The Montage of Queer Becoming
Montage is how we represent lived experience when linearity fails, how truth arrives as fragments, sensations, contradictions.
As I reflect on my life, I realize that one of the only constants in it has been the presence of drag queens. Those who helped me find acceptance in an otherwise cruel world. Long before I existed, drag queens created queer life through Stonewall, through queens who made resistance possible, and through Missouri performers whose arrests sparked early queer uprisings. My montage begins behind a dumpster in Indianapolis, outside Talbott Street Nightclub, home to Asia La Bouche, Alana Steele, and Vicky St. James.
Every night ended the same way: the emcee, from above the dance floor, shouting, "If ladies can look this good, there's no excuse for an ugly woman!" Camp, misogyny, comedy, cruelty; gender exposed as performance. This was sociology as life: drag as embodied theory. Gender as performance. Chosen family passed through song, humor, and survival. That was where I spent my twenties, promoting bands, throwing raves, and hanging out with drag queens. I was something few understood. This space would be my first field site, though I didn't yet know it.
After a time, I moved to Las Vegas to pursue my PhD and imagine myself anew as an educator and as someone worthy of desire and love. With the help of two queens, Des'rre D. St. James and Indiah Ferrah, I began to see myself differently for the first time. Some of the men in their circle had been my first abusers, but these two queens helped me reclaim a sense of myself I feared I had lost.
It was a brief moment, but the memories remain: after-hours bars, sunrises, and the freedom of becoming someone else. In Vegas, I learned that life is a performance and the roles are endless. Academia, I learned, is its own cruel beast in which it places us and in what it demands. I didn't know my next act would be a tragedy — Topeka.
No wonder Dorothy left.
Topeka was a bad fit; light-years from Vegas and from the queerness I missed. I learned quickly that tolerance often ends where tenure begins. It was sociology written upon my body: a lesson in cruelty, shrouded in silence. Sexual violence, abuse, and shame became my crosses to bear. On the weekends, I drive east to watch the Dirty Dorothy Show –– part cabaret, part comedy, part sermon. Those respites were like coming up for air, yet each night weeping upon my return.
After a decade, my odyssey nears its end. A Professor of Sociology at a flagship university, my classroom becomes a stage of its own and is shaped by the spirit of every queen, living or dead. That summer, I tried to make amends to the family I'd left, the friends I'd failed, and the lovers I'd thought I betrayed. And, by fate, Indiah Ferrah was in town. A chance at redemption for my past transgression?
Drag queens are full of grace, and their kindness knows no limit. I confided in her about the shame I felt about how I'd left. She turned to me and said, "I only have good memories of you, sweet summer child." And, with that, we laughed and downed shots of Fireball as if we'd never left Las Vegas. If I were Dorothy, Indiah was the good witch, reminding me I'd had the power all along. For a moment, I felt redeemed. And I realize sometimes the demons of our past are shadows we chase: the shame, the cruelty of lovers, and the burdens of my abusers were never mine to carry in the first place.
Slowly, Columbia takes its toll; six years without a queer community. And, so, I leave for Kansas City to soothe my soul and gather the fragments of myself. One night, a blue-eyed, red-headed queen named Tajma Stetson took my hand. "You're classically handsome," she says.
"That's the first time anyone's said that to me," I replied.
"Oh, surely you jest."
"My name's not Shirley — please call me Chris."
"Well, Chris… maybe someone should have told you long before now."
Outside of drag, we talked. Not about sex, but about life's simple pleasures: touch, eye contact, recognition. A whirlwind of emotion. What I felt wasn't lust; it was that fragile shimmer of kindness, the grace of being seen. Like so many sociologists before me, I've learned that sometimes we must trade theory for grace, analysis for art, and abstraction for the living world.
And so, by the grace of drag queens, I do into my own redemption and my own montage of queer becoming.
