by J †Johnson, Staff Writer

Welcome to the first installment of a weekly accompaniment to The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula Season 666, whether you are a seasoned Dragula monster or a tender, vulnerable newcomer to this horror drag competition show. In advance of the October 1st debut episode, Dracmorda and Swanthula Boulet dropped a “Meet Our Monsters” video on Instagram. Those readers who have not yet feasted their eyes on this toothsome, leggy spectacle are advised to beat feet for that little piece of theater. We’ll wait here.

OK, on with our own show and tell, as we meet the monster who will guide you through the glamorous, filthy underworld of Dragula’s 6th incarnation. First, let’s establish that neither TVJawn nor this writer are too interested in competition programs. Dragula is something I learned about from Fangoria and my Shudder feed a few years ago. What got my attention was not drag itself, but the show’s obvious engagement with horror cinema.

Let’s back up a moment for a word on drag. I came of age as a culture writer in the Bay Area in the ‘90s and drag was part of the broader arts scene, though it didn’t have the general respect afforded to art forms covered every week in the East Bay Express, Guardian, or SF Weekly. I talked recently with a musician I knew from back then who dressed up like his version of Courtney Love to play guerilla punk rock on the streets of the Castro: Keala Ramos of the Nervous Breakdowns. Keala plays with whoever he can get to show up for gigs—which back in the day often involved renting a generator and parking it in a storefront alcove during Pride, to play until the cops showed up.

Anyway, I mentioned drag, and Keala said he wasn’t sure what he was doing was really drag. And now I’m conflating our conversation with a clip I sent him, of Peaches Christ (a well-known horror drag queen from SF) saying that back then people hated drag. No doubt Keala, who was doing street drag in the early 2000s and getting very little respect for it, can concur. And yet he and his band were a crucial part of what made queer SF street art special at that time.

This is to say drag was something I knew about, something in the air (and the clubs), but it wasn’t something I sought out at the time. It had its adherents and its community, but it certainly wasn’t commodified and mainstreamed the way it would be when RuPaul established the Drag Race empire, starting in 2009.

OK, here’s the bridge, back in the ‘20s. Bored one night a few years ago, I put on an episode of Dragula Season 2 (which premiered on Halloween of 2016). And I liked it. In a way, it felt like a guilty pleasure—not because of drag, but because it’s a competition show, and as a poet and anarcho-communist, I’m competition averse. This is one of the reasons I wasn’t into Drag Race, though I clocked the appearance of queer art on the main stage of pop culture. [Note: In my queer writing practice, I am also first-person averse, for reasons we will return to, so now that we’ve said hello, please allow us to slip into a more comfortable pronoun, the several-selved we.]

Dragula, though, is something else. Sure, the cast competes in runway turns and challenges, and one contestant is eliminated every week. Meanwhile, we watch them prepare during each episode, often making their own outfits and doing their own makeup. We watch them help each other, critique each other’s art, talk about what matters to them, reflect on the whole weird process, and squabble as we do in community. We watch them get their drag together, and we watch the floor show begin with a wicked flourish by the Boulets. All these monsters come out to play, and it’s fucking glorious. The preparation we glimpse can’t prepare us for that transformation on stage. Truly it is a monstrous becoming, artists in full flower, decomposing before our eyes. And then the hosts, the Boulet Brothers, pass judgment. Really though it’s a fully embodied pinup critique, where we learn more about this art and what sets it apart from traditional drag.

Let’s pause here to make a distinction. Drag is a gay art, and queerness (as distinct from heteronormative culture) is baked into that. However, in the wake of the massive, popular success of Drag Race, and its particular aesthetic vision of drag, this essentially gay art is not always queer. Over the course of this serial commentary we’ll develop this distinction.

Once Dragula got its claws in us, we became insatiable drag monsters in our own way, and it wasn’t long before we came crawling to Drag Race, with its endless seasons and moments of crossover with the aesthetic world of Dragula. It’s certain that Drag Race influenced Dragula, even as a counter-inspiration for this other vision of drag that the Boulet Brothers weren’t seeing on television before they made their own show. But it also becomes evident that the influence starts to run both ways, and Drag Race gets just a bit more monstrous (and queer) over time.

After the deliberation that kicks off the third act of each Dragula episode, winners are chosen, and the bottom two or three contestants must face an elimination challenge. Maybe they have to eat repulsive food, or get skewered with needles, or be buried alive. In any case it’s some sort of trial they must make it through as drag performers. It’s not enough simply to face the challenge. It’s an extension of the performance competition, so they need to do it in character, with verve, to show their resilience and artistic drive. They need to come through the ordeal, become better monsters.

Then we get a title card that reads something like LATER THAT NIGHT… and someone dies at the clawed hands of the Boulet Brothers. It’s always filmed as a horror movie screen kill, and the craft, care, and field of reference on display are what bring the gorehounds to the show. Like the cold opens of most episodes, where the Boulets do a fully staged and produced thematic skit, the cinematic eliminations are an extension of the monstrous drag the show creates and promotes. They are also a curtain call for the departing artist—a wilting bouquet of respect and irreverence. The Boulets are making supermonsters, as they remind us, and the tenants of their drag, born of the club shows they put together earlier in their careers, are simple: filth, horror, glamour. Say that last word like you mean it, like you notice the u, like it’s fancy and so are you.

In this serial, we’re writing about the structure of the show, what it has to say about drag, horror, queerness, and art. This won’t be a standard recap—those are available elsewhere, on some excellent and insightful podcasts like the Boulets’ Creatures of the Night. This will be more of a commentary that speaks to our own critical engagements.

We’ll leave you with that for now, after two matters we should quickly address. Speaking of address, that’s the first point, which leads to the second. I am a queer, nonbinary writer who prefers to write in the first-person plural (we), as discussed elsewhere in my writing. While that plural subject position feels most accurate to the ways I engage my writing practice, I won’t force it. So, I allow myself to move between I and we, just as we move along the false gender binary. “I” is a construct—an assumed and it’s always temporary, always shifting subject position. We could say I is not I, or that we are I & I & I. As Samuel Beckett writes, every time you put a pronoun on the page it adds to the party. He makes it sound more terrifying, like the writer is hounded by non-identical packs of you and I. Even names do this. Each one is another Mary, Mary. To account for that illusion of continuity but also acknowledge the ever-shifting self, I prefer to posit that I & I & I—which changes over time but also writes over & over into the same growing body of work—as we. Of course, it’s also a way to draw the reader into the queer perspective this writing offers. One way to do so without speaking for others or coercing them into this perspectival medley is to drop some winking I-s on the page. And if these pronouns float down here, well so do we, as a famous killer clown—truly a drag monster—tells us.

Our last point for now is an acknowledgement that we are not a drag queen, even if we imagine drag names the way we once came up with infinite band names (like, why have we not heard of a stunt queen named Simone Bile?). Nor are we a drag scholar. We are, as Peaches Christ calls the cult of horror film fanatics, Children of the Popcorn. And we understand drag the way we understand gender. It’s deeply sociological and also highly performative. That’s an oversimplification of contemporary gender discourse and doesn’t adequately take into consideration crucial developments in queer and trans theory—more on that to come—but it’s a reference point for some of the fantastic and horrible things Dragula, and maybe also this writing, can show us. As Drac & Swan say on each episode: dim the lights, start the music, and let the floor show begin!