The endless courage of trans and queer people to make themselves seen and heard within this fucked-up and increasingly fascist chapter of our shared history is nothing short of miraculous. “Make Me Feel Mighty Real: Drag/Tech and the Queer Avatar,” a group show at Honor Fraser, should best be understood as an altar erected in tribute to that miracle—a jewel-encrusted, blasphemous smooch planted on the stiletto heel of the Divine.
Positing drag as a primary technology in constructing social and lived worlds, the exhibition’s cocurators—Jamison Edgar, the gallery’s director, and Scott Ewalt, a New York–based artist and DJ—took their cues from decades of drag performers and performances, fostering a très-gay aesthetic of off-the-scale too-muchness. In this embrace of excess, Edgar and Ewalt used virtually every square inch of the space. A reception desk at the back of Honor Fraser, for example, became a narrow projection surface for HOUSE OF AVALON’s video piece CYBERNATED EXTRACTS #501, 2023, while a longer wall directly opposite another (but still functioning) reception desk at the front of the gallery featured a smattering of materials from the Greer Lankton Archive at Pittsburgh’s Mattress Factory. Visual polyphony was valued over spatial equilibrium, and sometimes, as with the Lankton installation, this was not to the advantage of the artist. Still, on the whole, the risk was worthwhile, as there were moments when the overall anarchy was joyfully echoed in individual pieces, such as the glittering accumulative “Shroud” sculpture series, 2021–, by Max Colby, and the visionary avatars populating Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s web project BLACKTRANSARCHIVE.COM, 2021.
A sense of political urgency hinging on the ever-mutating linguistic and representational orders corralling and puncturing diverse gender experiences coursed through the exhibition. These aspects were not framed as eccentric fly-by-night moments in history, but as key technologies necessary to destroy and expand any calcified hegemonic notions of sex. Considered in this way, drag performers should be understood as some of the most brilliant gender engineers of our times. Long vitrines in the show’s first room, filled with items sourced from Ewalt’s personal collection of cultural ephemera produced between the 1950s and early 2000s, underlined this point beautifully. The selection offered here admitted that key distinctions between “trans” and “drag” presentations and experiences have not always been so neatly delineated. The earliest examples of this phenomenon included kink maestro Irving Klaw’s “transploitation” publications (e.g., Femme Mimics, 1954), Leonard Burtman’s fetish rags (such as “Maid to Please,” 1958), and a smattering of glamorous eight-by-ten glossies of old-school queens such as Kim August, Dorian, and Kitt Russell. Other cases featured material of a more recent, punkier, and New York–centric vintage: Wigstock posters (created by Ewalt), event flyers, a copy of Candy Darling’s diaries covered in pink vinyl published in 1997, and LPs by Joey Arias, Jayne County, Divine, and Sylvester.
“Make Me Feel Mighty Real” was not flawless, perhaps a necessary shortcoming of its ambition. Most notable was the fact that the masculine-leaning forms of drag were largely (though not entirely) absent and thus were denied the benefit of the show’s generative energy. This viewer was sad not to see examples of Del LaGrace Volcano’s mutating photographic practice, the big MC energy of Carmelita Tropicana’s alter ego Pingalito Betancourt, the true heart of swagger that is Dred, the many kings snapped by Catherine Opie, Marga Gomez’s myriad butch characters, and Gotham’s very own Murray Hill, the self-described “hardest working middle-aged man in show business.”
Making room for some of these innovators would have been in alignment with the show’s stated goals, expanding the language around the elasticity of drag as tech. As this offering articulated, via its astute timing and embrace of voracious visual pleasure, there is an ongoing need to build connections across drag practices and trans embodiments—especially as current legislative initiatives take aim at queens and trans folks alike, be they children or adults, labeling all gender nonconformists as “unnatural” and “pariahs.” Resilience in the face of these dire circumstances is to be found by joining together—and this would involve, in some way, taking up the imaginative task at the exhibition’s heart.
— Andy Campbell