Late last Saturday night, with a few friends, I wound through a casino in Vegas. “Follow that person in drag,” someone said, “they will know the way!” And they did. We tucked into the red sparkly booth around a table and the show started. I am not the first person to be moved by a drag show. This was not even my first time to be moved by a drag show, so maybe it was the fact that this one was on the strip in Vegas, or maybe because I had the monthly newsletter from the local stake president (because I’m still on the records) in which he warned people about the ‘evils of the world and the fiery trappings of Satan’ in my head. I wrote this stake president with some genuine questions about the language of those phrases and he responded that he certainly was not talking about me and sorry if I was offended, but as I sat in that booth, I thought, no, this is exactly the evils of the world he was talking about and I am who he was telling people to fear. But here I was, doing something that in a former life I would have certainly and secretly wanted to do, but wouldn’t have allowed myself because of the fear of how I would have been perceived.
As soon as the show started, the drag queens danced across the stage in stiletto heels I seriously could never even walk in and then a group of male dancers came on the stage. The ‘pit crew’, the host called them. They were, of course, wildly talented and good looking, but more than that, their dancing and simultaneous fawning over the queens was incredibly moving to me. In light of what the media and news, so many ultra masculine voices have been saying about drag queens and drag shows, it was beautiful to see a group of men acting out the opposite.
Ten minutes into the show, I turned to a friend and said jokingly, “This is what I had hoped my temple experience would be like.” But by the end of the night, and in the lingering high of the joy, I realized I was not joking at all.
As I move further beyond my life as an active Mormon, I can see how experiences are healing both the past and the present. The temple, for me, was a place of deep anxiety. Once I lost the little slip of paper with the name of the person I was doing work for between the dressing room and the endowment room and after a temple worker chided me for being careless about such important work, I ended up in a stall back in the changing room, sobbing in that itchy white dress. I had the distinct feeling that I would just never be good enough.
Fast forward then to me this past weekend as the drag queens sang about how they used to hate looking in the mirror, but ‘look at me now’.
On the stage I saw this performative couple of hours in which gender was imaginative, innovative and affirmed by everyone who participated. I saw people be entirely honest about the pain that precipitated the joy. I experienced people leaning into a full spectrum of possibility for who they might be. The male dancers were not limited to masculine dance, and instead of objectifying the queens, they seemed to be there to help them fulfill their purpose on the stage.
It was all so upside down from what I had learned. In the temple, every time I was asked to be subservient to my husband, even before I had a husband, I felt a small part of me recoil and fade. When I had to veil my face, still more. When covenanting all of myself to a system and a God I resented, more of me was gone.
Since I was a kid, I’ve had a perhaps naive and unattainable desire for magic, like it is a bird in flight just ahead of me. I’ve wanted to believe that the universe is full of surprise, that to be a human in this human experience can be butterflies in the stomach sort of love. I had to leave the church because that hope had left me. The parts of me that intuitively was alive to it had died over the course of trying to do the church right and seeing how little I achieved success.
In the days since RuPaul’s Drag Race Live, I have felt part of my temple experience restored, but in a way I could not have anticipated. Up on that stage, I watched people love themselves and each other in ways I had been told was harmful. In ways that people still try to tell me is harmful to me, my children and society. I think the people who say this are scared. I know because I know what it is to fear radical honesty and imagination, even while intuitively knowing it was the thing I wanted most.
One of my favorite parts of the show was when the host brought an audience member, Gary, a roofer from Oklahoma, on the stage. He was a great sport in his khaki pants and polo shirt. Watching him laugh next to a glorious, tall, sparkly black drag queen made it clear to me that there is so much room in this world. There is space for delight and love. There is room to support the wild imaginings of dreamers, even from our quotidian little lives. There is even room enough for us to be the wild imaginers.
When I was Mormon, I wanted, with all of me, to know this. I wanted the temple to transport me to the wakenings of my most creative self. I did not find it there. There was no room for play, no place for me to try out something new. The script was given to me, and I was the cast as the least significant role. I saw a glimpse of my wild and creative self in a hotel ballroom in Vegas, tucked in a sparkly booth, in my not sparkly clothes and my unremarkable body, crying because I was so proud of these people for being exactly who they were, and in turn, proud of myself for being there.
Being in the presence of such radical love, acceptance, and unfettered creativity is 100% a sacred experience.
Thank you for sharing this! You write so beautifully.