Pride in the Land of Prejudice
by Su Zi
The bar is unpretentious: tucked away in an old L of shops, it used to host biker rock-n-roll—Daytona is closer than an urban commute and the cult of the engine is part of life here. We are a working class community, despite the occasional homes of such as the likes of the Misters Travolta and Steinbrenner. There are many pick up trucks in the parking lot and it is a soft, summer evening of the type only found in the Gulf South: moist, scented, quiet.
The doorman is large, but discrete and does not speak as he holds open the door with his back. It is late enough to go out, evidenced by the gracious expectancy of the bar staff. My coworker's floral Capri trousers glow as we pay our five bucks across a display case filled with T-shirts and other bar-logoed whatnot.
There is an intimate room to the left that hosts a grand piano, the pianist, a few tables, a few people. Across the foyer is the main bar, tables, mirrors—also discrete. One cuts the corner of the dance floor, pretending not to see the DJ behind tinted glass, to sit in the generous, graveled courtyard that has its own bar. It is pleasant to sit on the resin chairs under the umbrella of the table and the elegant umbrella of a sycamore tree; so much so that when a brief rain comes up, we hear it and see it in dry circumspection. The bar hosts two pool tables; a seductive midweek proposition, this place, but it is Saturday night and there is entertainment promised: we are here for the drag show, we are here to meet friends and see the drag show. Eureka! A drag show.
Gentle Reader (to borrow from Mr. Lawrence), in the urban ghettos of gentrification, it may be that the right to drag is pretty old school. The right to be out, even—in a bar, a job, a college classroom—is a liberty won back when. For us, despite the media's technological invasion, the liberty is fragile. Although the beauty of small Southern towns—those sections not spoiled by suburban sprawl—is ever intoxicating, there is ever the darkest danger. Here in Marion County, Florida, violence lurks: violence is being groomed and grain-fed through the fascist undertakings of a few local politicians and the sheriff; vigilantism stirs ever undead.
If we understand fascism to be group-held prejudice backed mostly by military might, extending beyond a few historical charismatics, then we understand the xenophobic, homophobic fervor of today as nothing else but fascism.
Locally, there have been two contributions to fuel this monster: that a local politician went on camera to announce his crackpot idea of sending those convicted of sex crimes to Mexican prisons might just be dismissed as tacky. What is frightening is that the sheriff has had printed and distributed—in Sunday supplement fashion with the local newspaper—a thirty odd page text called "Sexual predators/Sexual Offenders 2005 Address Listing." The contents of this publication mostly are the pictures, names, addresses, convictions, dates of conviction, and dates of birth for over four hundred county residents, listed by zipcode. The preamble to the publication recommends the reporting of "suspicious activity." In his printed letter, the sheriff wants us to make the county "a stronger and safer community." There are also statute definitions for the crimes and for "stalking and harassment," but is this a warning to the convicts or to potential vigilantes?
The publication is a dark, invasive presence, but never mind. Never mind that the publicity caused one person, who lived in the next county, to shoot himself fatally. Never mind that this county is swamped in all forms of patriarchal violence: people beat their partners (dating, married, whatever), pound on their children, and are otherwise filled with rage (road or otherwise) and violence. Never mind that most folks are not native-born to the area. Never mind that the questionable economy is in conflict with the myth of happy-ever-after and is causing dangerous repercussions among the disenfranchised.
The rogue's gallery pictures in the sheriff's publication are not savory-faced citizens. Gentle Reader, they are a scary looking bunch; for the most part, their mutant psyches show. Two of the faces are folks familiar through jobs I held in my decade here. Yet one must wonder at the twenty-year-old woman convicted of "lewd and lascivious exhibition"—to a legal minor, of course. Then there is the person who, at age 17, in DeKalb County, Illinois, was convicted of "sexual abuse" on a "17 year old male." Are teens in trouble for their sex practice the same kinds of citizens as the smiling 47 year old guy convicted of "sex battery and kidnapping with a deadly weapon" near Disney World? The law answers yes: a sex crime is a sex crime; a minor cannot consent and is, by law, taboo.
In this environment, some weeks ago now, there was a picnic held by PRIDE: a miracle upon which the local PRIDE president commented, "We were told we couldn't have events here, but here we are." The picnic hosted somewhere under a hundred people in a drizzle in a park pavilion. The parking lot had a few discretely places rainbow flags and a number of pick up trucks.
In such a land as this, imagine our miracle, our most ferocious glee; a new gay bar, a drag show...hosanna, yippee. It was a blue-collar drag show: the entertainers used the dance floor; the spotlight was a bartender standing on a chair with that heavy lamp on one shoulder, probably the same way he totes bags of livestock feed. The crowd was euphoric. Of course, the entertainers synched to moldy-oldies, but it was great seeing mulleted lesbians stuffing dollars into costume tops, tweaking the performer's tittie; it was great seeing bouncing young men climb the performers like linesmen climbing telephone poles. The four women I was with screamed like witches at one entertainer's cheerleading costume. Of the triad of entertainers, one stripped out of the kind of housecoat routinely sold to Grandmas. Another stood at NBA height in heels and Miss Sound-System-Too-Bad-To-Hear-Name went from a standing jiggle into a full split, then wormed across the dance floor.
Later, waiting to piss, my comment about the bathroom décor—"diamond plate must be de rigueur in Marion County"—made me the moment's friend. One of the entertainers left in a tropic print shirt. Later, I wondered who had been the deputy undercover. Although I personally expected the sheeted freaks to show at the picnic, maybe they don't yet know about the place. Stetson Kennedy said, "You can't call the police when the Klan comes; the police are in the Klan." Certainly, half the bar crowd consisted of the young and delicious and the other half of wage-slaves with weary minds; no better psychic vacation than a linebacker in sequins, me thinks.
Yet ever lurks the shadow of the sheriff and his weird ways. Despite my delight in the drag show, I am frightened. Fear mongering is part of a cop's job, probably, and this fear is multi-fold: to fear the photographed monsters, to fear for the kids the monsters like to destroy, to fear for the noticeable number of older kids convicted, to fear that drag bar patrons will find themselves criminals, or even us, Gentle Reader, criminals of literacy if these words of love be found later obscene.
Su Zi (www.gnosticsuzi.com) has tattoos, smokes cigarettes, drives a pick up truck and has had poetry and prose published in a variety of print and electronic publications, including Natural Horse Magazine, New American Writing, Cosmoetica, The Ocala Star-Banner, Exquisite Corpse, Recursive Angel, Conspire, and Tear.
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