Who was I imitating when I was 11, dressed in my grandmother's old nightgown, telling my cousins they should call me Penelope? Who was I imitating when I began to sneak into my mother's bathroom to experiment with her makeup? It felt powerful to see her alter the color of her lips or to darken the edges around her eyes and eyelashes. I wanted that power too-the command over someone's attention. I used to think I was alone in such experiments until I wrote about them and learned that I was not.
Lately, I have been trying to think of when I first saw someone in drag. Was it Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye singing a duet in the musical White Christmas? Or Julie Andrews in Victor/Victoria? Barbra Streisand in Yentl? Harvey Korman on The Carol Burnett Show? Or Jim Bailey as Barbra Streisand, also on The Carol Burnett Show? I loved the variety shows of the 1970s and '80s, and a performer in drag was not an unusual treat. And yet maybe it was my father dressed as a fortune teller, with one hoop earring and a kerchief on his head, reading palms in a tent for the Portland, Maine, chapter of the Rotary's fundraiser.
My first drag-queen story hour was probably The Benny Hill Show. For those of you too young to know, he was a British comedian whose shows ran in the U.S. late at night. I watched the show with my dad, and it was a special treat, happening only on the nights when he'd let me stay up with him to laugh at these British people and their jokes about sexism, sex, and social gaffes. If I'm remembering correctly, this was among the things that came to us in Maine in the '70s or early '80s with cable, most likely on some PBS channel.
Drag of this kind was uncontroversial and all around me back then. As a kid, I was watching a lot of men and women in gowns on television. We all were. It was mainstream. And we loved it. Most of us, maybe even more now than back then, still do.
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