Happy Gay Pride, Everyone!

I moved to Seattle in 1993, actually following an ex there.  There seemed to be something about moving up the west coast.  I had started in Laguna Beach, but later moved to San Francisco to live with a friend I had known from Laguna.  Then two friends from Laguna moved to Seattle and eventually, I followed suit.  I had been in  Seattle, I think, less than two months when one night at a bar, a man approached me, literally took my face in his hands and said, "I could make you look just beautiful in drag!"  Um, okay.  At that point, everything I knew about drag had come from Torch Song Trilogy and the Crying Game, not a vast amount of experience considering I was twenty-five and gay and had lived all over California.  There was a huge drag scene in Seattle.  Maybe bigger drag scenes were just popping up in all major cities as drag ventured further away from camp and drag queens were aspiring to, what those I knew referred to as, realness.  Realness.  I was twenty-five, unemployed and there was a competition coming up called Closet Ball. I figured what the hell, what did I have to lose??  I hadn't a clue what I was getting myself into. 

Closet Ball was an event happening the Saturday of Gay Pride weekend at a bar called Neighbours, the title of which would be Under Construction.  Beneath scaffolding, a clever enough set, decorated with hard hats and ladders, the contestants would walk the runway as boys and then an established drag queen would have one hour to transform them into girls, the best transformation winning a crown and bearing the title Closet Queen for the coming year.  The man from the bar already had a contestant, so the search ensued for a suitable drag mother for me.  A drag queen who didn't perform anymore and, in fact, didn't even really do drag anymore stepped forward and offered to take me under his/her wing.  We had less than two weeks to pull our act together.  My drag mother's name was Sassy.  We needed a drag name for me, as well.  It was customary for the mother to name the daughter.  Although I wasn't a fan of the play on words names, I became Sarah Mony, well really I wouldn't become Sarah until the weekend of Pride, but you know what I mean. 

Sassy had a  theory that even if you weren't the prettiest drag queen, you'd have a leg up, so to speak, if you were the most graceful.  A pretty girl that walked like a truck driver would not come out victorious.  I don't think we doubted that I would be pretty.  Not knowing the competition, though, we couldn't tell whether or not I'd be the prettiest, so Sassy wanted to give me another advantage.  I lived in an apartment building, in Seattle, that had several floors and cement steps in the back to get from floor to floor, not unlike what you might find in a hospital.  I was tasked with running up and down these steps, several flights of stairs, in 5 inch heels.  It's an absolute miracle I didn't kill myself, because on top of the running in heels, Sassy felt it would add an edge if I did so after a few shots of tequlia. This began my love affair with high heels that continues to this day, several years after I hung up my corset and panty hose and put the wigs and dresses back in the closet. 

A week before Pride, a guy who I had dated briefly, decided to compete in Closet Ball, as well, pushing my competitive nature into over-drive.  I told Sassy, at that point, that I was willing to do whatever it took to win.  I suppose, melodramatically I was envisioning sleeping with a judge, my imagination never one to fail me.  Many female impersonators use putty to cover up their male eyebrows, so that female ones, thinner and more sculpted, with an arch can be drawn on over.  A few days before the pageant, confident that I had attained a definite grace and carriage in  heels, Sassy and I met to do a makeup run through.  It went like a breeze.  The putty worked and I have to say, I was stunned at how beautiful I was.  I can't even begin to describe the feeling I got when I looked in a mirror for the first time and saw a completely different face staring back at me. 

The night of the pageant, I wore jeans and a flannel shirt to walk the runway as a boy, beneath the jeans I wore dance tights and three pair of pantyhose.  My hands were in my pockets as I walked, hiding the beautiful red press-on nails on my fingers.  Backstage, Sassy was waiting to do my make up and hair.  Another strategy was to distinguish myself, if possible, by being the only one with a certain color hair, so we had red, brown and blonde wigs on hand, waiting to see what the competition would be wearing.  The clock started and Sassy applied the putty to my eye brows.  It was so hot backstage, though, that the putty wouldn't stick to my face.  Without having considered that possibility and with no backup plan, my drag mother reminded me of my comment about doing anything to win.  On the fly, I was being told to make a decision.  I nodded in agreement and Sassy took a disposable razor and completely removed my eyebrows.  To this day, mostly because of that, but also certainly not helped by years of tweezing that followed, I have the most ridiculous looking barely existent eye brows. I don't typically indulge in regrets, but that would most certainly be one.  I wore a  long silvery gold spaghetti strap dress and a blonde wig, very Marilyn Monroe, and five  inch gold heels and with the most impeccable eyebrows, I walked elegantly down the runway to cheers.  I had never before experienced such a rush.  I'm not certain I remembered much of the rest of the competition, but I do remember my heart beating almost through my chest and tears welling up in my eyes when they announced that I had won.  That night, Gay Pride, 21 years ago, Sarah Mony was born.

Thus began, a love/hate relationship between myself and drag.  I never completely took to it, rarely having fun doing it.  I loved the adoration of course, loved the feeling of looking pretty, and I discovered a sense of fashion and style I'd never had before.  A lipsync performance was not part of the pageant, but I quickly started performing in drag shows around Seattle, competitions, benefits, even other pageants.  There was never a shortage of those.  I found a niche and mostly did Country music, at first, although ballads were certainly big, too.  I wasn't then and am still not a dancer, defying that gay stereotype, for sure.  I can be taught though, choreographed, but it is an uphill battle for sure and I've rarely known anyone willing to take it on with me, so I learned a trick.  The more you move around on stage the less the audience really even notices that what you are doing is less dancing, than just walking quickly and decidedly about the stage.  I didn't start out impersonating anyone, just lipsynced, but eventually I came to achieve a few signature numbers and the impersonations followed.  I did Patsy Cline, Judy Garland and perhaps my most signature number was Reba McEntire's Fancy, for which I wore a gorgeous blood red velvet dress.  I continued to do drag steadily, sometimes 4 or 5 nights a week for two years.  There were cable access appearances, shows in Tacoma, Bellingham, and even out of state. 

There are so many memories I have of those years, so many brilliantly talented people, my hobby allowed me to meet.  I have a wealth of stories from those days, but probably the most loved amongst my friends happened a year after my alter-ego was born, Pride weekend this time 1994.  I had petitioned to move Closet Ball to Mother's Day weekend, using the drag mother thing as a gimmick and taking it away from the overshadowing scope of umpteen other shows and events going on over Gay Pride weekend, so I had already stepped down as Closet Queen, almost two months earlier.  I had been living with another female impersonator in the basement of a house. The apartment had windows in the front, though in reality they were in back of the house, half of the window obscured by the rain gutter.  As I said, it was Gay Pride and I had drank quite a bit.  I wore a crown lent to me by another drag queen.  The crown sat about six inches off my head.  I was a blonde that night and, although I hadn't performed, I wore the Fancy red velvet spaghetti strapped, backless, floor length dress with a slit up the left leg.  I also had on, God, probably six inch heels by that time and a floor length faux fur coat. 

I'd taken a taxi home and walked around the house to my front door rummaging in my purse for the apartment keys.  By the time, I reached the door, I still hadn't located my keys.  There was a light on inside and I knew that my roommate had likely passed out in his bed, so I pounded on the door for what seemed forever, periodically attempting again and again to find my damn keys.  I stopped just short of upending my purse on the ground and sifting through its contents.  It had begun to drizzle slightly and I didn't want my hair to get wet, so I literally climbed down into the rain gutter, positioning myself under the shelter of the eaves. 

The next morning my roommate came out to get the paper, walked five or six steps down the sidewalk and turned around to see a crown and a six inch heel pointed to heaven.  I had passed out in a fur and crown, heels still on my feet, in THE GUTTER.  This isn't close to the funniest part.  By the light of day, the very first thing I found in my purse were my keys and guess what.  The door that I had pounded on for what seemed like hours, but probably was more like ten minutes, wasn't even locked.  Many have said, if I ever write my memoirs, this illustration must be the cover.  It wasn't literally the gutter that I had passed out in, but that hasn't diminished the joke of me having done so, now, for twenty years. 

I thought of what that scene must have looked like once or twice yesterday as Pride revelry went on around me, this time in much heavier rain.  I was never popular in school and dropped out before my senior year, but I do love pomp and circumstance and all its trappings.  I would have loved homecoming, the king and queen, prom, high school dances, not one of which I ever attended.  I certainly would have enjoyed popularity had I ever achieved it.  I was instead friends with the other gay kid, the class clown/delinquent, and the pregnant girl who smelled faintly of manure.  I believe my short lived drag career in Seattle represented or harkened back to a time in high school where the pageantry of it all would have thrilled me.  Through drag, I got a do-over and became one of the popular kids and even, dare I say, prom queen.  I stopped doing drag when I started to get sick.  I was losing my eyesight due to something called CMV, an AIDS related illness and it had become increasingly difficult to do my own makeup and even to judge distances, one such distance being the edge of a stage during a performance.  I was mortified that night when I literally walked right off the stage.  Obviously I got better.  Thanks to new HIV medications and a trial through the University of Washington,  the disease was halted, my eyesight improved, and unlike so many of my friends, I lived through the worst of it.  I attempted to reinvent my drag career five years later, after I had moved home to Minnesota, but it never quite took off and for that, I'm actually quite grateful.  As I said, I didn't seem to enjoy it as much as others.  To me, it was a way to make money and a way to bolster popularity and stay in with the popular kids.  Thankfully, I have found other avenues for such a lofty goal. 

It did seem an apropos time to tell the story of my involvement in drag.  The Stonewall riots in New York City, in June of 1969,  inspired a walk a year later, whose commemoration was the first Pride parade ever.  My stepping down as Closet Queen was a couple of months before the 25th anniversary of Stonewall and I chose my theme around that.  It was a drag queen who threw a punch that incited the riots and began a 45 year fight for equality that continues today, as we battle for marriage equality, amongst other things.  I've never understood how some gay men could have less than  the utmost respect for their older counterparts and especially drag queens, people who endured and fought for so many of the things most of the gay community take for granted, sexual freedom, openness, identity, and probably most importantly developments in the fight against AIDS.  All you have to do is watch the movie Stonewall with the brilliant out actor Guillermo Diaz or the much more recent The Normal Heart, both dramatizations of two periods in the gay landscape, not exactly true stories, but certainly representations of hard won battles waged by gay men.  Sometimes a first step is absolutely the hardest, raising a  voice or even throwing a punch are seemingly insurmountable tasks.  I, for one, am exceedingly grateful for those who took the steps for me and fee absolutely blessed to be able to say I was a part of some of the wars, fought and won for us all. 

Making some sense out of it

On the night before Easter 1983 (it's funny how we remember the exact dates when our lives change), I saw a double feature with my mother.  It was Educating Rita, a lovely movie with Michael Caine and a very young Julie Walters (the future aka Mrs. Weasley from Harry Potter).  The second feature was a movie that would become my all time favorite, kind of odd for a 15 year old boy when I tell you what it was.  There was one scene in the Big Chill that spoke to me, a lonely, sad teenager, in a way nothing had before.  Sarah, a character played by Glenn Close is talking on the telephone, an actual hand held land-line, kids. Meg (Mary Kay Place) comes in the room with a cigarette.  Sarah motions for Meg to pass her the cigarette, which she does.  Then Sarah takes a couple of quick drags and passes it back.  Now I had just secretly started smoking cigarettes, but I don't think it had anything to do with that.  I sat in that dark movie theater and thought to myself, I swear to you with tears in my eyes, One day I will have a group of friends like this.  I had no idea how my calculation would prove to be.  I believe that it was a calculation, certainly more than a prediction.  I have maneuvered through life, almost repeatedly, in search of friends like this.  As I said, I was very lonely at 15, painfully so, the victim of an all too familiar, now, childhood peppered with mental illness, foster care,my parents' separation, sexual abuse, and already one suicide attempt.  Much of that is for another story.  This one really has a happy ending, which I'm getting to.  Eventually. 

Flash forward, four and a half years later, I was nineteen years old, newly out of the closet, again (yet another story), and had just moved from Minneapolis to live in Southern California.  At first I lived with my brother and his wife, both very accepting, embracing really compared to most of my siblings back home in Minnesota.  My brother Danny had even researched things and found one of the 3 or 4 gay bars in all of Orange County, back then, for us to go to.  I don't think that's changed much in Orange County some twenty five years later.  He took me to a place called the Lion's Den in Garden Grove, CA.  It wasn't my first experience in a gay bar, not by a long shot, but it would become extremely significant.  There I met a man named Rick, he was my age, so somewhere in between 19 and 20, and like me certainly not old enough to be where we were, drinking in a gay bar.  I have to tell you that everything about the world changed almost the moment our eyes met.  It's corny, but I believe I feel in love at that moment.  My heart beat faster, my breathes were slower, my words were jumbled in my throat even before I spoke them.  Certainly some were still jumbled as they came spilling out. 

Rick, lived in Laguna Beach, with his much older lover, Tom, and two roommates, both of which would become lifelong friends.  It wasn't long until I had moved in with all of them.  When Tom got up in the morning to go to work, I would crawl from my bed, into Rick's.  Thus was our relationship, my first love.  I was the other woman and I romanticized that ridiculously.  WE lived together for just a couple of months until I took a gig caring for a man who was dying of AIDS and wished to do so at home.  These kind of jobs were very easy to come by in the 80s and 90s.  I had actually gone to nursing school, briefly, but dropped out when it became clear the degree wasn't necessary to get the jobs I wanted.  I lived and cared for this man for three months, until he died.  The schedule was always pretty standard, 4 1/2 days on, 2 1/2 days off.  In the days off, I would usually go back to Rick's.  We continued our affair for about nine months, off and on.  After my patient passed away, however, I got my own apartment and expected Rick to leave Tom and move in with me.  God, how silly I was back then.  At first, we broke up, AGAIN.  Then got back together.  At one point, Rick actually did leave Tom and move in with me, but that lasted less than two months.  They were an incredible two months!  One night, my Rick grabbed my stethoscope and attempted to conduct a little experiment. Would the sounds of my heartbeat or my heartbeat itself change as he kissed me?  Of course, we all knew the answer to that. 

On another night, we were making love.  It was one of those experiences where by the light of a single candle, we could find every inc of each others' bodies, effortlessly.  The tears in my eyes mingled with the sweat on my face.  It was sweet, wet, absolute passion I have rarely experienced since.  Then I realized that Rick was crying, too.  I swooned a little in that moment.  He was inside me and all at once my life changed irrevocably.  He began not just to silently weep, but sob uncontrollably.  Then he confessed.  We had gone two months earlier for the not so romantic sign of the times, his and his AIDS tests.  I was negative.  PHEW!  He had tested positive, but told me he was negative.  For the following two months we had a lot of sex, all unprotected.  I lay there, with the love of life, collapsed on top of me, crying, apologizing, begging for forgiveness. At first, he was actually still inside of me.  I guess I cried, too, a different variety than the beginning of this scene.  Eventually I dealt with the betrayal, but that doesn't happen quickly when two people are naked and sweaty and at least one of them is so very much in love. 

Obviously Rick moved out, back in with Tom, of course, and soon after I started another nursing job.  Within a year, I had tested positive.  It was March 8, 1989, less than two years after moving to California.  I was 21 years old.  My brother and his wife had already moved to Miami, so I had no family near me.  I, however, had a group of friends, amazing young men, beautiful, strong, fiercely independent, but all reliant on each other.  It was a dream come true, something I'd sought since that Easter eve, less than six years earlier.  We were quite exactly like the group of friends in The Big Chill, only young, all male, and gay.  All of us had come out in the year or two prior, only one was actually from California, some of us lived together at different times.  We fought, we cried, we supported each other through lost jobs, spoiled love, family abandonment, and one other thing, a thing tragically common in that day, somewhat less so now, thankfully.  We were ten young gay men, all in our very early twenties, one or two not even out of their teenage years.  Within less than two years, a span of time of maybe six months prior and eighteen after, Rick had exposed me to HIV, eight of us tested positive.  My gay little version of the Big Chill.  My first group of cigarette sharing besties. 

Nearly twenty-five years later, I am 46 years old.  The ways that the beginning in Laguna Beach, CA, shaped my life as an out gay man are immeasurable.  I dallied in porn.  That ended abruptly after having filed just a couple of scenes when I tested positive.  I was told by a sort of porn mentor just to go with it and absolutely not to disclose my status.  Bareback was the norm back then.  No one asked about anyone's status.  Rick, who had an actual career in porn, certainly continued to work, as did a couple of our other friends.  I, however, could not.  Another promising career arrested too soon?  Who knows?  I rather doubt it.  I don't think I was very good.  I certainly wasn't in the two scenes I've ever seen.  I did film one with Rick, but have never seen it.  I don't even know if it ever made its way into a film, but I have always wondered if perhaps I was better in it because of the experience and chemistry Rick and I shared.  That stuff had been rarely thought about until I stumbled quite accidentally on a group of new gay porn stars and gay porn fans, quite a few of whom  are women.  Go figure!  I never imagined.  My situation back then, save for the whole HIV/AIDS connotations is so similar to that of ones I see now, incestuous, crazy, bittersweet, absolutely and unrelentingly beautiful, and life altering. 

In the eighties and nineties  --I eventually moved up the coast to San Francisco and then onto Seattle-- I saw AIDS affect the gay community like an endless storm, ravaging us, threatening to destroy, but inevitably strengthening beyond comprehension.  Even now perhaps it's incomprehensible the effect AIDS and HIV has had on the gay community.  Certainly it lessened our numbers.  In my little corner of the world, numbers were lessened devastatingly.    I lost 73 close friends before, at the end of the nineties, people actually seemed to stop dying.  Seventy-three.  Seventy-three!  Some were lovers, some co-workers, close acquaintances, some drag mothers and sisters.  Yes, I did drag and that career lasted far longer than the porn one. Every loss was felt.  In 1998, I left Seattle and moved home to Minnesota.  I was beaten up, emotionally battered, exhausted.  When I go back to Laguna Beach, San Francisco, and Seattle to visit, it is very much, to me, like revisiting the site of a Holocaust.  Let me go back to that wonderful group of ten to demonstrate.  The group I had sought out, calculatingly.  Remember eight of us tested positive in the last year of the eighties and first of the nineties?  I am the only one still alive. 

It's difficult to imagine, I'm sure, a thing that you wouldn't change for the world, yet hate in almost equal measure.  Hate, though, may be too strong a word. What can you call something so dark that sets a tone so exasperating, at times sad, horrible, triumphant, so astonishingly bittersweet?  The man I am today is because of every minute that has come before, from that moment in the dark movie theater watching the still all-time favorite Big Chill, and even certainly moments before, through the rest of my teenage years, those years on the West Coast, loving, learning, falling down repeatedly, getting back up, each not nostalgically a thread in a tapestry.  I've been thinking so much about this, lately.  Gay Pride is a few days away.  In March of 2015, it will be twenty-five years since I tested positive.  Mostly I am healthy, but I've endured some med changes over the last couple of years that have left me a bit shell shocked and frazzled, a bit, my wholly positive outlook.  Certainly my newest group of friends has brought some of this up.  My heart absolutely goes out to every last one of the young gay men I have net-met.  How could it not?  Even subtracting almost completely the HIV ingredient, although obviously not that completely, the friendships I see, the fights, public and behind the scenes, the tears I'm sure are cried, the hearts broken are all so reminiscent. 

And so to an extent, my life has come full circle.  I love the concept of the porn mom!  Just love it!  The community of people reaching out through DM, email, traveling miles to meet in person, fangirling, fanboying, all strangely odd, yet utterly fascinating.  And quite lovely.  This story, I am certain, is far, far from over. 

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this.  I hope there will be lots more to come.