Reconciling My South by Becoming a King

“Everyone and their mother wants to be a drag king. What I want to know is: what kind of masculinity are you going to bring to the stage?”

I am sitting in an empty nightclub with eight strangers as my soon-to-be drag dad lets the question hang in the air. Why did we all decide to sign up for an intensive drag king workshop? What were we getting ourselves into?

A few months earlier, I had gone to support a friend at his drag show debut, not really knowing what to expect. Although my friends loved sharing gifs of the flamboyant queens on Ru Paul’s Drag Race, they all felt awfully garish to me. But, hey, my friend was performing, and there was a good DJ for the venue, so I went. However, as I stood next to the catwalk, I was shocked by how desperately I wanted to be a drag king. The sheer confidence of those drag kings and queens made me realize that drag was way more than just glamour or passing as a certain gender. Drag was about proving that gender was just a pure performance by taking society’s scripts for male and female behavior and exaggerating those rules to their logical breaking point. As someone who had always been teased for her tomboyish behavior, seeing drag kings just completely own their masculinity made me yearn for something that I didn’t even know I could have, let alone be. And so now, there I was, a baby butch, being asked how I wanted to rebel against the gender roles that I chafed at.

Being asked what kind of masculinity I wanted to perform was a tricky question, especially as I reflected on the weird intersection it had with the rest of my identities. In a few words, I’m a bisexual second-generation Chinese-American woman, living in Boston but feeling like an ex-pat from Atlanta. This set of identities means that I don’t fit in many of the traditional societal dichotomies. Being Asian means I don’t fit in the standard narrative of literal black and white race relations, while bi-erasure is a known issue in both straight and queer communities.

And then there’s the Southern thing.

If you had told me back in high school that I’d become a big Southern apologist, I’d have scoffed at you. Why would I miss the place where “n-word go back to Africa” was scrawled in a bathroom stall? Why would I ever want to move back from Boston, where there wasn’t literally an entire Confederate Mount Rushmore as a tourist attraction?

Yet, I found myself missing the South. It was one thing to have my own personal conflicted feelings about the South; it was quite another to have everyone else around me write off my hometown as irredeemable racist rednecks. Whenever I said I was from Atlanta, people asked me about racism in the South while ignoring Boston’s own troubled history. I read the same op-ed in the Harvard Crimson every couple of years from Southerners, lamenting how little respect their classmates had for them. Meanwhile, mediocre gentrified Southern food was sold for $50 a plate, while my queer friends enjoyed using y’all for its gender-neutral nature as well as to have a bit of spite for the South.

I pushed back on those stereotypes, using my position as a queer Asian woman to explain the good within the South. Yes, Stone Mountain looks really bad on the surface, but you can actually see families of color hanging out there, unlike at many Boston tourist sites. Yes, being a liberal in the South makes you a minority, but it taught me how to listen and respond to people who I violently disagreed with, while still respecting them as human beings.

And so, as the instructor started walking through common drag styles, I found myself scribbling in my notes about my own style of masculinity. I wanted to create a persona that imbibed the duality of the South – to lampoon my character’s ties to an overly boastful masculinity while also treating his perspective with courtesy. I tried to channel the Southern men that I interacted with in high school, recognizing that the foolish “Dirty South” braggadocio my classmates had would eventually mellow out and become the gentleman-like sincerity found in my teachers. In particular, I thought about my history teacher, Mr. Roberts, who had us all give him a firm handshake as we entered the classroom and told us to “make good choices” when we left for the weekend. I wanted to channel his gentle but firm demeanor in my character, while recognizing that this good conscience was buried under a lot of bravado.

I chose the name Jimmie John Deere for myself and bragged about knowing how to shoot the Hooch in my bio. Although the Boston instructors saw my persona as a cowboy, hillbilly, or redneck, I knew, for myself, that this character was none of these things. My character was a proud Georgian – maybe a little too proud – but was someone who’d grow up and become a good father. I graduated from the class performing to Tim McGraw’s “Truck Yeah”, shaking my peach on stage and feeling freer than ever in my queer-Chinese-Southern version of masculinity.

The story would have ended there had I not gotten involved in the #MeToo movement, forcing me to reexamine all my conclusions about masculinity. I finished my drag class in August 2019. In September 2019, several cases of sexual harassment and use of blood money at my workplace resulted in several senior members resigning. I got personally involved in the fray, starting an email thread which inadvertently revealed the misogyny of many people in my department, which included a very famous and senior member questioning the definition of “sexual assault” and the age of consent. Although he was ultimately removed from my workplace, I was left with a lot of trauma for the rest of 2019 as I came to terms with the fact that people and institutions I trusted had betrayed me and other women on a fundamental level.

As I worked through the fallout, I found myself forced to confront my own past – of all the times that I hadn’t spoken up in my Atlanta high school days. Why didn’t I speak up when I saw my gay mentor be harassed while his harassers humped each other in the hotel room? Why did my school tell us not to talk to the press when a boy was expelled for sexually assaulting another student? The desire to emulate the Southern men in my life through drag suddenly tasted extremely rancid. What was there to save about masculinity? About the South? And why was I valorizing both?

Although I came up with my own answers, I realized that I needed an outside perspective to help me. I reached out to my old high school classmates – to my friends, of course, but also to the people who I disagreed with or barely associated with. The popular preppy boys whose Facebooks I combed through to solidify my drag style. The sisters of those boys, who moved so differently through the social sphere than I did. My harassed gay mentor and one of his harassers. I tried to ask the people whose words and stories still haunted me to this day what they thought about Southern masculinity and how they squared away the terrible things that happened at our school with its purported morals.

I’m extremely grateful for the seven people who agreed to talk with me – Alex, Brandon, Chris, Emily, Joshua, Nathan, and Scott*. They honored me by how open and honest with their stories they were with me, revealing how shut my own eyes were.

By far, my most glaring naiveté was not realizing that the privilege that I wanted to embody in my drag was not that of a Southern man, but of a rich white Southern man. I knew that I had gone to an elite private high school in Atlanta; my immigrant parents deliberately took me out of the public school system and sent me here for the academics, in spite of the Christian moralizing. I knew that there was a tension between me and the people who were solely here for very expensive college prep and the children of the Southern gentry, whose last names decorated buildings around Atlanta. While I ignored everything that wasn’t my studies, everyone else in this school felt the white wealth driving the entire school’s mentality.

This was told most dramatically through Nathan’s story, one of the few other Asian-Americans in my school. In high school, he wanted nothing more than to “erase his Asianness,” to distinguish himself as not just another Asian model minority, but to be white. “I ignored all of the negative Asian stereotypes around me, because I wanted to pretend that those things didn’t apply to me.” He cited Eddie, another Asian boy in our grade, who seemed to be winning this game – confident, invited to parties, and always with a gaggle of women. And yet, Nathan recognized, both he and Eddie could never achieve the traditional ideal of the Southern gentleman, that “just by being white and just by living in the South, you’re 60% of the way for some ideal Southern masculinity that Eddie and I could never have.”

This was echoed by Alex, a white woman, as she reflected on the cotillion and etiquette our school tried to encourage within us. “Everyone is perfectly nice as long as you don’t bring up anything remotely controversial,” she stated, “but wasp nests are everywhere.” And, what do you do when your own existence is inherently political to the status quo? She described how she would learn incredibly dark things from people in casual whisper networks, telling me things that I hadn’t even heard about like a black student in our grade finding a noose in his locker. I had no idea how much being Asian blinded me to the fact that there were literal multiple targeted hate crimes at our school that were barely addressed.

I soon found that my upper middle-class background had blinded me to another core tension in the school – its shift from making good Christians to making good CEOs. Founded in the 1950s as part of a white flight trend to protest the integration of public school systems, my school carried an enormous amount of historical baggage with it, including having an annual freshman “slave auction” to fundraise for prom. However, in the 1990s, the school became, as Joshua, a white man, put it, “less about educating the Southern gentry for daddy’s law firm and more about optimizing for the Ivy League.” Prioritizing college outcomes meant that racist legacies needed to be dropped in order to hire a more diverse set of teachers so that competitive students like me would want to come. However, it also meant that the school was left deeply conflicted and without a guiding principle.

Many of the people I interviewed lamented this change. Brandon, a white man, felt that this lack of a greater good to aspire to meant that a new self-centered money-focused philosophy took its place. Emily, a white woman whose family had gone to the school for generations, agreed. “It’s terrible that the older parts of our school are tied in with these historical and racial issues,” she reflected, “but those older parts are also tied in with that Christian tradition of ‘To whom much was given, much will be expected’. Although it’s great that the newer version of the school has people joining now who are more interested in training their brain than gaining clout, there’s just not as much giving back to the community.”

From these conversations, I realized that Mr. Roberts, who I had so wanted to emulate, was part of this shift in values. Midway through that history class, I learned that he actually became a teacher because he was involved in a complex derivatives scam that forced his early retirement. Even in the people I chose to idolize as the “good” of Southern culture merely had a veneer of niceness, hiding naked greed behind nominal Christian morals.

This focus on gentility was one thing that remained consistent about my school, despite its shifting values. My high school promised a fast pass to the good life through this image, that tucking in your shirt and looking people in the eye would help you get ahead just as much as academic performance. Nathan noted that this focus on image was actually part of what attracted all of us to the school in the first place. “The values of Southern masculinity are inherently tied to the core values of the education we received,” Nathan emphasized, “That curriculum gives you power, sure, but those principles are also just good things to do. It’ll take a lot of work to decide what’s worth recycling from those Southern masculine principles.” 

Scott, a white man, agreed. To him, the school indeed tried and confronted the dark incidents I knew about, holding assemblies for the sexual assault incident and the n-word bathroom graffiti. “People care about our school for its rich history and want it to be better,” Scott said, “and while individual people can fail, it’s not necessarily a fault of the institution as a whole.” 

However, Chris, a black man, pointed out that the extent the school was willing to challenge its perception of success often came at the expense of valuing all students equally. He cited multiple friends that had gotten pushed out from the school for wanting ADHD accommodations, concerned that the school chose to preserve its 100% college admissions rate rather than try to adapt its teaching for its students. Reputation and image are important, he agreed, but not if it “comes at the cost of actually doing the work to teach.”

After finishing all of the interviews, my original questions still lingered. Why did I want to valorize cultural aspects that are so tinged with toxicity, whether it’s claiming Southern heritage or performing drag through masculinity? Why did I so desire to perpetuate the things that hurt me in the first place?

It’s not so simple as just saying that my queerness, my Asian background, my femininity absolves me from the classical questions of the South. Although these things provide me with a different perspective to the questions, I still grew up in this environment where racism is deeply internalized within me and could still be given voice by my actions. The fact that I know Asian-American men  who wave Confederate flags is a testament to that. 

For me and other Asian-Americans, it’s so easy to hide behind the label “person of color”, imagining an easy solidarity with the black community, while simultaneously pushing them down in order to bill ourselves as “the model minority.” This tension allowed me to uncritically think of white masculinity as the Southern masculinity to aspire to in my drag and only come to realize the racial aspects through my interviews.

I pressed my interviewees on another eliding label. Did they identify themselves as Southerners? Most would not, preferring to introduce themselves as “from Atlanta.” Chris pointed out that by continuing to use the term Southern we’re still defining a geographic region demarcated by the boundaries of the Confederacy, implying that a historical belief in the institution of slavery is the common bond we all share.

The only people who still defined themselves as a Southerner were me and the two straight white men I interviewed – Scott and Brandon. While both men tempered their observations with a more American solidarity, there was something really jarring about hearing them say the same apologist words I had used to defend the South to Bostonians, that racial tensions weren’t all that bad in the South. The interviews made it extremely clear to me that something deeply embedded in our upbringing was very wrong, something that couldn’t just be explained away by individual actors or even a single institution’s failings.

Yet, all of my interviewees agreed that there was something worth saving in the South. Maybe just small things – the food, the music, the humidity – but important things that you find missing when they’re no longer there. As Scott joked, “If the kids from New Jersey can be proud of a convenience store, then why can’t we take a stand for where we come from? Even if it’s not really something to be proud of?” Though his family has lived in the South for over 300 years and were slaveholders, he noted that “it’s time for me and people like me to stop being scared of change and do the right thing, even if it means getting dethroned from power.”

It all comes back down to my drag dad’s first lesson to me – what kind of masculinity do I want to bring to the stage. There’s an incredibly fine line between reclaiming the South for myself and claiming that those positive aspects justify all of the harm that the South has meant and represented. If toxic masculinity is the exaggeration of the normally positive characteristics of masculinity, then it’s playing with fire to try to use drag – an intentional farcical exaggeration of gender roles – to attempt to deconstruct those ideas.

I’ve realized that I was definitely attracted to playing a white Southern masculinity because I wanted to try on the privilege. Every time I bind my breasts and feel wind on my chest or swagger out on stage with a born confidence I’ve never had, it’s absolutely liberating. But, after my conversations, I’ve realized that play-acting masculinity does not inherently keep me from enacting the same toxic traps that my classmates discussed, even if it’s just a performance on a stage.

As a result, I’ve tried to rewrite the backstory of Jimmie John Deere a little. Just as I confront the complexities of my strange intersectional identity, so too am I asking him to embrace his own queerness. To celebrate his chosen drag family in a gay cabaret number rather than rely on the easy power and heritage of Southern male tropes. To care less about the image of Christian morality and instead ask the hard questions on how to bring those ideals in a just way. And maybe then, he can help the person behind the drag heal a little more too.

* All names used in this piece, including the author’s, are pseudonyms to protect anonymity.

More from The Bitter Southerner