Unicorn

by Amrou Al-Kadhi

  Soon though, one of the other queens saw me sitting in stasis with the doors about to open at any moment. In a silent act of solidarity, they made up my face. This was the first instance of the powerful sisterhood I have come to find in the drag community. On later getting to know this person, I discovered that they had lost their father as a baby, and also struggled with feelings of familial dislocation. In that moment, both of us were grieving and being restored.

  Before I could fully tumble down this well of sadness, the first guests arrived, and I ran to the bathroom to firmly place a lid on it. Seeing my reflection in drag for the very first time was an uncanny kind of reunion, an introduction to a person I had always had inside me, yet had somehow always missed. I recognised the person in the mirror more than I had ever recognised my own image, experiencing the same fuzzy harmony as when I first gazed into a formless marine aquarium. Again, my gender dysphoria was suddenly appeased, and here in front of me was a true manifestation of my internal self. It was time for everyone to meet her.

  It was moving to see so many students come to support the evening, most of whom attended in some kind of drag. As soon as there was an audience, I interacted with them as my drag character Glamrou, an overly confident and acerbic queen who says the things that nobody else dares to. As people took their seats – i.e. the floor of a low-ceilinged cave – I lap-danced those who were willing, with the sexual litheness of a lemur and the confidence of a peacock.

  One of the things that I’ve come to find interesting about being in drag is that once you’re dressed and made up, you so rarely see yourself in drag (unless your outfit involves some kind of reflective device). As a result, your image belongs more to the people who are viewing you, and you start to perceive yourself in how you are being perceived in the eyes gazing at you. That night, the eyes of everyone I spoke to seemed bewitched by the confidence of the queen in their presence, with no knowledge of the sorrowing mess she had been just moments before the doors opened. By the time it came to perform my number, I tried to summon the matriarchal majesty of Queen Latifah in the Chicago ballad, and my performance, though unquestionably a hot mess, incorporated numerous thigh slaps, grinding of audience members, and a power that I didn’t even know I had. There was a person in the front row whose mouth was on the floor as they stared up at me, and afterwards they remarked that they’d never seen ‘femininity’ so unreservedly celebrated before.

  After the final number – one of the queens singing an aching rendition of ‘I Am What I Am’ – I thanked the crowd for coming to support us, and whipped out a set of queer platitudes you’d find in any gay anthem: ‘Remember to be yourself’, ‘You’re all superstars’, and a direct bit of plagiarism, ‘You were born this way!’ After that, Lady Gaga’s empowering queer anthem blasted through the room, every single person stood up, and we danced in what was one of the biggest emotional releases of my life. One of the queens who I still perform with, Shirley Du Naughty, ran up to me, and we hugged tightly. The evening was a beautiful celebration of so much. It went on late into the night, and I can still feel every single beat of it.

  When I finally got to my room at about five in the morning, the intense triumph of the evening slowly dissipated, and, as the wig came off, the shame slid over me to replace it. I stared at my reflection. I looked like a genderless newt whose face had melted, and the starkness of my bare-walled college room made me feel terrifyingly lonely. I took a sleeping pill and didn’t wake until 3 p.m. the next day.

  Whenever I woke up in my university dorms, the first thing I experienced was panic, and this became attached to anxieties surrounding my phone. Will there be a series of missed calls or prosecuting text messages from my parents? Will I have been found out somehow? Has someone at Cambridge discovered that my ‘celebrate all of who you are’ mottos are utterly phoney? Or has someone in my family got wind of my drag night? Which side of myself has been ousted by another side? And so the morning after the first Denim, panic woke me from my slumber, and I grabbed my phone, scrolling past the numerous messages of praise and gratitude from students to see if there was anything reprimanding from my parents. I was terrified they’d got wind of the evening all the way from Dubai. After a manic scroll, I realised that for now, I was in the clear.

  But this, in essence, was the experience of my early drag career. Something at once so liberating soon became a second closet, both literally and metaphorically, full of sequins, patent leather heels and glittery eyeshadow, but also secrets, both magical and shameful.

  The buzz I felt from Glamrou’s first outing was unlike anything else, and even knowing all the problems this would probably throw my way, I needed to experience it again. For so long my male body had been judged a failure, physically, socially, sexually and religiously, and now, as my female alter ego, I had agency and strength. While in the past femininity had brought with it a whole panoply of issues – both at home and at school – in drag, femininity became armour, and the more of it I flaunted, the more powerful I became. This was not something I could ever turn away from. And so I continued drag throughout my time as a student, and the events got bigger and bigger.

  One of the major events was an 800-strong party at the historic Cambridge Union. We decorated the venue first by placing acetate over the portraits of stuffy white masters and giving them all ‘lipstick’ with coloured markers. So far, so good. But I think that was one of the only things that didn’t go wrong that night. Most of it was a disaster of farcical proportions.

  The ticket to the party was meant to be a neon pink wristband reading DENIM; the idea was that when instructed, the crowd would raise their arms to create an anemone of UV-light. On the day the wristbands were due to arrive I woke up at 6 a.m., rushing with excitement at the thought of turning the brown-panelled Union walls pink. I cycled to the Union to check them out, my prized red billowing cape getting stuck in the wheels as it did every day, and skipped to the front office, almost mounting the huge parcel that lay there with my name on it. I tore open the box, and grabbed a wristband. There it was – a popping neon pink. And on the front? It said DEMIN. Maybe it’s a mistake. I dived back in, hoping that this was a singular freak accident. DEMIN. Third time lucky? DEMIN. All 800 of them said DEMIN. D-E-M-I-N. With the profound sadness of a kid who doesn’t get the video game they dreamt of at Christmas, I met up with the producer I worked with at the time. She lit her third cigarette in a row and smoked the whole thing in silence. Then she said, ‘I’ve got it! How about we change the tagline of the event to GET DEM-IN DENIM.’ At this moment, I cried.

  Perhaps the ‘DEMIN-DENIM-saga’ was a bad omen, because from there the catastrophes multiplied. The Union was not actually equipped to throw a concert for 800 students, and so the sound system was grossly inadequate for the space. Of course, we only found this out during the opening number. In my bedroom I had come up with a remix of Lady Gaga’s ‘Bad Romance’ and Madonna’s ‘Vogue’ – yes, I was what you might call ‘a basic gay’ – which was entirely choreographed for the floor with us five queens singing on Britney-style radio mics. The mics, however, did not work. Did we know this? No. Not till after the song. And how long was the song? Seven minutes. Does it get worse? Of course it does. The stage we hired was built so low that only the front row could actually see any of the floor-work choreography we’d worked on day and night for months. The vast majority of the 800 students who stood behind them could only see the tops of our wigs. So for seven minutes almost 750 people watched the tips of five wigs bobbing up and down to absolutely no music.

  The failure of the show felt emotionally cataclysmic. The fact that I had failed within a queer space was like a double punch, as if the sin-collecting angel had shown up again, saying, ‘You deserved to fail for being so sinful.’ Drag, for the most part, felt like it could exist on a different plateau of reality to the one I failed in on the outside world, and although an ephemeral space, it was one where I could at least pretend to be victoriou
s. Any kind of failure within a safe queer space that I’d constructed felt like a colossal GAME OVER. After the show of five-wigs-no-sound ended, the rest of Denim partied away into the night, and I retreated to the balcony, watching on as hundreds of students danced free from gender norms. From my seat in the gods, I wanted to feel happy that I’d been able to orchestrate this happening, but instead I felt devastated at its ephemeral fragility; I knew that as soon as the DJ ended their set, I’d have to get home and take off my drag, and any sense of invincibility would be immediately obliterated. Looking down at the intertwining mass of optimistic student queerness, I didn’t feel hopeful that such a space could exist – I was saddened by its transience. As with my aquarium, I was once again gazing at a queer wonderland, but couldn’t find a way in.

  Even though drag brought with it its own set of disappointments, the feelings of empowerment it brought me were still too significant to ignore. When I was a teenager, my social self was founded upon erasing or exaggerating narratives of my life. In drag, I felt as if I was performatively rewriting those narratives.

  Drag is a visual assertion of identity that doesn’t rely on words or explanations. When you walk into a room in drag, you immediately take up space. Your stilettoes echo and your fabrics billow; the glitter on your eyelids refracts the light, and your every step has heft. When I teach on drag courses to those early in their drag career, this is one of the first things I work on with students – I tell them to be ‘moved’ by their own presence, to treat every step they take into a room as a cinematic event. I want them to be so consumed by the sheer profundity of their existence that they move themselves to tears with every motion. A drag queen whose work has been of immeasurable inspiration to me, Victoria Sin, taught me a lot about this. When they are in drag, they move at a gloriously laconic pace, and talk at half the speed of regular conversation, confronting everyone in the room with their sumptuous presence, and on their own terms.

  When I created Glamrou, my drag persona, I replaced my long-felt invisibility with ultra visibility, and it told the world that I loved being me. It told the world that I was proud to be queer. It told the world that I was defiantly myself. As Glamrou, I got to live out thought patterns that were the opposite of those that governed the entirety of my day out of drag. I saw this too in the rest of my Denim queens. There was one who, out of drag, was always uncommonly polite and so sweet-natured; in drag, his character was a monstrous murderer. One of the other queens struggled with body image issues, and anxieties about their sexual attractiveness to other men – in drag, they were unapologetically sexy, body positive, and seductive. Drag is like a form of hypnotherapy; in your drag persona, you mute the engrained cognitive patterns to create new, positive neurological pathways. The more and more your drag character evolves, the more these affirmations become part of yourself out of drag. Not that I’m saying the murderous queen became a murderer out of drag, but over the course of their drag career, it’s been moving to see the confidence it has given him to assert his opinion when necessary, and to abstain from apologising when not necessary.

  My experience, however, was that the more Glamrou got to experience the things I wished I really felt myself, the more Amrou felt deprived of those privileges. And that’s partly because the more Glamrou succeeded as a drag queen, the more Amrou suffered in real life. The worst of it came during a summer show Denim did in a West End theatre in London. It was only a one-night event, but it was an extremely exciting moment for us to be able to take our drag to a prominent London stage, and we were all really excited. Each of the other Denims had their family in to watch the show, and I always found this difficult. At this point in my life my parents lived in the Middle East, and I shared absolutely zero details of my life with them. Least of all about Denim. The only real links to my family I had were Majid and Lily (my father’s old friend and his girlfriend). I grew particularly close with Lily over this period – she was someone I could speak to about my sexuality, and pretty much all her friends were gay. Majid knew my father, so I had to be careful of what I said around him – but he also partied religiously in Mykonos (the decadent Greek island), and he was an example to me of an Arab breaking the rules. I loved Lily, and I wanted to love Majid so that I could have a connection with someone close to my father who might in some way understand me. Every so often, he suggested that he did, like the night he drunkenly texted me a video of some drag queens in Barcelona he was watching. But, notwithstanding his ‘against-the-Iraqi mould’ activities, as a wealthy and unreserved patriarch, he was still a very respected figure in our community.

  Feeling hopeful, I invited Majid and Lily to the show – it was playing with fire, but I needed Amrou’s and Glamrou’s worlds to collide, to feel as if they were working in harmony, not in fractured opposition. Majid ignored my message – I assumed he was silently proud, only ignoring me to save face in the community – and Lily said she’d come with her gay cohort. Throughout the show, I felt tidal waves of support coming from her eyes; she was no longer looking at the floor as she had during the Macaulay Culkin episode, but instead looked up at me proudly, having known since I was a kid that this was a part of me that I needed to express. In the dressing room after the show, it was one of the first times I didn’t feel weighed down with post-show sorrow – because I had some semblance of family out there. I got to be like the other queens, packing away their drag in the comfort that their family would be out there telling them they were proud.

  But as I waltzed into the bar, ready to experience a familial embrace, Lily was nowhere to be found. I looked everywhere for her, and theorised that she might be having a late-night dinner somewhere. I called and texted her, and eventually she messaged with ‘I had to go home. Well done baby.’ For Lily, this was cold. I had half expected her to be wailing in tears and telling me that it was the proudest she’d ever been in her life. This message felt perfunctory, even clinical. And it was unlike her. But as it turns out, Majid had seen a photo of me performing that night (Lily’s friend had uploaded it onto Facebook straight after the show). He called her home to berate her, and next he would come for me. The following morning, after I was woken by my everyday surge of panic, my hand swiping my phone to check for any notifications of potential life catastrophes, there it finally was: an emotional grenade in the guise of an email from my father’s oldest friend Majid. It went something like this:

  Your dad made constant sacrifices so he could give you a good life. And you’re repaying him how? With this drag nonsense that is bringing your family nothing but shame. Until you stop your selfish stupidity, I want nothing more to do with you. Do not contact me until you’ve finally grown up.

  I read it three times in a row. The first time I processed only the shape of the words, scanning the emotionally abusive message with the coldness of a forensic specialist. On the second read, I consumed every word very slowly. Each one was like a blade slicing through my insides. The third time, I read it even more slowly, scouring it for any potential subtext that might negate the cruelty of the message. No such luck. I immediately got out of bed, took my phone, and left the house. It was a hot summer’s day, and I lay on the grass in the nearby park for hours, willing the sun to incinerate me until I was nothing but ash.

  Majid, who I had come to believe was a true renegade ally, once told me that his own lifestyle did not need such policing because of one key distinction: for the most part, he did it in private. His constant partying in Mykonos and his almost comical disregard for Islam were never called into question, because in public Arab spaces, he presented as a rich, conformist and culturally observant man, like a KGB spy undercover in America. Drag, however, immediately makes visible what no one is ready to acknowledge. It disrupts boundaries between the private and public, and visibly tells the people around you that you are different and not afraid to show it.

  There are many Muslims and Arab cousins of mine who similarly defy the gender codes of our community – but they are able
to save face in public. Collective responsibility is a huge pressure; your parents impress upon you the need to uphold a set of behaviours and principles because they too had to sacrifice their identities to these structures; the delicate house of mirrors is kept stable because of the silent assumption that everyone in the room will play along and keep the fantasy alive. I have seen female cousins of mine out in nightclubs high on drugs with tattoos all over their backs, and then seen them performing the role of modest Arab daughter at functions the next day. I have seen my parents once nearly hitting each other in a fight at home, only then to embody the image of total domestic bliss soon afterwards at a cousin’s birthday. Paradoxically, for me to perform in an identity so unashamedly ‘artificial’ was a threat to a man who believed the health of the community depended on an unacknowledged artificiality. He didn’t stop at the email. Wanting to scare me out of drag for good, he sent the incriminating photo of me onstage to my parents. (This was of me in hot pants grinding with the floor and pretending that the microphone was a penis). Cheers, Majid.