Garbage Pail
Feminist Drag Queens Refuse to Shave Armpits
by Matt Sullivan
illustration by Greg Moutafis
“I’m sick of wearing high heels to accommodate society’s patriarchal standards of what a woman should dress like,” says Fiona Fierce. Hardly a novel complaint, you might say, but here’s the rub: “Fiona” is actually Phillip Stewart, drag queen.
Fiona is part of a growing movement of transvestites that are eschewing the elaborate wigs, make-up, jewelry and dresses to opt for a more lax standard of femininity. Condemning what she calls the “slavery of glamour,” Fiona confesses that there are some days when she just isn’t up to the hours of plucking and tucking that drag queens traditionally undergo to transcend their birth gender.
“I’m not a diva 24/7,” she says, “Often, I just want to kick back with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and watch Ally McBeal in a pair of sweats.”
But the movement is more than just a fashion-oriented backlash to diva-dom; for some, it’s political. “Women, and men dressed like women, have been treated like second-class citizens for too long,” says Feminist Drag Queen Council president Vulva Venus, who also answers to the name Richard Johnson. “This cosmetic culture we live in has unrealistic expectations of what a man dressed as a woman’s body should look like.”
Fashion is one area of rebellion: at the time of our interview, Venus was sporting a “butch” haircut, wearing a hooded sweatshirt, dungarees, and construction boots. “I don’t care if get called a dyke, I take it as a compliment,” she says. She has even stopped shaving her armpits in a gesture of protest, although she still shaves her face three times a day. “I’ve got a heavy beard,” she says, “In high school, they used to call me ‘Teen Wolf.'”
Some old habits, however, die harder than others. “The other day, a group of burly guys working on the ‘Big Dig’ whistled at me, making cat-calls – I think I even heard the term ‘hoochie mama,'” says Fiona, “I didn’t have the balls to scold them for their blatant sexual harassment. I was blushing like a school girl.”
