December 28, 2008
Queens of Heart
My friend Jan Haaken is a woman for all seasons. Not only does she teach psychology at Portland State U. in Oregon, but she’s got a radio political talk show in that city, a psychotherapy practice informed by serious Freud and serious feminism, and a flowering career as a film producer and director. Jan was visiting New York earlier this month and brought me a copy of her wonderful documentary Queens of Heart: Community Therapists in Drag. Note to sex politics devotees and lovers of cinema that’s both thoughtful and a romp — go get it, now!
The film is about an outré drag club run for decades in Portland by Darcelle XV (real name Walter Cole), a septuagenerian gay activist and a man. He and his burlesque crew do bachelorette parties for young women — many of them surburban, fundamentalist Christians — who are about to have very straight weddings and want to get wasted and rowdy before they tie the knot.
Film director Jan Haaken
Jan always looks beneath the surface. I got to know her years ago, when everyone was still arguing whether “recovered memories” of childhood sex abuse were “real” or “false.” Jan was underwhelmed by the question (though she was passionately against the witch hunts which the “memories,” or whatever they were, were creating on therapists’ couches and in police stations and court rooms). She was far more interested in exploring the political and cultural truths-or- consequences of this overheated phenomenon. She wrote Pillar of Salt: Gender, Memory, and the Perils of Looking Back, which explores those deeper truths. It’s the smartest book around on the subject, and the most feminist.
Queens of Heart is equally intelligent. Jan chose the title because she thinks Darcelle XV and her fellow entertainers function as psychiatrists for their public. Strutting around in over-the-top, slinky femme outfits, and shaking their falsie boobs in drunk customers’ faces, the male performers “are walking Rorschach cards, and they have to understand what they arouse in people,” Jan said while talking with me recently about the film. “What goes on between performers and audience is like a therapeutic encounter.”
Some of what the performers arouse is a level of public sexual aggression from their female audience that hardly comports with stereotypes about womanly decorum and passivity. In one scene in Queens of Heart, a cute, conservative-looking young thing marches toward a drag performer on stage and proceeds to slide her hand up and up and up to his crotch — much to the 
consternation of the dancer, who responds with tactful revulsion, like a woman who’s being harassed but has to make nice to stay on the job. Another dancer later notes that in gentlemen’s clubs, it’s illegal to touch real women dancers’ real breasts or genitals. But at the drag joint, it’s perfectly OK to go after fake women’s fake bits. In fact, fakery seems to be what emboldens the female customers. They know they’re touching men, but these men are clowns. Clowns who look like women, so tonight it’s OK to touch women, too. Then, tomorrow, those who did the touching will be dressed in white, tripping down the aisle at the local Assembly of God Church.
Couple at a drag ball. Diane Arbus, NYC 1970
“There’s a lot of this touching in the drag clubs by women,” Haaken says. “In women’s studies and what’s called ’spectatorship theory,’ the typical view is of women in sex clubs being preyed upon, and men doing the preying. But women can be predatory regarding gay men. I’m interested in breaking up the simplistic view of a dichotomy between the predatory male stance and the more innocent, female stance” Haaken says. “I was trying to take a fresh look by turning the camera on the audience, not just asking “Why do drag performers do this?” but “Why do people come? What are they experiencing?”
We talked about drag as “role inversion ritual.” That’s a term used by anthropologists to describe the way cultures institutionalize behaviors that reverse everyday social roles — the poor act rich and the rich act poor, for instance, or men dress like women and women like men — to momentarily create a sense of transgression, but ultimately to celebrate and buttress inequalities of the status quo.
“Why aren’t Darcelle’s performances for straight people simply another role inversion ritual?” I asked, “something that even Rick Warren could have fun at?” “I think there are some people for whom drag clubbing is an inversion ritual,” Jan said. “But the way that performers at Darcelle’s talk back to the audience makes it different.” Indeed, they do talk back, “challenging audiences not to just passively consume,” as Jan puts it. Queens shows the performers poking fun at brides’ churchiness and their aspirations to marry in white, and challenging drunken male customers who throw macho weight around during the show.
Still, Jan says, the club in itself is not the whole point. The point is the larger community of gay liberation politics, which is particularly strong in Portland. “For many people [Darcelle's] is their first exposure to what they understand is gay culture,” Jan notes. “If it were the only representation of queer culture it would be more problematic than it is nowadays.
Heavy messages like this are embedded in Queens, but it’s also got a lot of surface fun: great female impersonating, terrific music, and a sense of serendipity. Jan knows how to mix work and pleasure. To get money to do the film, she and her long time partner (a man) did a fund raiser at the club which included getting married — with drag queen Darcelle officiating. That’s not in the film, but its spirit lies beneath.
Queens of Heart is being distributed by Cinema Libre (click here), where you can order it for $19.95. It’s also available at Netflix and Amazon.