the transformation sequence

harrison cook

Glitterous Rex hatched from a pean-historic drag egg. That’s the smarmy genesis of the drag queen concept living inside my head since late 2019. I’d just started watching Rupaul’s Drag Race every week with the religiosity of a devoted sports fan with my gay friends in Chicago. We all had a drag queen name. The fictional character of ourselves who has the courage to wear anything under the lens of critique, roast any hater on the spot, and who, of course, levitates down that runway like some goddess from myth. With tones of canary yellow laced in every outfit, Karl transformed into Baby Gouda. Sleek and angular, Simon transfigured into Sylvia Satrease. But I never saw my drag queen, Glitterous Rex, in the same cute cellophane light. To me, she hatched from her egg to terrify the world of men. Not to friend them. She parts the eggshell, spindles of goo stretching, sliding down the porous exterior. She emerges, wearing an acid green dress, flecks of color on the fabric Trompe-l’oeil reptilian or avian features, perhaps as a creature caught in the stages of evolution itself. Pink glitter T-Rexes glint as the heels of her shoes. And as she takes one step forward, the illusion of my drag queen evaporates in a prism mist. The name, “Glitterous Rex,” implies a certain level of expertise. I can talk the talk. I can't walk. Literally: I’ve never crammed my size fourteen shoe into a set of high-heeled shoes, but when I picture myself stepping into Glitterous Rex there is a certain stillness and wholeness required of myself—the artist—that now, I find myself lacking. 

I remember Lady Gaga’s 2013 Vanity Fair cover spread, misplaced between Popular Mechanics and a Farmer’s Almanac in the grocery store. Topless, hair grayed, sylvan almost, Gaga was coming off her The Fame Monster album and writing the bangers from Born This Way. I saw the other copies safely tucked in the lifestyle section. Perhaps it was the forced juxtaposition bringing me to pick up Vanity Fair like a magnet picks up a loose nail. I flipped through the gloss pages, past perfume, and cologne samples, glued, folded, and sealed, past clothes my family couldn’t afford even in their dreams, and found the feature on Mother Monster herself near the middle. She wore a dress crafted by Alexander McQueen, featuring Renaissance figures as a gold trim around crimson and olive green. Her spread in that little number looks like Lady Gaga in a crimson veil. She wore the same dress at the VMA’s in 2010, though then she sported a vertical feather, instead of the magazine’s crystal crown. I remember sneaking the magazine into my mother’s grocery cart. She was on the phone, distracted, and loaded the cart onto the cashier’s belt two items at a time. Though I’d start a collection of Lady Gaga fashion shoot magazines, the 2013 Vanity Fair Style issue painted a scaffolding, provided the bones for Glitterous Rex, stomping down the runaway, a moment frozen in time, when she flips her dress, and looks at the audience through a thin veil and they are petrified. 

McQueen, the documentary released in 2018, follows the brilliant, but brief, career of the fashion designer Alexander McQueen. There is an architecture of cruelty McQueen’s fashion combats against. He aimed to elevate the female form to that of a mythic status. His women wore armor, metal scales, brass breastplates, protecting from the brutalism waiting outside the studio. In the film, he talks about a friend who almost died, due to spousal abuse, and the transformation it instilled within his work moving forward.  McQueen said in the documentary,“I like men to keep their distance from women, I like men to be stunned by an entrance. I’ve seen a woman get nearly beaten to death by her husband. I want people to be afraid of the women I dress.”

One retelling of the Medusa myth interprets the defilement of Athena’s tomb as an act of rape and repaints the virgin goddess in a merciful light. She transformed Medusa into the snake-haired, talon bearer, with eyes that turn anyone who looks upon them into granite, we know and see today, so she wouldn’t be abused again. Though, in college, I found this interpretation fails when Athena later equips Perseus with mythical weapons to slay “the monster,” of Medusa. We remember Medusa as the monster, forget she was once a woman, devout to her goddess, known for her beauty and intelligence.

Medusa, or in these cases, the costume of her, is missing from her myth as notable drag queens invoke her image. Season one of RuPaul’s Drag Race, Shannel lip-synced for her life as Medusa, and when she dropped, her headpiece ripped from her cowl up to her scalp. Season thirteen contestant, Denali, wore an albino python rendition of Medusa, an arrangement of snakes, flaring out into a cobra-like crown. Season thirteen winner (sorry for the spoilers) Symone wore a Grecian white dress with golden armor covering her left side. A wig of grey dreadlocks, arranged like darting snakes with golden heads, fan around her head like rays from the sun. Symone invokes Perseus and Medusa, the story of the myth, misinformed hero, and misunderstood monster. She slayed. 

The transformation from gay man into immaculate woman is my favorite part of Drag Race. Artists armed with makeup, bedazzle tackle boxes of the stuff, shape and paint the male face, dissolving our jawlines, cheeks, stubble and eyebrows into sleeker, rounder geometries. A drag queen’s face is painted for the light. 

As a child, I whirled around my living room, spinning, and twirling the remote or mop handle, waving my magic wand like Sailor Moon herself who played on the screen. Stars spiraled to her nails, painting them red, while diamonds and prisms of light made her uniform, ribbons changed into ruby knee-high boots, with a halo materializing into a crested headband. Galaxies and stars streamed in the background giving the illusion of acceleration through the blue cosmos. Every time “Fighting evil by moonlight/Winning love by daylight” boomed from the speakers, I’d sprint to turn up the volume. When Sailor Moon armored herself to fight for truth and love, I mimicked her, closed my eyes, weaving a painting with my body, and for a brief, brilliant movement, I was left transformed. 

For Glitterous Rex’s debut, I’d need one roll of duct tape and one 6’1” fabricated egg to conceal my dress. I don’t know what the duct tape is for, but most drag queens, especially on Drag Race carry one. When I close my eyes, I see Glitterous Rex, walking on stage, the egg covering her. A knife cuts the egg from the inside and when the egg splits open, she walks forward, wearing a dress the color of a split mirror. As she’d sissy that walk, the audience would be forced to look at themselves through the lens of Glitterous Rex. 

Yet when I look in the mirror, I wait, standing there in the bathroom, with the emerald lipstick always about to touch my lips. I wait for the cool color to smear across my mouth, but it doesn’t. The monstrous part of me is always waiting for the transformation sequence, for her to roar, “Glittoral powers activate!”

about the artist

Harrison Cook is the deputy managing editor for Guesthouse and a contributing writer for Hi-Fructose. His work has been published in Gay Mag, Foglifter, Slate, and elsewhere. He is currently working on a queer memoir about football. Harrison can be found on Twitter: @CookHarrisom.