Her gentle brand of bitchiness and Caesar's Palace-meets-'Dallas' aesthetic helped turn drag into a mainstream pop cultural phenomenon.īy 1994, Terence Stamp was slipping on high heels for 'The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert,' followed one year later by Patrick Swayze, Wesley Snipes and John Leguizamo in 'To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar.' The same year, 'Wigstock: The Movie' documented the popular New York drag festival of the same name, drag queens were a fixture on the daytime talk show circuit and, in 1996, Nathan Lane seduced a Republican senator in 'The Birdcage' dressed as an uptight housewife.īut something funny happened on my way to the gay ghetto: The drag queen disappeared not only from mainstream popular culture, but also, to a large extent, from the gay culture of my generation. She had a hit single in 1993, 'Supermodel (You Better Work),' her own VH1 talk show and, as the face of MAC Cosmetics, she popped up in ads everywhere. And by drag queens, I meant RuPaul.ĭuring my early teens, RuPaul seemed to be everywhere.
As a child of the '90s, I was taught by popular culture to expect several things from my future life as a gay man: shirtless dancing in large nightclubs, a disconcerting number of flamboyantly patterned shirts and, of course, drag queens.
