Reading is Fundamental!

Todays post is brought to you by one Benjamin J. This is some good ish!

Reading is Fundamental!

I don’t know about you guys, but I fucking love me some RuPaul’s Drag Race. I missed the first season, simply due to not knowing it existed, but I’ve been an avid fan since the second season. Today I want to discuss something that they do which is a regular feature, occurring once per season (I think). No, I’m not talking about Snatch Game, which is their equivalent of Top Chef’s Restaurant Wars (credit to Harmonie for making that analogy). I’m talking about doing some good old reading!

For those not in the know, according to the show the drag slang term “to read” means roughly to insult, roughly to review. I’m given to understand it’s a real term, and it seems likely it comes from backstage cattiness. Picture one queen on stage, doing her thing, and two other queens cracking wise on her outfit for being too matronly, or her wig for not being humongous enough. These backstage bitches would be “reading” the onstage performer.

On Drag Race, the segment goes like this:  one queen is given a pair of “reading glasses”. She then goes down the line of the remaining queens, giving each a little bit of trash talking. The goal is to be clever and funny, and to base each insult on a grain of truth or a running theme. It’s like a Friar’s Club Roast of dudes wearing chick clothes. So, like a Friar’s Club Roast of Bea Arthur.

Now, I am not a drag queen. I’m not even an executive transvestite. Pretty much everything I know about their culture is filtered through Miss Ru’s little show, which is over the top, played up, shilly to the extreme, and essentially not a documentary (or docky-wocky, as they’re called). Regardless, I think I have a pretty good idea about why the queens do this, based on observation and analysis. In fact, I believe the segment is a natural evolution of real behaviors. Much like Restaurant Wars, in fact.

One, they’re dudes. Under all the makeup, the fake boobs, the padded butts, and the extraordinary wigs, they’re dudes. And dudes rip on each other. That’s a pretty significant part of the dude personality. Speaking in general terms, if two guys are getting along, they’re probably spending a not-insignificant portion of their time insulting each other. Or punching. It’s how we roll. Any slight difference is pounced upon, expanded upon, and referenced continuously. Much like the “reading”, it tends to not be malicious. For example, my friend Kelly is a year and a month older than me. Most of the world’s population is older than him, yet he is the butt of all of our age jokes. I know it’s ridiculous, but it doesn’t stop me from asking him how delicious the turkey was at the first Thanksgiving, or if he was sad when Caesar crossed the Rubicon and he couldn’t go with him because he was already too old.

Two, they’re drag queens. I can’t exactly imagine the kind of bullying each one has had to put up with over the years, in some form or another. There’s a couple of ways of dealing with bullies, and my favorite has always been humor. Laugh at yourself before they can laugh at you. Barring that, you can laugh at them with your friends later. Being into drag tends to be a filter. You don’t get a lot of queens that don’t have a sense of humor. If you take your cross-dressing too seriously, then you likely either do it at home behind closed doors, or out in the world and try to pass. Either way, you don’t put on a wig the size of Marmaduke, lip synch with elaborate choreography, and call yourself a “diva”. These queens’ experience with bullying, and their senses of humor come together perfectly in the desire to “read” their friends (or competitors) and to take their turn being “read”. It’s all in good fun, it’s not vicious (normally), and it takes away some of the power of others to hurt you.

Finally, the “reading” is done in a session. Of course, they may insult each other and fight for real on other occasions, but the idea of stopping everything and beginning a “reading”, going straight through it, then ending it and going back to normal is like a pressure release. It’s a tension-breaker. And if I understand the things these queens go through to look like they do, I can understand the need for a tension-breaker.

So, that’s my analysis of a phenomenon that may just be made up for a television show that I watch. Stay tuned for next time when I analyze the crippling, addictive compulsion modern consumers feel toward spending by exploring an episode of Supermarket Sweep.