The Stately Drag Queens Of The Portland Museum Of Art

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin

Sometimes a man is hard-pressed to tell a story, to tell a story about things that he only learned about later in life, learned about haphazardly and in some senses in an abstract way, in an abstract right way but abstract nevertheless. Learned some things which his experience, his life experience, is ill-suited for him to try to make sense out of, to try to fit in human language emotions of which he is only distantly capable of conveying, yet is compelled to convey. The story to be conveyed here is such a story and concerns my old growing up friend, Jason Barnes, from Olde Saco, that is up in Maine, coastal Maine for those heathens who want to know, about twenty miles or so from scene of the action here, the Portland Museum of Art located over on Congress Street in that benighted city. Yah, Jason Barnes’ saga is such a story about a man’s abstract knowledge limitations and while it would be better for him to tell it, and maybe he will some day when he reflects on what I say here, it is left to this old scribbler to give his take on the matter as it was explained to him by Jason one night not long ago.

I had not seen Jason for a while, maybe three or four years, until he rang me up one afternoon once he found out from a mutual friend of ours from the Olde Saco days that I had retired from the publishing industry and had moved from the bustle and traffic of Cambridge back up to Ocean City not far from where we grew up (although it might as well be a million planets away from the old Acre projects where we came of age. Since Jason now resides in Kennebunk , also a short distance from Olde Saco, it was an easy fit to meet up at one of our old drinking holes, the Dew Drop Inn in ocean-side Olde Saco, one late afternoon where we in our youth had many a time unloaded many a hard-pressed dollar trying to drink ourselves into some form of salvation, mine from constant women troubles, and he not from those particular woes but others, others unknown to me at the time but certainly did not concern women. After a few drinks, the old whiskey and water of our youth still the drink of choice except now we drank from the high-shelf rather than house whiskey or what passed for whiskey then, he laid out his story, not to seek pity or redress or anything like that but just to tell it, and to ask for some commiseration if not understanding. Commiseration he got that day, the bonds that we could draw on of that emotion going back to boyhood 1950s times in the old Acre projects where we breathed our first.

Now I have to tell you some things about Jason, some things related to the story even though it is going to raise hell with the flow of what he had to say and how I would really want to present what he had to say. It will go a long way to explaining why he got commiseration that late Dew Drop Inn afternoon although not understanding. Like I said Jason and I were thick as thieves from first grade at Olde Saco South Elementary School located in that housing project that I mentioned before and that everybody in town called the Acre (whether to signify Hell’s Acre or God’s Little Acre was, is, a subject for dispute) all the way through high school. We had our share of run-ins with authority, first teachers and parents, later cops and judges. We also had our share, or so it seemed at the time, of successes and failures with girls, the young women who were forever a mystery then (and now).

On that last matter it was frankly all a sham on Jason’s part though. A crying out loud sham, although he didn’t know it at the time, at the time when he was grabbing every stray girl on the beach, the ballroom or Jimmy Jakes’ Diner (the one on Main Street no the one on Atlantic Avenue that catered to the tourists, the French-Canadian tourist who swamped the place in summer making it an outpost of old Quebec), nor how to express it, or how to proceed on his feelings in that benighted 1950s old time French- Canadian Roman Catholic-drenched working class town. See, and this I did not know until many years later when he shocked me with the news after he told me he had been arrested in New York City on Christopher Street in 1969 during what later became known as the Stonewall Rebellion, Jason was gay (or to use the terms of the times and which he used to describe himself then, a fag, queer, a homosexual, although he did not use the term homo).

And Jason said that had always had those feelings from when he was a young boy, a young boy sifting through his mother’s bureau drawers touching her womanly things, getting an unnamable excitement from the rustle of silk and cotton. (Although truth to tell I also did the same things, the same no idea what made women different from men thing except the feeling was not to endure for long). We were both adults at the time of his “coming out” and I certainly knew of homosexual activities (and knew how to say fag, queer and homo, as well as dyke and lessie with the best of them), or had heard about them from others I knew in the newspaper world who were so inclined. But not Jason, not Jason who had a wife and two young children whom he adored and who adored him. Impossible.

It took me a long while, a very long while, to comprehend that hard fact, that he had suppressed his real feelings, had done what was “normal”for the sake of appearance and for the sake of his parents and siblings, had done what was the right thing to cover for the wrong things that he began to investigate, secretly, very secretly began to investigate not long after we left high school. It wasn’t until sometime later when I asked him why he had never “hit” on me, or gave me any overt expression of what he was feeling he said, I, kind of bookish, kind of full of a guy full himself, and kind of scrawny, was not his type, his type being muscle beach boys then. He made me laugh when he said he would watch the muscle guys that did their work-outs on Olde Saco Beach every summer and figure that they were the essence of manliness not realizing that many of those brethren were as gay as he was. In any case later, later when he began to act on his desires he actually favored bookish guys, although he had no taste for scrawny ones. With that remark, after the laughter settled down, we were undying friends again.

So with that information out of the way we can proceed with what Jason told me that barroom afternoon, told me about himself more that I had heard about before in order to understand why he was upset by what happened at the art museum. Sometime after Jason “discovered” who he really was, and acted on it by divorcing his wife and moving to the Soho district down in New York City just before it became the big arty place to be he had a further identity crisis. Or rather exploring his sexuality further than he had done previously, previously when he was keeping himself deep in the closet and having to spend all his emotional and physical energy on keeping that hard lid on, he found that he really did like that old time feeling he got when he put on his mother’s garments (and later, in deep secret, his wife’s things on occasion). He didn’t believe he was a woman necessarily but he knew that he felt more than just being a gay man. So he started to hang out at the High Hat Club, a joint off of Soho where there were nightly drag queen performances. You know some big burly guy dressing up and performing Mae West or some blonde, and making the boys tittle. Harmless stuff really, and nobody’s business.

One night though, a slow Monday night Jason thought, they had what we now call an “open mic” at the club and for three dollars you could dress up and go up and strut your stuff, and see if the boys were tittled. Now I know this “open mic” stuff from other milieus, the ever ready folkies filling up local coffeehouses with their plainsong plea, comedy clubs looking for fresh talent, poetry slams and so on but I was never hip to the drag queen scene and how they discovered new talent. All I knew was that at the end of Olde Saco Beach, down the far end, the very end there used to be a club my mother (and if I recall Jason’s too) warned us against, the Rock Haven, an old converted boat where female impersonators did their thing.

So this one night Jason decided to strut his stuff. He gave more details that I needed to know about the arts of breast enhancement, leg and face shaving, and the terrible problems with make-up worthy of some of the women I have known but this not about the trials and tribulations of drag queens as such so I will not proceed further along that course. I don’t know if he had a boyfriend at the time, a steady guy anyway, but he went on stage that night and did a smoky version of jazz-singer Peggy Lee’s Cry Me A River. The boys went wild, went crazy and he had more dates than he could handle for a while. Moreover he turned that night’s performance into an act at the club for the next several years, a paying act, which provided him, along with generous boyfriends, mainly older, with enough to live on for a while.

The problem though like with all women is that once the aging process starts, starts its inevitable toll the boys were looking for fresh meat, fresh songs and fresh daisies. Jason also said he was tired of the scene, more so after many, too many friends contracted AIDS and so he went back to his profession, his trained profession as an architect for a firm outside of Boston. And so he did that and still does that kind of work, lives a quiet life with his lover and husband, Gus (husband of late once the good citizens of Maine finally got it right on the same-sex marriage question). A good solid citizen of the Pine Tree state and still is.

But what got Jason so upset, so knotted up that he had to tell Joshua Breslin of his incident at the art museum. Well, here is the way he told it to me. He had wanted to see the travelling exhibit from the Museum of Modern Art, the Payson Collection of mainly modern art so he went there one weekday to do so. While viewing Pablo Picasso’s Boy With A Horse he noticed that an older woman, a woman dressed rather shabbily, no, rather haphazardly with a hat popular in about 1956 that did not go with her outfit, a jacket that did not match with her skirt, and wearing sneakers, New Balance, topped off by huge ill-fitting glasses and some almost ghoulish make-up that did nothing for her was watching him intensely. A mess thought Jason at first and second glance. Now this is important because even as a kid Jason had a feline, well let’s call it a feline, sense of style, even if he, we, couldn’t do anything about it, not having two dimes to rub together most days. So this woman’s look offended his sense of order but he let it pass.

While Jason was viewing a Matisse though he noticed this old shipwreck was staring at him again, staring closely, and did so for a couple of minutes. Then this wreck yelled out “Peggy, Peggy Lee, it’s me Judy Garland,” Jason shrank for he knew very well the reference could only be directed at him, and only by someone who knew him from New York City in the old days, his old drag queen days. And he knew further that “Judy Garland” was none other than Dick Jones (aka Rita Jones, and several other names as well, girl’s names of course) whom he worked with (and competed, furiously competed with, as they all did for those boy titters) at various location in that city. So Jason knew, despite all caution that he needed to talk to her, talk quickly and quietly.

The upshot of the whole thing was that the shipwreck, let’s call her Judy to keep things straight, was in town for one day, one night really, doing her Judy act down at the Sandbar Club. Jesus, Jason thought don’t old queens know enough to give it up. He also could not imagine the clientele that would pay, pay good money or bad, to see a sixty-something drag queen under any circumstances. Jason had the good sense to stop performing before he wound up in some such circumstances. And that is really why Jason wanted to discuss this whole thing with me, me rather than Gus, who would have been nonplussed by the whole thing. Besides Jason really wanted to talk about getting old, about our getting old, and not about the stately if faded drag queens of the art museum. He said seeing Judy made him for the first time feel old. Welcome aboard, brother. But get this- every time I think about the image of that faded drag queen waiting for the other shoe to drop I finally realized why I could only commiserate with Jason and not show understanding. Jesus.