A drag queens advice on shame

[Music]

[Applause]

these days

i find it easy to look in the mirror

this used to be the case too

because i learned to be a drag queen

alone

back then in the early noughties there

was no cultural mirror for someone like

me

there was no chance of switching on

netflix and finding someone who looked

like you

and lily savage never quite made it to

the woolworth’s bargain bin

if she ever made it to the dizzying

heights of vhs at all

so there was me and a mirror and that’s

the only place i saw myself for a long

time

it would be over a decade until this

part of me became more than a mere

reflection

and in that time what happened would

change my relationship with that mirror

in that decade i came out as gay at a

catholic state comp in the working class

northwest

and i survived but as with anything

that unsmooths the edges of normal

society

that coming out brought with a daily

dose of judgment and

there in shame from almost everyone

around me

a shame that was heard and felt and

internalized and often replicated by me

commonly when we think about shame we

imagine it at the extreme

end of the spectrum anything from years

of intense dieting to keep up with

extreme western beauty standards all the

way to things like honour violence

but for me my shame existed at the long

end of the tale of the shea monster as

self-hatred

now this didn’t really affect anyone

else on the surface

i was fat feminine gay spotty

ginger i didn’t really have much going

for me by society

standards but what i did have was a

killer if not over compensatory

gay personality and i was not afraid to

use it

if you’re gonna throw a rock at me and

call me a fagger then i’ll barb you back

by telling you

that one day when i’m famous you’ll be

licking my boots clean and begging me

for employment

we all reproduce shameful and shaming

behaviors because

we’re all trying to escape our own shame

and as the shame monster swallowed me

whole

i couldn’t find myself in the mirror

eventually i left my hometown and went

to a rather posh

university that my whole town had

celebrated my acceptance out with glee

and when i arrived there i started to

tell lies about my upbringing

not big ones there’s only so many vowels

you can drop until someone realizes

you’re not landed gentry

but i started to say things like i’d

read that book when i hadn’t

and i started to tell people i’d grown

up in manchester when really it was two

hours north of there

i spent time alone in the mirror like i

had with my drag persona all those years

ago

trying to change the way i speak just a

little

to the world i was easy i worked hard to

fit myself into a neat storyline

the friendly gay mancunian when really i

knew that the swathing complexities of

my identity

couldn’t fit inside a storyline and if i

was found out

i was terrified that i’d be cast out and

so

the self-hate ensued once again

now what does self-hate look like what

does it feel like

it sounds pretty intense but it’s

actually way more boring and way less

dramatic than

vile gouts of hatred towards who you are

for me

self-hatred was about not believing

things that were objectively true

it was about looking in the mirror and

seeing something monstrous

it was about looking in the mirror and

seeing something not deserving of love

or respect from myself and others it was

about

looking in the mirror and wanting to

change parts of myself

my weight my gender my sexuality my

class

so extremely that you commit to acts of

self-harm and

self-denial i lied i judged i bitched

i changed the way i spoke and i had so

much extreme sex that

i would find myself years later

recalling all the times my consent had

been breached because

it’s what i thought i deserved sidebar

to say

that extreme sex when practiced safely

and consensually can be some of the best

sex

but as my grandma would have said i was

in a pickle

i looked in the mirror and i saw

something monstrous

but i’d managed to persuade those around

me that i was fabulous

the first time i performed in drag i was

19

and to put it lightly i was not fabulous

but so was everyone and the standard

back then in 2011 was

much lower than it is now and you know

the people of my

repressed generation were just pretty

happy to see something different

but as bad as i might have been

this experience was such a liberatory

process something that oprah might have

called an

aha moment because for the first time

this thing i’d only ever really seen in

a mirror was real

she was tangible and what’s more she was

adored by a crowd of people

drag continued this way for a while

until the barrier between the mirror and

the real world faded away

i had admitted my most shameful desires

to the world

and somewhere in some pockets of some

worlds that i never knew existed she was

adored so i started to drop my vows more

i started to talk about lancaster more

i started to wear ball gowns in the

street and i started to fall back in

love with what i saw

in the mirror eventually everyone around

me followed suit

my friends my family my lovers

she became a place of value and of power

and of uplift

she became what she’d been in the mirror

all those years ago

a savior so i did what anyone who found

their power source would do

and i leaned in as arch capitalist

sheryl sandberg would say

and i journeyed to the heart of the

queer motherland

east london there i had queer sex

i made queer friends i wore queer

clothes

and i built myself a job where i could

dress like this

every day worshiping at the feet of the

northern women who raised me

and be celebrated for it it’s kind of a

wild thing

to get your head around the idea of

being celebrated for something you were

so painfully derided for before

but my journey to shamelessness was not

over

funny how years of deep embedded

circuitry takes a little while to

untangle

see i’d made this bubble this shame-free

bubble

where everything about me was celebrated

and one night

on the way home from a gig in drag i was

beat so badly that i was hospitalized by

a homophobic passerby

the shame flooded out of my internal

boxes and filled me up

i went to so many dark places in my head

i’m loathed to repeat them

but i ask myself questions like what if

everyone who’s

ever said anything bad about me was

right what if i deserve all of this

shame

i had some work to do and i was a bit

too shaken to stay around in london so

i took a train from houston back home to

lancaster and i spent some time healing

and i worked hard to fall in love with

the things i thought i’d left behind

the things i’d loved about lancaster

growing up

the people there the way we connect jan

down the spa

shop who sells the boys who give

you a bit of a look but respect you

nonetheless

and i came back to london with more of

an awareness of my value

of my history

i had been dressing differently since

the attack i was wearing all black plain

clothes

trying to blend in because when i was at

home in lancaster i realized that

safety was more important to me than

curing myself of shame and

i can’t do the latter if i don’t have

the former

but while i was up in lancaster i’d also

had another realization

i realized that everybody suffers with

shame even my attacker

this was another aha moment a moment so

liberatory that it confused me for a

while

the fact that i wasn’t alone in this

that everyone

suffers from shame

normality is god and everyone’s a sinner

i realized

i got obsessed with it i started looking

everywhere and seeing shame in people’s

behaviors

from their silence to their violence

from their gender reveal parties to

their big white weddings

even my attacker he was so filled with

shame because of what masculinity had

done to him that upon seeing my

difference he lashed out at me with his

fists

rather than curing my shame i had to

work hard to reimagine it

as something that we all carry around

with us like little pebbles attached to

our back in a rucksack

it’s something that affects us all that

causes harm in us all

and causes us to perpetuate harm

outwards to others too

i also realized i was existing a

complicated interplay of

narcissism self-hate and shame too where

i wanted everyone to accept everything

about me and until then

until that moment i would see something

monstrous in the mirror

but i realized that i don’t need

everyone to accept everything about me

jan down the spa shop who sells has

way bigger problems than

my gender my class my sexuality

she’s got her own shame to deal with but

what we do need

what i need is the ability to live

safely

the ability to walk down the street in

drag and not have some homophobic

passerby do what he did to me

and the way we do that is by doing some

shame work

it’s about looking inside and realizing

that all the boxes that have been put

there by the world

are a lie all the things that you’ve had

to shave off to make yourself smooth

bring them back there’s power there

there’s value there there’s beauty there

shame work is social work

it’s time we all did a bit these days

i find it easy to look in the mirror

thank you for coming to my ted talk

you