Joe: Butch Queen, First Time in Drags at a Ball 

When I’m recapping American Idol for this website and I wind up in Texas to visit my mom in the nursing home she lives in, I can count on the rest of my family joining me for watching the show during my stay and giving me a fresh perspective on karaoke. Not so with Project Runway. They just don’t care. Just today I explained Anna Wintour to my younger brother. Guess how much of a shit he gave? By morning he will probably not even remember we had a conversation containing the word “vogue.” 

This means I’m on my own for Runway this week. Just me, a DVR I find confusing because it’s some off-brand the cable company gives you and not a TiVo, and nieces and a nephew (combined ages of all three of them = 21) who wouldn’t understand the concept of “drag queen” at all or have any fresh takes on the career trajectory of Varla Jean Merman. That’s this week’s challenge, by the way, men in womany clothes. It took them this long to make that a theme? Because Jerell did it just last week all by himself without being asked. So someone’s really been asleep at the wheel. 

So I had this big idea I was going to bring a DVD copy of Paris Is Burning with me to Texas to give myself a refresher course in realness, mopping at Roy Rogers, shade, OP-YOO-LENCE, and what it means to be a butch-queen-first-time-in-drags-at-a-ball. Yeah, they say “drags” in that movie. I don’t know why. But sometimes life is mysterious. And then I went off and forgot to bring the DVD. And Rowlett, Texas? Not a place where video stores just have copies of Paris Is Burning clogging the shelves. Adding to that is the way my mother has been a persistent taker-upper of a lot of my time. I mean, she is the reason I fly home and all, to be her chaperone to movies, shopping, hair salons, and wherever else she wants to go, since the nursing home can get a little boredom-intensive, but it’s cutting into my research time. I’m all about research, you know. And our trip to Lane Bryant the other day wasn’t really insightful enough to count. All I gleaned from that one was that for plus-size ladies this is the summer of SHOW THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE YOUR MONSTER JUGS. Seriously, every top she pulled off the rack was cut down to Sharon Stone and back. Not that the larger ladies shouldn’t show ‘em off. But my 66-year-old mom is somewhat more modest than all you young BBWs out there. 

So the episode starts. And I’m alone -- my sister-in-law was here on the couch but said, “I don’t think I can handle this show” and walked out of the room -- and I’m also triple-tasking by watching the show and leafing through the enormous September Vogue at the same time and getting instant messages from the husband/partner/whatever and a prize-winning e-mail from model friend Elyse. She’s currently stationed over in Shenzhen, China, lady-posing all over the place to the delight of the Asian nations. I already asked her what she thinks of this week’s challenge. Her response: 

Dave, 
Unlike your garden-variety transsexual, the female persona of the drag queen ceases to exist when she's not performing, right? The clock strikes midnight and she goes back to being my 10th-grade math teacher, Mr. Van Der Geest. With that in mind, words such as "impeccable tailoring," "modern," "wearability," "clean lines," and "tapered" do not factor in to my axis of drag queen admiration. That bitch better be FESTOONED. I need to see 18 to 20 pounds of wig alone. The face needs to be dripping with frosting and glitter, and every square inch of her clothing must be exploding with feathers, fur, and fascinators (there's your fashion vocabulary word for the week). She needs to stir up Taz-grade rhinestone siroccos every time she takes a step. I want to panic when I first see her: Oh, god! Shaq is picking his teeth with Charo! The pope is amok in full papal regalia and date-raping the Arlington prom queen! If I'm not getting double-plus Carmen Miranda overkill from my DQs, then, like, what the hell am I doing at a drag show? If I just wanted to see some dudes in some spandex with some bronzer on, the Abbey is right down the street. 

Message from the husband/partner/whatever: “Oh, this’ll be good. As we’ve seen in the past, the designers can not only not design for men, they also can’t design for plus-size women.” 

The day begins at Atlas with Korto foreshadowing tonight’s chopee (that would be Daniel) by telling the camera that he thinks he’s smart for playing it so safely but that he’ll think twice soon enough. She’s no dummy, that Korto. She’s really grown on me. The other person growing on me is Joe, because he’s so exactly the opposite of the goomba I assumed he was. I mean, he is one. But he’s also acting like a total gay and openly criticizes Keith for all of his “swatches and strips.” Wants to know if the judges are “blind.” Way to be, Joe. Outbitch all the fags. 

Heidi meets everyone on the runway to explain the challenge. She’s in head-to-toe black, intentionally going neutral to emphasize what’s about to happen next. I wish instead that she’d be the way she is in the September Vogue in this ad for some fashiony thing in a bathtub, soaked in full clothes and heels, covered in bubbles. They could have wheeled her out in that. 

Behind a scrim we see a big Viking/opera lady/mass of human. It’s Chris March with horns and glitter disco balls for boobs. The challenge: Make these drag queens even more like themselves. In other words, go nuts and be tacky and ignore everything you ever knew about taste. I recognize a few of them: Sherri Vine, Hedda Lettuce, Sharon Needles, and the most famous of the bunch, Varla Jean Merman, star of the drag comedy Girls Will Be Girls. The rest I don’t know: Farrah Moans, Miss Understood, Sweetie, Luisa Verde, LeMay, Annida Greenkard, and Acid Betty. I could try describing all of them, but there are only so many euphemisms for “clownishly large man in neon- green lipstick.” 

And not to disparage these fine showgirls, but outside of New York club life and possibly Wigstock, who are these dudes? Where’s Amanda Lepore? (I know, she’s not a drag queen, she’s trans, but still she’s awesome.) Where’s Jackie Beat? Lipsynka? Coco Peru? Evie Harris? Joey Arias? Alexis Arquette (who, I guess, maybe, is also considered trans at this point, right?)? The Lady Bunny? The Goddess Bunny? Vaginal Davis? Whoever else I’m forgetting? The corpse of Leigh Bowery? It’s like the producers just walked down the block to some nightclub and said, “OK, you, you, you, you and you.”