Provincetown is an outsider’s place, it always has been, and I am an outsider, I always have been. I have never found a group that I wanted to join or that wanted me to join. I have lived outside of the tent, it is where I belong and am comfortable. I believe I live outside of the suffocating labels, expectations and assumptions of other people. I call it the Outsiderness Of Being, it is where I live, I believe Maria comes from the same place, it is a state of mind I suppose, something we share.
There are people who look at the world from the inside, people who look from the outside, often with longing. I guess this is why I have always identified with drag queens, with people whose art is impersonating other human beings, people they perhaps wish they were. It is a poignant life, often a painful and difficult life.
In our culture, there are few people who experience outsiderness more directly than the drag queens, transvestites who assume the identities of other people, especially famous ones, usually men who act out the lives of women. They call them cross dressers. In Provincetown, there is one movie theater on the second floor of a wharf-turned-mall, but there are at least three clubs where drag queens perform several times a night. We went to see an “Evening At The Bird Cage,” where two gifted men – Joe Posa and Thirsty Burlington – impersonated Joan Rivers, Cher, Lisa Manelli, Michael Jackson, and Barbara Streisand.
The culture is different than Broadway, even though the shows evoke the big stage. The shows are generally inexpensive – about $25 to $30 in Provincetown. The rooms are usually small. The audience comes with dollar bills to hand out to the performs who march down the aisles at least once during every song. The singing is often very good, the costumes outrageous, the humor biting and funny, self-aware and merciless. Drag Queens know how to be outrageous – big hair, big wigs, sparkling gowns.
Joan Rivers would have wanted the show to go on, said the manager, and so it did. Cher was uproariously funny, and there was a sense of community and intimacy in the room that you will never find in a Broadway musical. Outsiders are a community in themselves, part of the Outsiderness Of Being. It was as if we were all in it together, and I suppose this is so. We were. Even as you laugh, your heart breaks a bit.
Maria and I both loved the show, the spirit and the pain and the artistry of it. It is never easy to be an artist or a performer, to be a drag queen takes a particular kind of passion and determination and love. The drag queens have always inspired me. If they can do it, I can do it.
Our world is increasingly corporate and conformist, the outsiders and the drag queens pushed to the edges of our culture, usually out of sight, confined to a few outsider towns with outsider audiences. I’m not sure why I belonged there, I have never wanted to put on a sequined gown. But the Outsiderness Of Being is a state of mind, it is not really just about gender. If you are a citizen of this place, you know it in your bones.