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The next time I suggested my parents come to San Francisco to see me perform in a drag competition, my mom booked her flight and explained away why my dad wouldn’t be able to join. “This goes beyond my limits of understanding, but I love you and know you to be a good person, and this seems to make you happy, so I’ll let it go,” he’d said.
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We’d moved beyond his outright condemnation of me doing drag, but rather than a peace agreement, it had felt much more like a ceasefire arrangement. When I asked him after the show what he thought and how he felt, he simply replied, “Well, you either evolve, or you die,” then shuffled to his Uber and back to his hotel room. Sure, I’d finally convinced my parents to come see me perform back in 2019, but it was clear that my dad was quite uncomfortable, and I suspected he’d mostly done it to appease my mom, who had done some strong lobbying behind the scenes to get him there. This was a vast departure from our discussions about drag over the four preceding years. So, as you can imagine, when I called my parents last year to let them know I’d been vaccinated and was coming home to visit them, I was stunned to learn that my dad wanted me to bring home my drag makeup and put him into drag. It was something to be shunned and condemned, and if someone found themselves a “victim of same-sex attraction,” as they’d referred to it, they better pray hard for God to save them. Queerness was spoken about as something evil and of the devil.
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My dad grew up in a religious, conservative community where, by his own admission, there weren’t any openly LGBTQ+ people. And, as such, he was afraid and critical of it. In fact, the heated conversation we were having in the car on that day was sparked by photos that surfaced of me and my then-partner doing drag in the San Francisco Pride parade.Įven though my dad had a supportive stance around queer sexual orientation, I quickly learned that his understanding of gender-nonconforming behavior and queer gender identity was quite limited. Well, you can probably guess how this turned out. In the same breath, he cautioned me to not be one of “those gays,” going on to add that I shouldn’t make anyone feel uncomfortable or throw my sexuality in their face by “wearing women’s clothes or marching in the Pride parade.” When he realized I was gay, he assured me that although the road ahead would be tough, and my mom would struggle because of her religious convictions, this is who I was, and he’d support me.
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For him ― a physician from central Mississippi who has never lived outside the South, except for a brief stint in Oklahoma for his medical residency ― sexual orientation was part of one’s genetic makeup. This exchange between us was in stark contrast to how my dad reacted when I first came out as gay over 10 years earlier. During this particular episode, my dad was sharing his disdain around my newfound hobby: performing in drag clubs as Mary Lou Pearl. I’d grown accustomed to these types of interrogations on my visits home, and just before I left and was trapped in the car for 45 minutes always seemed to be the best time for my parents to express their concern around how California had “changed” me and question where my life was headed. While this might sound like a parent chastising their young child who got ahold of their iPad, this was a line my dad uttered to me, a queer person in their late 20s at the time, while he was driving me to the airport to fly back to San Francisco after one of my regular trips to Georgia, where I grew up. “You can play ‘dress up’ or whatever, but why on earth would you post these photos on the internet? People will think it’s weird!”