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10
Feb 20Beginnings
I look at the feather fan, and I’m immediately taken back to 1999, and the first Feast Festival I ever attended. I was in my first year of my PhD, my supervisor was a queer academic, and invited me and couple of other postgrads to come along. My supervisor was also taking part in the biggest Drag King group, known as Ben Dover and His Beautiful Boys – all 16 of them at the time. One night, I went to a drag queen performance night, and I think I fell in love. Not in love with anybody exactly, but in love with the queer world. I loved the colours, glitz, make-up, feathers and the sheen of all the costumes. I loved the shoes the performers wore, knowing I’d be hospitalised immediately if I tried a pair on. I loved the performances, the parodies, the lip-syncing. I was reading Judith Butler’s “Gender Trouble” at the time, and it all kinda of made sense to me even if I would come to understand queer and queerness in other ways later on. Those boa feathers and fans symbolised a different kind of freedom of expression, one far more interesting than the predictability of the straight world. Fifteen years later, I finally came to realise what I knew all along – I’m bisexual. Thinking back, 1999 was a beginning of a kind while I was busy paying attention to all things feathers.
