A Few Things: Drag Performance, Miya Folick's "ROACH," Upcoming Conferences
What I Am Currently Enjoying And Thinking
Hello, welcome to another update on a few things I am currently enjoying or thinking about, or projects I am working on. This week, I discuss one aspect of the complexity of drag performance Miya Folick’s latest album, “ROACH”.
On Drag Performance
Over the past weeks—for, uh, no particular reason—I have been thinking a lot about the way drag performance is often oversimplified and misunderstood by many as merely a kind of debauched striptease or mockery of traditional values and religion, which I think greatly reduces its complexity, ignores its history and the nuanced messages it may convey, and limits its possibilities.
I have been frequently reminded of a passage from David Halperin’s How To Be Gay1, an academic exploration of gay male subjectivity and inculturation, in which he discusses the Fire Island Italian widows, a group of “gay men of Mediterranean descent who dressed in the black frocks and veils donned by Italian peasant women upon the death of their husbands” (179). For years these men made an appearance every year at the “Invasion of the Pines,” an drag event that takes place every Independence Day on Fire Island, the gay vacation colony off the coast of New York.
Taking upon themselves the traditional black dress of Southern Italian and Sicilian widows—which not only represented mourning, but also “authority, seniority, and autonomy in traditional village life (179)”—these men could easily be understood as merely making a mockery of women, of marriage and the family, of mourning itself. But this would be too simple. Why? Because these Fire Island Italian widows “were all men who had themselves lost lovers, friends, or members of their local community to AIDS” (179). Their mourning was not merely parody or mockery, but was also real; it was a performance, but was not for that reason less sincere.
Besides allowing these men to mourn their own losses, the public mourning of the Fire Island Italian widows became “a communal enactment of loss and pain” (180) that enabled others to mourn as well. Their conscious mixing of parody and sincerity (which Halperin suggests is characteristic of gay male subjectivity at large) was a kind of cultural commentary on gay loss:
As gay men mourning their friends or partners in public, the Italian widows would have known that the emotions they felt and displayed were necessarily consigned by conventional cultural codes to the realm of the incongruous, the excessive, the melodramatic, the hysterical, the inauthentic—at any rate, the less than fully dignified…[O]ccupying as they already did the cultural space of parody—of the fake, the derivative, the out of place, the disallowed, the unserious—[they] had only one way to impose their grief publicly, and that was by embracing the social devaluation of their feelings through a parodic, exaggerated, melodramatic, self-mocking, grotesque, explicitly role-playing, stylized performance (180-181).
With the knowledge that their mourning was already subject to mockery, the Fire Island Italian widows chose to lean into the mockery and subvert it (through enacting a parody themselves) rather than struggle against it by demanding solemn respect (“stop laughing, this is serious!”). Their example shows that drag can function on multiple levels—mockery and seriousness, parody and mourning, comedy and tragedy—even in the same performance.
So by taking upon themselves traditional symbols, drag performers are not always merely mocking tradition or blaspheming (of course, plenty of drag performers do mostly mock and blaspheme, and I am definitely not trying to excuse that), but they are sometimes even revealing a kind of respect for the traditions from which they have often been excluded. Perhaps, then, it becomes clearer why a group of drag performers committed to charity work and activism might take upon themselves the symbols of a Catholic religious life—not merely to mock it or blaspheme, but also to express the pain of exclusion, and even a kind of veiled respect.
Miya Folick’s “ROACH”
Miya Folick has been steadily releasing singles for months now, building excitement for the release of her full album, “ROACH,” this past week. I admit, I did not give the entirety of her previous album, “Premonitions,” the attention it really deserves, but the lead track, “Thingamajig” pretty quickly made it into my most-listened-to tracks when I discovered it just before the pandemic; its simplicity, along with Folick’s tender, emotive vocal delivery and delicate, meandering melody, got it stuck in my mind.
Some of the magic of that track is repeated on “Oh God”. Launching into a full-on religious crisis with no musical prelude, Folick cries out in anguish, “oh God!” followed by questions and laments: “do I need God? / who is God? / I’ve never had God.” It is a kind of secular psalm; I immediately thought of the 1975’s “If I Believe You,” which like “Oh God” is an expression of non-belief as prayer. Detailing years of aimless wandering (“fucking off and watching trashy TV / spending all my twenties not believing anything”), Folick provides no resolution here; the song starts an album-long process of unearthing pain, regret, boredom, and listlessness—and holding them up to the light.
“Get Out of My House” is, quite simply one of the best break-up songs I have ever heard, maybe the best; it crackles with energy. Beginning with a steady drum beat, Folick offers a list of complaints to a nameless “you”: “you never want to touch me, you only want to make me cry / you never, ever call me / you think that you can just come by”. Her voice wobbles, barely restrained while the chords chug along. The bridge into the chorus captures the precise moment of explosion and release: “I love being on my own without you / taking off my clothes without you / thought I needed your glow / needed you to be home / but I’m better alone, woo!”
“Nothing to See” explores all the clear-eyed realizations that come in the aftermath of a breakup: “I know you’ve been talking to girls on the internet / she’s only nineteen and I can’t compete with that.” Folick has awoken. “You told me that you loved me, but you mispronounced my name / I never corrected you, ‘cause I didn’t want to push you away / why did I do that?” And in “Drugs or People” we see the fruit of lessons learned; it buzzes along with a kind of “I’m-slowly-learning-how-to-be-healthy” self-awareness.
To get to the roots of maladaptive behaviors, look to the parents—this is the approach of the slower, hypnotic “Mommy”. “Where do my parents begin and / where do I begin?” she wonders, discovering her people-pleasing may come from her father after all. And “2007” contains another breakthrough. “I haven’t felt safe since 2007 / I haven’t felt safe since 2001” she admits over single humming notes and a shuffling snare. The chorus is a lush oasis: “I want to smile real big! / I want to fucking live!” I was reminded of the Brood’s “Mother,” which captures the same longing for freedom, for joy.
Something like hope characterizes “Cockroach” as well, but more resilience at rock bottom rather than reaching for release: “bury me under the weight / bitterness, jealousy, hate / ‘cause I’m a fucking cockroach and you can’t kill me,” she deadpans. “Tetherball” begins with an atmospheric hum, over which Folick sings more realizations: “I’m not careful enough / I keep tearing through love / like a tetherball swinging ‘till its all tangled up / whipping through the air ‘till I’m stuck”. As it progresses, it becomes more glitchy and electronic, so that by the second chorus, it has taken on the urgency of a ticking clock: “it’s harder to get better / than to lie, lie, lie.”
“Cartoon Clouds” calls to mind one of the grounding exercises one of my friends, a somatic therapist, uses with her clients: she asks them to name “five things you see, four things you hear, three things you touch,” etc. Folick tells herself, and us, to slow down and look at the clouds passing by; the background is a bouncy beat that sounds like childhood nostalgia. After all, “what’s the point of being gloomy when there’s so much else to do?” The last lines are an invitation to embodiment, to pay attention to the senses without getting caught up in a blur of thoughts: “doesn’t it feel good to feel good?”
The past tense is more about gratefulness than regret on “So Clear” as Folick describes the awful place she was in with heavy-handed cliches: “I was down like you see in the movies / crying on the bathroom floor,” and “I was desperate like you read in the papers / screaming in oblivion”. Her years of turmoil are “ten thousand days” that have finally passed; she achieves some contentment at last on “Ordinary”: “I can’t have it all / and I wouldn’t want to / my life is small, but it’s big enough for me” she sings over a few bare chords.
Clocking in at a little under forty-five minutes, “ROACH” takes listeners on a long therapeutic journey: religious crisis, profound anxiety and depression, a painful breakup and newfound freedom, uncovering family dynamics, hitting absolute rock bottom, and finally, a measure of peace. There are plenty of catchy melodies sprinkled throughout the album, but they are balanced by something more complex, off-kilter and unexpected. Check it out!
Upcoming Conferences
Once again, I would appreciate your prayers, encouragements, and general good vibes as I prepare for three panels and a breakout session over three days at two different conferences (Revoice and Outreach) in a couple weeks (June 15th-17th)! You can read about them in last week’s post. I’m starting to get really excited to discuss the themes of engaging with the Bible and living a life of chastity as a celibate gay follower of Christ!
David Halperin, How To Be Gay (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2012)