An 'Outstanding' Pride Month & 5 1/2 Burning Q's with Author Elyssa Maxx Goodman
An important Netflix documentary premiere and 5 1/2 Burning Q's with the author of Glitter and Concrete: A Cultural History of Drag in New York City
Hello! I hope you all are faring swimmingly!
Another glorious Pride month is upon us so how are you celebrating?
I was BEYOND excited to be invited to attend the Tribeca Film Festival premiere of Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution. It’s the first feature-length documentary (OUT TODAY) to bring a broad, contextual lens to the history of queer stand-up comedy—an art form that did plenty to forge social change over the past five decades.
Combining interviews, performances, and archival footage from trailblazers like Robin Tyler (the first comedian to come out on national television), Lily Tomlin, Sandra Bernhard, Wanda Sykes, Eddie Izzard, Hannah Gadsby, Tig Notaro, Rosie O'Donnell, Margaret Cho, Guy Branum, Bob The Drag Queen, Fortune Feimster, Trixie Mattel, Joel Kim Booster, and so many more, it’s a moving story about the slow crawl toward progress in the face of continuous social oppression and adversity.
What blew my FCKNG mind was that I was in a tiny theater, watching sets from Joel Kim Booster, Judy Gold, and Margaret Cho.
Clockwise from top left, Judy Gold, Margaret Cho, Joel Kim Booster, Roz Hernandez, photo credit: me
Inspired by a historical gathering of these comedic talents at the Greek Theater in L.A. a couple of years ago, the documentary, written and directed by Page Hurwitz, was a beautiful assemblage that captured the personal and professional trajectories of these amazing performers. I’ve been such a fan of every single one of them for so long. I’ve seen Lily Tomlin’s The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe performed by both her on Broadway and by Cecily Strong at The Shed; I devoured Sandra Berhard’s pithy memoir Confessions of a Pretty Lady when it came out in 1988; I’ve seen Eddie Izzard perform at Madison Square Garden; I’ve loved Guy Branum and Fortune Feimster since their stints on the Chelsea Lately roundtable.
I might be a devout loud-mouthed ally, but I will never be able to be in the skin of and fully understand what it means to be in the LGBTQIA community. That’s why I feel we owe it to our friends and families in the community to sit the FCK down, shut the FCK up, and engage in as many cultural continuing education courses as we can find. We also owe it to them to vote against anyone and everyone who is determined to take their human rights away, but I digress.
Outstanding is an important class in LGBTQIA+ history. It made me privy to the comic genius that was Robin Tyler, a delightful Aries powerhouse and pioneer in every sense of the word: “Closets are vertical coffins,” she said. “All you do is suffocate to death.” The woman was at Stonewall. She was the first to marry her late wife (they were together for 55 years) in L.A. She was the first lesbian, feminist comic to come out on American television and her relentless activism helped moved the needle for so many that came after her. “This is not a movement about sexual preferences,” says Tyler in the film, who is as inspiring in real life as she is in the film. “It is a movement about the right to love. If I never had sex with a woman again, I’d still be a lesbian.”
She’s someone we always should’ve celebrated but, because of the pervasive oppressive bullshit generated by small minded idiots (like Anita Bryant, who the kids will learn about) who feel as if they can and should impose their fabricated and unsubstantiated views on others and keep great queer art out of the limelight, I was unaware of her genius until I literally got to meet her in person.
Comedy is resistance, my lovelies. Gather on the couch and watch Outstanding, stat.
5 (1/2) Burning Qs with Elyssa Maxx Goodman, author of Glitter and Concrete: A Cultural History of Drag in New York City
Photo of Elyssa Maxx Goodman by Ben Seagren
When I first met Elyssa Maxx Goodman at a quarterly writer gathering in the East Village a few years back, I was struck by her smile and her candor. She exudes a warmth and a willingness to connect you can feel in her first book, Glitter and Concrete: A Cultural History of Drag in New York City—a lovingly and thoughtfully assembled ode to all things drag. Like the great MUTHR she is, she was kind enough to answer 5 burning q’s about her book, what it means to revere the drag art form, and how we can best support it. Read on!
MUTHR, FCKD: Your book is such a lovingly rendered, thoroughly researched book that details and contextualizes the history and evolution of New York City drag. What question do you get most often from younger drag artists who read your book?
Elyssa Maxx Goodman: I think the question I get most often from younger drag artists who read my book is why I wanted to do it in the first place. Sometimes they ask how I got into drag, especially since I'm not a drag artist, I'm just this person who loves this art form. I wanted a book about this subject to exist because it was a book I wanted to read. I also get asked about how I decided to include what I did include, and if there was anything that didn't make the cut, which are all great questions. The book was originally almost 500 pages, maybe at different points in the writing process more than that. It’s such a rich history I’ve been honored to document and share.
MF: What first made you a drag fan?
EMG: I think what first made me a drag fan were the costumes. By the time I saw To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar, which is what got me into drag, I was seven years old and my mother had raised me to that point on 1950s movie musicals and their brilliant costumes—think Gentlemen Prefer Blondes—and for me and for her drag became a natural extension of that. I loved the costumes. On top of that, I loved these people who were existing in the same time that I was existing, who were so smart and witty and glamorous and self possessed and powerful. They became my Disney princesses, and I loved them for that. After that I just kept consuming drag, however I could. For my parents, it was a costume, and it is a costume. I think there's a lot of beauty in its power, though. My relationship to drag has changed from just a love of costume and moved well beyond that, into the realm of appreciating this gorgeous, unapologetic way to express yourself. I love it for that reason, and I love the people who love it and perform it for that reason.
MF: If you could go back in time and see one drag performer or performance, who would it be?
EMG: It's a hard question to answer because for historical purposes, there are so many different performers or performances I would have wanted to see. For just the sheer love of of the scene that it came from, I would have loved to see Divine in The Neon Woman, which was a play by Tom Eyen who also wrote Dreamgirls and ran at a nightclub called Hurrah. I would have loved to see the original productions of Torch Song Trilogy at La MaMa, I would have loved to go to a Jackie 60 party and see what that was like. I would have loved to go to a Whispers party at the Pyramid Club to feel first-hand its importance and beauty to the people there in the moment. I would have loved to see International Chrysis perform as well in one of her cabaret shows, like The Last Temptation of Chrysis, to understand her magnetism in person. You kind of get it when you see videos of her online, but I would have loved to know what that looks like.
MF: Creatively and artistically, where is drag headed? What are you seeing?
EMG: Something really exciting about drag now is how the breadth of the gender spectrum is being explored. There aren't just queens and kings, there are people lovingly called drag things and nonbinary drag artists who are parodying gender beyond the binary. That's really exciting to me. I hope we continue to see more and I'm sure that we will.
MF: This is MUTHR, FCKD and we don't shy from acknowledging how up FCKD the world is. In the face of so much oppression, what is something every drag fan can do to preserve LGBTQ+ and drag rights? What can we do to help UNFCK things?
EMG: Something every drag fan can do to preserve LGBTQ+ and drag rights is to make sure that you vote people into office who support the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals, and who support the right of drag artists to freedom of expression. That's the biggest one I can think of right now, especially in an election year. The other thing is to advocate for drag in any scenario that's possible! Advocate for it as an art form. Donate money to organizations like Drag Story Hour, or organizations that support drag like the ACLU's Drag Defense Fund. You can hire drag artists for events, buy tickets to their performances, tip them, and support them with your wallet. When drag is given space to thrive, more and more people can see it and see how wonderful it is and that it is an art form. But yeah, give drag artists your money. Hire them to produce their artwork, to show their artwork, to be the brilliant performers they are.
MF BONUS Q: What are you working on next?
EMG: I'm working on an anthology for which I will be the editor and another history which is related to Glitter and Concrete but that's all I can say about either of them right now :)
Ed. Note: Having been to Jackie 60 (once on mushrooms) and Whispers at the Pyramid, you chose well, Miz Goodman!
How’s my day job going you ask? Well, ICYMI: Do you suffer from sudden headaches or migraines that hit out of nowhere? For The Los Angeles Times, I wrote a little something about “weather whiplash,” or barometric pressure headaches. If you got into Brats, I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Andrew McCarthy for Cultured.
Readers, listen up! If you like what you read here, please do subscribe and share! Paid subscribers will soon have access to great shit, so hop on board because a) it’s a cheap thrill you can look forward to every week and b) I work hard to bring you the best that entertainment has to offer, so helping a sister out would go a long way toward keeping me going.
That’s it for now, kids! Stay gold!
xx
I absolutely loved this. It gave me the feels xx