The women at Hair of the Nation magazine aren’t the only ones that think women can’t do any of this.
In a recent interview with Salon.com, author and activist Lissa Waldman shared her personal experience of being asked to perform in drag by drag queens and the ways in which she had to take a backseat to the men in drag, which made her feel like she was doing something wrong.
Waldman, who is also the founder and president of the feminist nonprofit All Women’s Foundation, shared the story of one of her drag performances that was recently performed by drag queen and activist Mandy Lee in a small town in Tennessee.
The performance was held on August 14th at the Tennessee-based Hollie’s Lounge, which is owned by a gay couple who are openly gay.
“I was told that my performance would be a bit ‘out there,'” Waldman said, adding that she had never done drag before.
“It was actually very difficult, and I really didn’t know what I was doing.
I think I just assumed that I was a drag queen because I had an accent.”
Waldman explained that her performance had a lot of “dancing and singing and making fun of my drag name and my accent.
She said she also did a quick dance with the drag queen’s name on it, and then started a little bit of a dance.
It wasn’t until after I was done with my dance that I realized that my dance partner was not a drag performer, that she was actually a transgender woman.”
She continued, “I was kind of confused and a little uncomfortable and embarrassed, and that I had to ask her to stop because I thought she might be offended that I asked her to dance.”
I didn’t think I was performing a drag act, she said.
I was just performing my own act.
“A quick search on YouTube reveals that Mandy’s performance was actually quite successful, winning a nomination for the 2018 Drag Race.
The performance, however, had a couple of issues.
First, Waldman had to be very careful with how she performed the dance, as the performers she had performed with in drag before weren’t allowed to perform drag in public spaces.
When the drag queens did perform, they were usually performed in a more “downtempo” style than the drag women she was about to perform with.
“But I was like, ‘You’re going be funny because you’re trans.’ “
[The drag queens] would just have this kind of, ‘Oh, you’re going to be funny, so you’re not going to look like a woman,'” Waldmann explained.
“But I was like, ‘You’re going be funny because you’re trans.’
I had a different accent.
I had my hair, I had makeup on.
I didn’t have a wig on.
So that made it a little tricky.”
So she made a choice to perform the performance with the transgender woman who had to perform alone.
Waldeman said that while she was very excited about the result of her performance, it didn’t feel like it was being done in a professional way.
“I had to do my own thing,” she said, explaining that she wasn’t allowed into the room with anyone else, and her performance was so poorly done that it was almost unprofessional.
This performance was supposed to be a “mockumentary,” she explained, but the whole performance had to look “out of place.”
The next night, Waldmans performance was performed at a different venue, but she said that there was one other drag queen who had not yet performed the performance and the whole experience felt awkward and “off.”
“She was really nervous, she was kind a little nervous about how the performance was going to go, and she wasn.
And she had this really bad look on her face,” Waldman recalled.
“So I said, ‘No, I’m going to perform this as a mockumentary, you know?
This is supposed to look out of place.
This is going to feel like an act, and you’re doing this thing.’
And it’s a very good act.”
The transgender woman said that during the performance, she realized that she hadn’t done her performance very well, as Waldman was performing the same act as a drag woman.
“And then she goes, ‘So what?
I’m not a woman.
I’m trans.
I have this look on my face,'” Waldm said.
In an effort to rectify the situation, she decided to ask the transgender performer, and the trans woman agreed to perform her own performance.
At the end of the performance Waldmans “dress-up” became even more of a drag performance than before, and Waldman felt like she had done enough