Jo’s Reviews > Gay Bar: Why We Went Out > Status Update

"A drag queen - a good drag queen - is not there to mock women, but to transcend the limitations of masculinity."

"The gay roots of pop culture is an embattled terrain of making the people happy and being readily dismissed as insipid."

"Now drag is everyone's escapism - perhaps more like it used to be. Camp is the stuff of wedding reception. Doing the YMCA is a first-world coping mechanism. Over-identifying with the diva vocals of spurned women is no longer the sole prerogative of gay men."

On 'queer community': "We hear the word 'community' all the time. Often it sounds like wishful thinking. Queer community is just as vague - just piling a confusing identity onto an elusive concept. Maybe 'community', as Famous says, excludes inherently. At the word 'community', both of us are prone to hear 'clique'."

Re a Wolfgang Tillmans video installation: "The video made me consider the nightclub as a site of loss - losing inhibitions, your friends, your possessions, yourself. It's a place to find something through abandonment."

"Memoir is how you groom yourself. Memoir is drag."

On the 'gay shame' movement: "It seemed though that the group's intent was generally less about introspection & more about being enlightened queers rebuking benighted gays - in which case, shame was not a reclaimed affect, but a verb: a wagging finger."