The Rosie O’Donnell Show broke ground for women in TV, and when she announced her lesbian identity it had a big impact in particular for people who were gay. She radiated an undeniable joy. I also sensed the emotion she had to hide, strategically, behind the broadcast. I would come home after being tormented at school, make myself something to eat, and sit down to watch her show. She took me away, if just momentarily, from the darkness in my life. Her one-hour show felt like a reprieve of sorts, a heavenly feeling. Here was a gay woman on network television, strong and intelligent, sharing her love for unique and eccentric people, and bringing joy to her audiences. Rosie didn’t come out until 2002, just months before the end of her show, but I always found that her identity was an unspoken part of her presence. At the beginning of each episode, Rosie would literally reach out to her audience to connect. This signalled a familiarity with isolation and loneliness; she was someone who wanted to make it easier for people like me to exist. It was a powerful gesture, a human gesture. Her heart was open and available because she made it that way.
The Rosie O’Donnell Show elevated examples of people helping other people; it had the potential to change people’s lives, and it did so for many people like me. Her guests ranged from celebrities and media personalities to activists and change-makers. Some of these people were saving lives by turning their interests into action; they were helping people. Rosie used her celebrity and influence to shine a light on important people, people who were working to change the world in amazing ways. Her show ignited a spark within me. It was more than an illusion on my TV screen, it was the stuff of reality, of truth-telling. The stories of real people transmitted from her New York studio to the tube-TV in my basement in Napanee inspired me. Here were real people harnessing their power and passion to reach out.
Ellen DeGeneres was another pioneer when both the character she played in her sitcom and she herself came out on national TV in 1997. Plastered on magazines and newspapers and widely broadcast on television, Ellen’s truth was impossible to ignore. Her coming out story demanded a bravery that touched me. It takes a tremendous amount of courage and insight to work through the script of heteronormativity, and even more, especially at that time, to be public about it. Ellen’s success, her eventual self-actualization of her own truth and her sexuality, was a turning point in our culture in the recognition and representation of gay and lesbian people.
Rosie and Ellen were bright lights during my adolescence. Both were powerful and honest women daring to rewrite the heteronormative script that was constructed by those who monopolized cultural power in the media. The transformative and inspirational power of their effect on popular culture stuck with me. I learned about harnessing experience to make an impact. And this inspiring force became a powerful element in my own life.
Though I was born into the home constructed for me — my body, my identity — throughout my life I have been deconstructed, reconstructed, and renewed by all the stories that hold truth for me. The stories of two people in particular embodied the magical humanity of our contemporary culture, how it resonates with us, and why it can make a significant difference in our lives.
My path crossed with that of a beloved figure of twentieth-century Western culture when I was still a child. She changed my life forever with a smile and a simple gesture.
On the morning of October 28, 1991, I woke up on the edge of nervous excitement, and drove with my mom into Kingston from our home in Napanee. It was a crisp and sunny late-fall day, and the excitement in Kingston was palpable even to me at nine years old. I stood with my mom and some of her friends behind a barricade across from the Kingston Armouries, home to the Princess of Wales’ Own Regiment. We were there to see the princess herself, Diana.
Would we catch a glimpse of her — the princess who had dared to break convention, who cared about alleviating human suffering, who was changing the world with a smile? The princess who had dramatically shifted the public perception of AIDS and brought awareness to the inhumane treatment of HIV patients when she shook the hand of a patient, flesh upon flesh. Diana elevated an empathy for people above all else. She was the princess of empathy, in my mind.
The public wasn’t given access to the formal proceedings inside the Kingston Armouries that day, but we knew that she would have to exit the building in our direction at some point. When she finally did emerge from beyond the dark space of the doorway, she appeared like a sphere of light. I’m serious: it was that beautiful and majestic. Her luminosity seemed to make an entrance before she did.
I stood there on the other side of the road among hundreds of people who had amassed to see her and her royal husband, Charles, Prince of Wales. I was wearing my neon-green, blue, and purple winter parka and feeling slightly cold. But the warmth of her presence renewed my spirit. I had never before felt such a sense of loving admiration as when she walked out from the doorway and stood there in crystal-clarity just a hundred feet away from us. She wore a golden-yellow blazer with royal-blue buttons, a matching skirt with a blue-gold rounded hat, and was surrounded by her security escort along with handlers, publicists, and royal assistants. I stood there transfixed, never turning my gaze, with a hopeful and growing excitement. People around me started to scream, calling her name over and over again. A chanting choir of souls beckoned her closer.
The security detail and handlers began to steer her and the Prince of Wales towards their car. I looked up at my mom with wonder. “Will she come meet us, Mom?” I could see the hesitation in my mom’s eyes. She didn’t want to disappoint me. I had taken the day off school, and we had travelled here from Napanee, hoping against hope that we would meet the princess.
Suddenly, there was a commotion around Diana. I could see her speaking with one of her handlers, and then she broke ranks and proceeded to move in the direction of the crowd of cheering fans. She had heard us calling for her. She was moving towards us. A couple of her handlers tried to stop her, but their efforts were futile. Diana was beyond their control. She had learned to depart from formal structure to engage with the people who looked up to her and appreciated her humanity. Her speed picked up a little as she made her way across the road. Dozens of people followed close behind. This was obviously an unplanned part of their day.
As she reached the barricade, Diana began to shake hands and greet people in the crowd. She was less than twenty feet away from me, and I started to get nervous.
“Mom, what should I tell her? What should I say?”
I could hear the building excitement in her shaky voice. “Tell her how you truly feel, Joshua.”
I couldn’t decide what to say. The light, her warmth, the love flowing so openly from her heart was my focus. Within a few minutes, she was less than five feet away from me. By this point, members of her security detail were gently nudging her along. She couldn’t stop for every single person. But then she stopped right in front of me. Looking down, she smiled the most beautiful smile I had ever seen; it warmed my soul. I looked up at her. It was as though I could see her soul shining back at me. I reached out for her and her hand moved towards mine. The softness of her silk glove touched the bare flesh of my little hand. My heart was happy. I looked up into her eyes and the world around me stopped for a moment. I knew then exactly what I wanted to say to her: “You are beautiful, Princess Diana. You look like an angel.”
Her smile widened and her eyes beamed. “Thank you so very much,” she said to me as she held my hand. I felt so special in that moment. I know that she heard what I said. I mean, she really heard it and appreciated it. After all, it was from my little heart. I knew at that moment that she cared about me even though she didn’t know me. She cared about me because I was a living, breathing human being in front of her. That was all that mattered. Being a human being was always enough for Princess Diana. She embodied love, she was the definition of love. Her smile will always stay with me.
Of course, in the early 1990s, not everyone had
a camera at their fingertips the way we do now and, sadly, we didn’t get a photograph of me meeting her that day. But I didn’t need a photo. I didn’t need proof of that moment. My feelings were the proof. I knew our meeting would stay with me forever.
Then, at Christmas that year, I opened a gift and screamed with excitement. I couldn’t believe what I held in my hands. Apparently, a few weeks before Christmas my mom had been contacted through her network of friends by a woman who had taken a photograph of a “young child shaking Princess Diana’s hand” in Kingston. The photographer was trying to find the parents of this young child. My mom couldn’t believe her luck — someone had taken a photo of that special moment after all! She framed it for me and wrote a message on the back about the magic of the experience. She also wrote a small column in Kingston’s newspaper, The Whig Standard, discussing the impact of meeting Princess Diana and how that day had left us with such happiness and respect for the princess.
I stared deep into the photograph. I saw an angel of light and love meeting a young spirit for a reason, a spirit who was already being dehumanized and would come to face much pain, sorrow, and violence. Diana’s beautiful smile shone down at me and left me with tangible magic, perhaps even protection. From that day on, I kept the photo of our meeting on my bedroom wall above me like a guardian angel. Each time I move, I hang the photo above me where I sleep.
I felt her tragic passing in 1997 with deep sadness and confusion. But I know that she will always exist in our collective memory; she will always be an angel who took time to be with us in physical form. She took time to be with me, to tell me that I mattered with the simple gesture of shaking my hand, thanking me, and smiling. Our paths crossed, ever so briefly, and her humanity has never left me.
And then there was another princess. I’m not joking when I say that in my house while I was growing up we probably watched the first three Star Wars films a hundred or more times. I was always intrigued by the films’ sci-fi elements, but that wasn’t the main reason I became such a huge fan of the series. For me, it was all about Princess Leia. And my admiration extended beyond that character into the very heart and soul of the woman who brought her to life: a feminist, a writer, an artist, a mother, a lover, a general, a queen, a fighter, and a force to be reckoned with — Carrie Fisher.
Carrie Fisher’s unique gifts started to have a profound impact on me in my thirties. I devoured all of her memoirs and her fictional work. Her writing is open, lucid, dreamy, and direct. I laughed and cried, and my spirit soared while reading her words. She lived an unrivalled life. When she died in late 2016, I was absolutely gutted. I cried for days. She was unlike anyone else. She was Carrie, and she left a force with me that took time for me to unravel. Why had this legendary pop culture figure, writer, actor affected me so much? Why her?
I wrote a short piece for HuffPost shortly after her passing. I was in the bathtub crying during a depressed episode, and then I realized something powerful, yet so simple, while thinking about Carrie’s words about mental illness: her contributions to popular culture had helped to make me feel less alone. I quickly dried off and ran to my laptop to write. I felt a calling to suddenly open up about my struggles with mental health. I had been suffering with dysthymia disorder, a consistent and moderate form of depression, for most of my life. I also wrote about the inextricable relationship that my mental illness has with my empathy. There are moments when I cannot distinguish my feelings from the feelings of others, a particularly challenging emotional experience when I already deal with depression. I went to Carrie for inspiration, for her stories, and for what she so courageously shared for so long in her public life and her writing. I ended up writing the piece in just a few hours and cited Carrie as my primary inspiration for opening up about my mental illness.
I then watched Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, the HBO documentary filmed before they both tragically passed, within days of each other, and I felt an even greater empathic pull to her spirit. I could see myself, my own confusing feelings between depression and empathy, my creative exhaustion and inspiration, and the darkness that seeps in and is impossible to control. In the film, she said that she’d always been an “open faced sandwich,” emphasizing the awareness of her many layers exposed to the world despite the challenges she faced with bipolar disorder. Her playful, brilliant force beamed through the screen while I watched the documentary. I don’t think there was a clear line for Carrie when it came to personal versus professional. The blurring of this boundary made her work very powerful, and I deeply resonate with the feeling of living a life without this clear distinction. She funnelled everything into her work. Even her tweets, mostly made up of emojis and symbols to spell words in cryptic construction, made sense to her because she saw from her own point of view.
Carrie was outspoken about experiencing bipolar disorder (like my mom) and she advised all who suffer with mental illness to seek support in community. The overwhelming response I received from readers of my HuffPost piece confirmed much of what she said: there are a great many people suffering in silence, waiting for someone to share similar experiences and to find commonality in their pain. Stigma in our society prevents us from sharing.
Carrie is the force that I follow for inspiration in how to engage with the public by being authentic while also retaining a sense of privacy. It’s risky in general to share personal stories of mental illness, and especially risky when you are also trans, since many people believe, falsely, that being trans is in itself a mental illness. I will always look to Carrie’s star burning bright in the cosmos for direction and inspiration, and to the words she left us in her books, while I engage with my own identity and the complicated relationship with representation in popular culture.
In addition to the Star Wars saga, two films in particular stand out from my youth — films that allowed me to see parts of myself reflected on the screen: To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Wong Foo and Priscilla are films about the lives of drag queens, one set in the United States and the other in Australia. Both narratives revolve around road trips that take the drag queens on wild adventures. What influenced me in these films was the undeniable subversion of the gender binary, particularly in gender expression. Some of the characters in the films eventually come out as trans women, and some of the characters represent the playfulness of gender.
Drag, or gender as play, made me connect with these films. Believe me, there is a whole host of problems with both films in their representation of race, sexuality, and gender. But these issues aside, the representation of drag excited me as a teenager. There was a sense of freedom in the “cross-dressing” since it signalled something beyond the binary. I noticed, and felt comfort in, the representation of drag that highlights a continuum of gender presentation, and even identity, rather than an opposition between them.
Drag queens and kings have been some of the strongest pioneers in our community. They were at the forefront of significant moments in our history to agitate for necessary change and tolerance. In particular we remember the powerful action of drag queens of colour, trans people of colour, and gender-nonconforming people of colour at the Stonewall raid in 1969 in New York City. Drag queens formed a special part of my introduction to queer culture during my adolescence. When I was still underage, my friends and I visited the one gay bar that existed in Kingston, Ontario. There we found these incredible queens with their height, magical beauty, and strength of spirit, which both intimidated and intrigued me. The presence of drag queens often came with a dedication to telling a story about, or with, their bodies. They were in control of the space, commanding both from the identity underneath the makeup, clothes, and personas, but also from this very real place of sexuality, sex, and gender that results in drag. The films, and the drag queens represented in them, became a comfortable and welcoming part of the culture for me. Drag illuminated possibilities for gen
der to be malleable and fluid instead of static and fixed. These were the only examples of gender expression beyond the binary available to me. I have deep respect for drag culture in that it represents possibilities beyond what being assigned male or female tells us we have to be. Drag can enunciate something in between and beyond, opening a playfulness to explore and experiment — in essence, to be free and fluid.
It is interesting and apt that drag queens are contributing significantly to the visibility of non-binary identity and expression in today’s popular culture. Historically, some drag queens have often been undermined, disrespected, and criticized for making a mockery of trans people in their performative plays of gender. Some members of the trans community broadly characterize drag as a disavowal of the validity of trans identity. Yes, there are some issues with drag, including the potential for misogyny and an insensitivity that can undermine trans identities, but this negative characterization bothers me. Drag cannot be homogenized. Drag enables a freedom to explore gender and to poke fun at the stereotypical performance of gender that we tend to always treat with serious fact in our lives. And its comedic effects loosen the suffocating grip that our culture has on gender.
The queens on the reality show, RuPaul’s Drag Race, for instance, have been a gift to the popular culture discussion about gender beyond the binary because several of them — including Jinkx Monsoon, Violet Chachki, Adore Delano, Aja, Courtney Act, Shea Coulee, Kelly Mantle, and Sasha Velour — have come out as non-binary, genderfluid, or gender-nonconforming. Non-binary-identified drag queens defy the notion that all drag queens and kings are cis people. For instance, when Peppermint came out as a trans woman on the show, it created a ridiculous debate about whether or not drag queens can be trans and still perform drag. Ultimately, these drag queens are changing the script by dismantling the false notion that trans people, including non-binary people, aren’t part of the drag community.
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