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