You might not know this, but Hosanna escaped from the Red Light. We haven’t seen her for several weeks. With her petticoats and her lace, her make-up and her false eyelashes, and above all her air of poverty, she would have taken to their heels one of these evenings. Some would have seen her wandering near the Jacques-Cartier bridge with her friend Cuirette, both holding hands. The craziest rumors say that she would have settled on the South Shore. Maybe she had had enough of the sequins and the spotlights. A character from the Main in a dingy bungalow in a sanitized suburb, we had never seen that! Michel Tremblay must have had insomnia.
It is even said that the most famous drag queen of Quebec theater would read children’s books in a library lost between Candiac and Saint-Constant, preaching the good word to the little ones without forgetting to tell them not to jostle in the ranks.
So what happened to our drag queens? “It’s the fashion,” mumbled a radio presenter who didn’t think so well. Because, the phenomenon is not only Quebec. He is global. It’s not just in Sainte-Catherine that the “mad women” have recycled themselves in the “tale” for children. At Uncle Sam’s, the Duchess of Langeais long ago traded the gold of the stage for the canteens of daycare centers in order to preach the good gendered word. According to Timeson the British Isle of Man, a drag queen reportedly explained to children aged 11 and 12 that there were 73 “genders” – not one more, not one less – and above all how one could take from a girl a piece of skin to make her a penis.
One would almost miss the legend of Hermaphrodite. Remember, the one who became both man and woman after being attacked by a naiad while bathing in the lake of Caria. It was still something else!
When it comes to imitating the United States, France is never outdone. So we saw drag queens in a library near Rennes presenting, in partnership with the Ministry of Culture, a show called
One of a kind. In Paris, in the XIIIe district, near the Butte-aux-Cailles, a reading workshop invited one as a speaker. In Bordeaux, as part of the month of early childhood on equality between girls and boys, one of them organized a “sensory make-up” workshop for children aged 18 months to 4 years. Same thing in Toulouse, where Shanna Banana and Brandy Snap read books in a youth center in the Saint-Cyprien district.
Each time, it obviously creates a buzz. And the hurry to be surprised… and to take it easy. As if it did not flow from source that these pseudo-spectacles were ultimately only mediocre re-education sessions intended to propagate the flat morality of gender theory. The operation does not deceive anyone. When will strippers and go-go boys to teach children to brush their teeth?
Once mistresses of subversion who laughed at gender and sexual ambivalence, here are our drag queens transformed into sad commissioners of the good gendered word. Here is the “forbidden to forbid” metamorphosed into “do-not-do-not-do-that… and don’t forget to wash your hands”. What a sad end for those who were the masters of misunderstanding, of the second degree, of equivocation and ambiguity. But you have to make a living…
Far be it from me to despise these artists. Long after Michel Tremblay’s play, Mathieu Amalric’s sumptuous film, Tour, reminded us of the baroque beauty of the burlesque world of which drag queens have always been a part. Except that once the spotlights have been turned off and the curtain has fallen, the skilful game of seduction turns into a little catechism, the voluptuous disguises into caricatures of women bordering on sexism and the burlesque fantasy inherited from the carnival into socialist realism with sauce happy.
We are far from the derision of Michou, who died barely three years ago, and who, to wake up the Parisian nights, had put on a parody with his friends, a dry cleaner who sang out of tune and a bartender friend of the regiment, before to become the queen of Montmartre. At least, the “man in blue” will not have seen this decline, he who whistled two bottles of champagne a day and said that the water was “to wash your buttocks”.
A strange phenomenon worthy of a Puritan era which sees drag queens colonizing daycare centers and the cultural press lecturing us. When the Duchess of Langeais takes herself for Madame Bec-Sec and Hosanna for a pastor of diversity, it is an understatement to say that we have changed times.
“Children should be indulgent towards grown-ups”, you will tell me in the words of Saint-Exupéry. We can not say so well. Please, let us restore their neutrality to schools and libraries, their innocence to children and their fantasy to drag queens. Mixing genres is not always a success. When art degenerates into morality, it is neither good for art nor for morality.