunch.
I was not prepared. My mother was not prepared. No one was, at any time in the past six months or years, prepared for what was happening to Jan. Large stacks of bills, opened and unopened, on every flat surface in Jan’s mid-century ranch house on one of the loveliest residential blocks in Waco.
Jan can’t remember anymore when she quit smoking, but the house smelled exactly the same as it did when I was a kid over 30 years ago, trying to entertain myself in the den with antique toys and blocks that I was way too big for. There is a dark brown path of footprints in the white carpet along the skid Jan walks between the kitchen and her den where she watches The Waltons on basic cable at volume 99.
But figuring out if Jan’s taken her pills (she hasn’t, which is why I’m ordering her a fancy dispenser machine), or paid her bills (she hasn’t, which is why I now have them all on autopay), or put her phone handsets back on their bases (she hasn’t, which is why they say they are dead when they’re not), has been a weekly ordeal for me since we showed up for lunch all those months ago. We just went there for lunch. My mom keeps apologizing for getting me into this mess. We just went there for lunch. There’s nothing to apologize for. Who could have guessed.
I am doing my best to make sure Jan will be okay at home as long as we can keep her there. Trying to account for medication and nutrition and socialization from 80 miles away is another full time job I didn’t ask for. I’m exhausted, and I’m an old maid.
Jan and I are a couple of old maids and she’s probably the person who is going to get the most of my time for however long she shall live. Because I’m not married and I don’t have kids, or a uterus, I have no one else to stake a claim on it. Jan had a uterus and never did anything with it, which is fine but not relatable to me. I would have so many kids if I could (because I’m a slut).
Bea is the one who bought most of the Trixie Cosmetics. She’s the one convinced she can learn to style wigs and paint faces from YouTube tutorials. She’s the one who tried to make D-cup breasts out of nylon knickers and birdseed.
My first drag name was Tequila Mockingbird. I’m not sure I’d even had tequila at that point, and the novel never spoke to me the way it speaks to some people, but I knew a drag name had to be a witty pun, and with queer historical erasure being what it is, and the internet not being home to quite so much of that history when I was 17, I had no way of knowing whether it was an original name.
But it made me feel original and pretty and witty and gay to be Tequila Mockingbird. She knew every lyric and had numbers for “I’ve Committed Murder” by Macy Gray and “Temperamental” by Everything but the Girl and “Caught a Lite Sneeze” by Tori Amos and “I Get Lonely” by Janet Jackson. She never got up in drag anywhere but the living room, and even in that living room, there was no hair and makeup, only the moves and the lyrics. Since then, a fair few Tequila Mockingbirds seem to have come and gone across the Google results of time and tide.
By now I’ve had a dozen drag names that never really took hold of my imagination, but the one I’ve stuck with the longest is the latest. She’s been around three years or so at this point: Beatrice Aggressive. Bea for short. Bea Aggressive, Be Be Aggressive.
Bea is the one who bought most of the Trixie Cosmetics, if you want to break it all the way down. She’s the one convinced she can learn to style wigs and paint faces from YouTube tutorials. She’s the one who tried to make D-cup breasts out of nylon knickers and birdseed.
Beatrice is a gaymer, a bitch, a legend, scared for her life and sanity, insecure as fuck, a wannabe sister of perpetual whatever. She dreams of auditioning for RuPaul’s Drag Race. She knows who she would do for Snatch Game; knows she would kill the improv and acting challenges. She might even be able to get the choreo down if she doesn’t get too in her head.
But she doesn’t think Ru would like her much, and while it can be cute for 22-year-old contestants who have been doing drag for, like, five minutes to get on the show, it’s been less cute when queens start drag later in life and end up in the werk room.
Teenagers and drag queens and septuagenarians have a lot in common, and here I am stuck in between my own desire to be a teenage drag queen rock star and a seventy-something. I never get to wind down from it. I’m on call 24/7 for my mom, her cousin, the pets, my family, my work, my life’s work, art, television, magic, nightmares, regrets, it’s all here with me all the time.
When I pitched this piece I thought a 100% through-line would show itself. The thread I thought would be here when I dreamed it up was “using makeup to escape the reality of caregiving.” But I don’t really use makeup and my reality is inescapable. I’ve also realized I could legit write a memoir now. I’ve seen some shit and I’ve had thoughts about it. Over my 42 years, I’ve perceived myself as having taken my talents and squandered them into unfulfilled promise, which is bonkers cuckoo crazy because I try to always keep my promises.
I always feel like I never know if anything is anything, and I typically assume everything is nothing, but I’m trying to resist that urge here and say, I feel like I know something here is more than nothing, anything could be everything, and nothing is more important than living for yourself through all the obligations and bullshit.
So if impulse purchasing a Trixie x Juno palette gives me two minutes of gender euphoria, I’m going to take it, because those two minutes are sometimes the only ones for months on end when I’m just happy to be here.
To have been Tequila Mockingbird in my best friend’s living room freshman year. To have been the gen-rushing, locker-slamming, piece of shit survivor Bea Aggressive in your random Dead by Daylight lobby at 9:43 pm on any given Tuesday. To have been sitting next to you in eighth grade “Career Investigations” signing every assignment as J.B. before I knew the reasons why I hated my first name. To have been a coattail rider and a songwriter. To have been a cocktail waitress and a Master of Fine Art.
To have been a bunch of things that are basically different names for the same thing.
I’m a gaytriarch if I say I am. And if I want to tell the story of myself as myself for myself so that anyone who reads it can understand what I mean when I say that I’m more than what it looks like I’ve pretended to be, then that’s the story I will tell. And like a three-year-old with a death trap red felt cape who was—and is—neither bird nor plane, but in fact both faggot and queer:
Who is she, though, and who would play her?
I’m sorry to tell you I have had several venereal diseases. Also, Alzheimer’s is a fucker.
I love this piece so much. I am (was? --my own reality has been inescapable and often conflicts with oportunities) a Dallas drag king, but our timelines and circles didn't quite overlap so I love reading a story that's so different and so necessary since not all of us can have the dream performer life.