Free One Dead Drag Queen by Mark Richard Zubro Page A

finally overcame my swirling thoughts. The last song I remembered was Lyle Lovett singing “Step Inside This House.”

     
    I woke in the living room to full morning. I called the hospital. They thought Tom was sleeping and not in a coma anymore. I showered, dressed, and called security. McCutcheon picked me up, and we hurried over. Tom wasn’t awake, but the doctors were hopeful.
    About nine, one of Tom’s friends, a drag queen named Myrtle Mae Zagglioni, swept in. Myrtle Mae was known to a few of us as Bryce Bennet, scion to an agribusiness fortune. Myrtle Mae would rather lose his entire wardrobe than have this fact broadcast. The way I heard the story was that ever since he’d run away from home when he was sixteen, Myrtle Mae had tried to live down his wealthy background. When he was young, he supposedly lived a raucous and exciting life: driving a garbage truck in New York for a while; being thrown out of the Peace Corps for radical activities in South America; and picking grapes in California with the United Farm Workers, an avocation particularly offensive to his family. How much of any of these and more were true, I didn’t know. Tom wasn’t sure and claimed he was too discreet to ask. I thought this was a crock. Tom loves gossip as much as the most notorious queeny Hollywood reporter, he just hates to admit it. I know better. I think he just hadn’t found anybody who was willing to tell.
    With Myrtle Mae was his sometime companion John Werner. He was in his late sixties or early seventies. Werner always dressed in pastel colors or washed-out grays. He seldom spoke. With Myrtle Mae, if you looked beyond the layers of makeup and the glitter to the lines around his eyes and the wattles he tried to cover over, you could tell he had to be near Werner’s age. It was rumored that they had once been lovers. While they did not live together, Werner accompaniedMyrtle Mae to weddings, funerals, and I guessed now, hospital visits.
    Werner I didn’t mind. I disliked Myrtle Mae intensely. As far as I knew, he never appeared outside of drag. I don’t mind drag, but like most gay people it irritates me that the straight media usually shows only pictures of drag queens after every gay pride parade. I am unable to explain, and I’m not sure anyone can, the endless fascination the straight media have with drag queens. I hesitate to embrace the theory that this emphasis comes about because drag is seen as the safe way to deal with gay people. The semitragic, overemotional, clownish buffoon as role model? As acceptable icon? Think Amos and Andy in the fifties and how offensive that is today. I believe the prevalence of drag portrayals is a way to keep us marginalized, to keep prominent the message to the silly and righteously Christian that drag is all that gay people are. That we are as pathetic if occasionally amusing as most drag queens are portrayed.
    Unfortunately, the straight media’s interest in the dragqueen phenomenon is only slightly greater than that shown by the gay media. I don’t understand that either. Don’t get me wrong. I have a soft spot for drag queens, as I suspect all gay people do, because of their role in the Stonewall riots. Plus, I don’t mind if people want to do drag, but dressing up, costumes, and exaggerated effeminacy are not my thing. What can I say? I flunked Halloween as a kid.
    The real reason I can’t stand Myrtle Mae, though, is his condescending attitude toward me. I’m sorry that he was picked on by the more coordinated and athletic of his classmates in school. I had nothing to do with it. He always manages to make some snide crack about my being a jock, usually connecting the comment with a vicious swipe at my IQ level. Lots of gay people look down on me because I’m a jock. Evenworse, I don’t like opera, don’t know the name of the trendiest art galleries in New York, and don’t know the names of very many long-dead actresses. Nor do I particularly care to change their