Fighting the shame society puts on me for being different
‘Fat, northern, brash, lumbering drag queen’ Crystal Rasmussen knows what it is to be judged and to feel selfloathing. The performer’s Fringe show explores a journey to acceptance
Recently someone stopped me after a show. I always flinch when someone stops me after a show – worried either that I’ll be criticised, or, if complimented, that I’ll only let them down in person; that I’m an introvert despite the fact that I’ve just sung about shagging a married man in a Snow White costume on stage.
But this person who stopped me after a show simply said, “You’re so graceful.”
Now, graceful is a word that’s never been used to describe me. I’ve had funny, fab, fat, faggot, but I’ve never had graceful. To me, graceful is something I never thought I could be: grace is usually reserved for the gentle poetics of thin, middle class ballerinas or the fey wristflicks of a specific set of gay men who deploy language like a paintbrush and have countless, interchangeable sets of tortoiseshell spectacles.
But for me – a fat, northern, brash, lumbering drag queen with a self-deprecating streak – graceful always seemed an impossible thing to be. I was taken aback, and as I sipped from a pint of Newcastle Brown Ale and pulled on a rolled-up fag (to the chagrin of my vocal cords) I started to tear-up on this poor audience member who instantly apologised for their choice of words.
“No no, these tears aren’t sad,” I reassured with a wobbly chin shedding flecks of glitter from my beard, “They’re tears of relief.”
Earlier this year, I released a memoir. How glamorous! When I started writing Diary of a Drag Queen I was looking to get paid to go to therapy. I couldn’t afford actual therapy, so I figured I’d put my experience as an underpaid journalist to good use and write a book in which I could excise a lot of the stories of childhood/ teenage/adult homophobia I’d held inside until my midtwenties. Of course, I wanted
to write a book so that people like me could feel seen, and people who weren’t like me could understand a little more about drag, about this thing that people know the face of so well, but don’t know the heart of at all.
The book, and so much of my life and the lives of many queers, is about formulating effective methods by which to bypass the shame society puts upon you for being different. For being queer, or a person of colour, or a woman, or non-binary, or trans, or fat, or working class.
It had been the biggest excavation of all the things I’d internalised about myself: that I’m too much, too big, too fat, too loud, too gay, too feminine. Being too anything weighs down on a person. On these pages I’d written candidly about sex and violence, about love and loss, about self-hatred and about pooing myself in KFC this one time. I had used honesty and empathy as a tool to demonstrate there’s nothing wrong with anything about me. “If I release all these things society thinks are shameful about me into the world, perhaps their mark on me will diminish,” I thought. Very Hannah Gadsby.
But thinking and believing are two different things.
And so I got on stage, a bunch of times, and tried to talk about how I excavated all this ugly, unwanted shame. And every time I got a little closer. But I never quite got there.
I started by talking about drag, about its healing heart: one that is indeed full of glitter and filth and humour, but one that’s also full of tenderness and love, of kindness and a want to lift other people up. Next I talked about love – finding it, losing it, finding it in yourself, losing it, finding it in your queer friends and keeping it, working to believe you’re all the good things they say you are. After this I talked about the liberating power of Madonna, the warpaint that is makeup, about being lucky enough to heal the fractures that being different forces within families. I talked about sex, smoking, about running away and coming back. And yes, they’re all tools in my combat against shame, but when considered in a vacuum none of these things are a cure for shame. While Brené Brown of Tedtalk shame fame, and general all round icon, might say that the cure to shame is empathy, I would argue it’s a lot more than that.
It’s about recoding what you believe about not one or two parts of yourself, but all of them in unison. It’s about believing you don’t deserve to feel shame. I learned this for the first time after I was attacked outside my home in East London in full drag – that I didn’t deserve that kind of violence, and so I don’t deserve the kind of violence my shame caused me to inflict upon myself.
Some people believe shame can be useful – it’s often the most effective method in teaching us what’s right and wrong. When we’re right we’re rewarded, when we’re wrong we’re shamed. But shame is a process of veiling the things that we’ve been told are wrong, not necessarily changing or accepting them. Yes, some things are wrong – like Brexit or racism or single use plastics – but feeling shame about them won’t change them, it will arguably allow their hold upon you to grow. But unveiling these things inside you allows for you to work out whether they’re right or wrong, then to change or celebrate them; and it also allows internal space for other things to exist inside you.
When I was wracked with shame in the past, it showed in the way I carried myself, in the way I spoke and sang – always with a slight inability to let go, to be totally honest, to be completely present. But as the grasp of shame slips away, albeit impermanently and very, very slowly, I’m able to hold all things about me in one place, even if just for a second.
I can be all the things I am, in unison and harmony. I can be an all singing, partially dancing, definitely humorous nuanced non-binary drag queen smoker with a thick northern accent, and I can be all of these things at once.
At least I was recently, when someone stopped me after a show and called me graceful.
There’s no cure for shame, it’s a work in progress. This is what my show at the Edinburgh Festival is about – this work in progress. And who knows, perhaps if you come you might be there on one of the nights where we all, momentarily, press pause on our shame. Where we all get to feel graceful for a good 55 minutes. If not – your money back!*
*obviously not.
● Crystal Rasmussen presents The Bible 2 (Plus a Cure For Shame, Violence, Betrayal and Athlete’s Foot) LIVE! At The Underbelly: Belly Dancer in Edinburgh at 5:50pm from 1-25 August (not 12 Aug). For tickets visit: www. underbellyedinburgh.co.uk
It’s about recoding what you believe about not one or two parts of yourself, but all of them in unison