The DJ pressed play. The first notes hit. The lights came up.
I tapped my foot to the beat, while the rest of my body shook uncontrollably. This was my first *real* drag debut. What the hell was I doing?
“I call you when I need you / My heart’s on fire”
Tina belted out that first classic line. I slowly lowered a checkout lane cooking magazine that covered my face.
“You come to me, come to me / Wild and wired”
There I was. No, there she was: Mrs. Joann Fabrixxx, dolled up like none other than Lucy Ricardo. The audience howled.
“It can’t be wrong / Take my heart and make it strong, baby”
My on-stage husband handed me a familiar white jar with a blue and yellow label…
“You’re simply the best!”
…and for the next four minutes, I stirred, spread, and eventually slurped up that Best-brand Mayonnaise with the joy of a QVC impulse buy—all in a pair of six-inch, clearance-rack heels from Target.
I was living. And you better believe I felt the Spirit. Honestly, in a more profound way than I have in most churches.
So, let’s get this out of the way… Yep, I’m a pastor that does drag. But, I do want to be clear that I’m not a drag queen. Not by any means.
I’m a baby, infant, tiny embryo of a drag performer. I’ve performed just a handful of times. Sometimes on stage, and sometimes on Zoom.
Drag for me is a fun hobby, but it’s not a huge part of who I am.
Like all artists, some people are born to do drag. Inside of them, there’s some uncontainable spark of creativity and expression—sometimes an entirely new being—that demands to be unleashed upon the world. Drag is an art form that can bring that person to life.
But that’s not me. I stumbled into it.
Through my love of singing and performing, I found myself surrounded by people who lived for drag.
Some of them were glam queens.
Some were gender-bending bearded queens.
Others were cis-gender female faux queens.
All of them were fierce and fabulous.
Slowly but surely, they lured me into drag. Or maybe the allure of drag itself and its disregard for “the conventional” beckoned me in. However it happened, once I stepped onto that glittering stage, I got to taste the divine.
Drag reveals the image of God.
I tiptoed into drag. I wasn’t for, I wasn’t against. But it wasn’t really on the list.
Why? Well, I blame the boxes.
As a queer person, I’ve been shoved in TONS of them. (Maybe you have, too).
I was told my handwriting wasn’t right. Too girly. The way I walked, too. One time when I was very young, I was literally standing still, leaning against a door, and I was told I wasn’t standing the way a little boy was supposed to.
Boxes! Everywhere.
The world builds all sorts of them, and we’re supposed to fit right in.
We have boxes for how to dress and how to talk.
We have boxes for what jobs to take and how to spend our money.
We have boxes for what ideas to believe and who to vote for.
We have boxes for who to spend time with and who to love.
We have boxes for who to be.
A lot of times, we pour our energy into meeting those expectations. If we’re not careful, we can start defining ourselves through a phantom, false version of ourselves all driven by one simple question: “What will the world think of me?” And before we know it, the boxes box us in.
Drag showed me that things could be different.
At it’s core, drag is a protest. It is art that says “No!” to the deeply ingrained ways that the world demands we perform our gender and sexuality.
Drag opens up boxes. And every step of my wading into the Deep Drag Sea helped me open one of my own .
First, walking, dancing, and moving my body in ways I “shouldn’t.” I can!
Then, wearing a dress and heels. Oh, I can!
Next, painting my own face. You know I can!
And then finally, strutting onto the stage to perform a number that I’d come up with all on my own…
“You’re simply the best! / Better than all the rest!”
BAM! When those lights hit, I got a rush. A tremendous sense of power.
In that split second, none of the boxes mattered anymore—or at least they mattered less. All of the expectations of masculinity and mannerisms. All of the shoulds and should-nots.
Instead, I had a moment where self-pride mixed with play and all the different, weird, wild parts of myself were loved a little deeper and got to shine a little brighter. (And it didn’t hurt that had an audience screaming “Yasssss!” at me either.)
In a word, it felt like unencumbered freedom. And I’m going to call that freedom divine.
I think this is the “I Am!” that Moses experiences when God appears (FLAMING, mind you) in a burning bush and calls him into a new identity.
And the compassionate life that Jesus lived that drew in the sinners, the outcasts, the less-thans, the ones who have been boxed in and beaten down by the world, which continues to call us to see His face in all people.
And the expansive Spirit that binds every single being together when Paul writes in Galatians: “There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither slave nor free; nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
In that drag-tastic spotlight, I felt like I understood — at least for a moment — the depth and simplicity of how God sees me. And at the same time, how ridiculous we are for the categories and containers we create to control our worlds.
But it turns out, I’m not the first to have had this feeling. I walk in the stiletto heel-prints of greatness.
Here’s how Mama RuPaul herself puts it:
You are not your religion.
You are not your skin color.
You are not your gender, your politics, your career, or your marital status.
You are none of the superficial things that this world deems important.
The real you is the energy force that created the entire universe.
But now read this from Father Henri Nouwen, a Catholic theologian. Nouwen was a beloved teacher, author, and pastor who wrote intimately about his spiritual life. Though he never came out publicly, he revealed he was gay through journals and confidants. He writes similarly:
We are not what we do.
We are not what we have.
We are not what others think of us.
Coming home is claiming this truth:
I am the beloved child of a loving Creator.
We no longer have to beg for permission from the world to exist.
We spend so much energy — too much energy — begging the world to exist, begging the world to find us worthy. The liberating alternative is to accept the deep, spiritual gift that every inch of who we are is grounded in the very essence of God. It’s part of us.
That’s exactly what drag shows us and proves to us.
Drag invites us to imagine a world where we are free from the shackles of expectation and creates a space where the limitless power and creativity of the divine is celebrated with confetti and dollar bills (if you’re lucky).
In churches, we talk a lot about being a place where all people are welcome. “Come as you are,” we say. But do we mean that? From my experience, there are still a lot of boxes cluttering up our communities.
With drag, those words are enfleshed with every size and shape of human body and embroidered with makeup, manicures, and magnificence.
Drag beckons us into a world beneath the surface of all things where we discover all sorts of new possibilites.
Beneath all the grit there is glitter.
Beneath all the suffering there is sparkle.
Beneath all the dirt there’s a diamond.
Drag is a prophetic protest that demands that all people are invited to God’s fabulous party to dance on the systems of patriarchy, hetero-normativity, and cis-genderism that oppress and entangle us.
But perhaps most profoundly, drag proclaims with power and pizzazz: “You are enough.”
I hope heaven is one big drag show.
A place where people of all walks of life are covered in every exaggerated color and costume and coiffure that humankind has ever dreamed up.
A place where joy is first on the agenda, and we can defiantly laugh through the pain and suffering of the world.
A place where everyone experiences the electric power of the Spirit that weaves us all together in our diversity and desires.
Jesus, here’s my prayer: Throw me a party like that for eternity. I’m here for it.
But for now, I can rest knowing—at least for me—that the Kingdom of God comes to life whenever a spotlight hits any drag stage and whenever my painted toenails slip into Joann’s Target clearance rack heels.