Tom Rasmussen is putting on makeup. Pats of powder, streaks of highlighter. “The transformation is slow,” they write in their new memoir, “Diary of a Drag Queen.” (Tom, who is nonbinary, takes the pronoun “they.”) A presence is quietly building: louche, discerning. It belongs to Crystal, Tom’s onstage persona, a fabulously wealthy singer and the co-author of the book. (Crystal also happens to be a serial divorcée, a murderess, and the lost Romanov duchess—on page 339 of “Diary,” we find out how Rasputin died.) But back to the mirror. “There’s no aha moment,” Tom continues. “It’s more like a dragon slowly awakening: its wings are my femininity, its fire is the belief she gives me that I can do anything, its thick scales are my ability to draw immense strength from my glorious transgression.” At last, Crystal, fully summoned, interjects with her trademark bold italics: “Dracarys, bitch! ”
Crystal is Tom, but bolded, italicized. One author reads as a human being. The other, touching down and then departing in a rain of glitter, feels more like a force of nature. “I was always inexplicably performative, lewd, flamboyant,” Tom writes. Growing up, in Lancaster, England, they were enthralled by women: by their mum and grandma, who evinced a “heady mix of northern savageness and warmth,” and by Madonna and Celine Dion. The diary—mostly narrated by Tom, with spicy assists from Crystal—spans the year between December 18, 2015, and December 17, 2016. When the curtain rises, Tom, a twentysomething transplant in New York City, is working as a personal assistant in the fashion industry, where their duties include sexting the boss’s boyfriend. (“Last night, about 4:00 a.m., wrapped in cum-soaked Calvin Klein Egyptian-cotton sheets, I realised I had to quit my first job in fashion.”) Broke and disillusioned, Tom moves to London, where Crystal reunites Denim, her longtime drag supergroup. The book is a whirlwind of anecdote: there is poop, drugs, Kentucky Fried Chicken, karaoke, leather orgies, even a broken marriage engagement. As Tom describes alienating family dinners and Crystal recalls her own challenges (“You all remember the James Franco thing? Where he was found, shoulder deep, in my asshole and had to self-amputate after 127 hours?”), a division of labor emerges. Tom covers the nuance, doubt, and uncertainty of being a drag queen. Crystal covers the transcendence.
Similarly, the book itself is a mix of larger-than-life provocation and smaller, more relatable gestures. Tom walks a delicate line between entertaining the reader, shocking her (in one harrowing scene, a stranger verbally harasses Tom and then punches them in the face), and asserting characters’ everyday humanity. “Diary” is acutely aware of the trade-offs between drama and empathy. “The problem,” Tom writes, “is that when you paint on this barrier [makeup], people no longer see you as a person: in drag you’re either sub- or superhuman.”
It is in part to restore characters to themselves that “Diary” threads its storytelling with explanation and analysis. “This book hopes to make academic concepts accessible to my mum, or me five years ago, using my life as the means to do that rather than using lofty language,” Tom has said. The memoir preëmpts tired critiques of drag culture, such as the idea that makeup shrouds one’s true self (“choosing how you want to look is the definition of authentic”) or that drag is inherently misogynistic. (“Femininity, when repossessed from fossilized ideas of what it should be, whether by drag queens or women, becomes a place of play, of beauty, of power,” Tom argues.) Drag unveils itself, throughout, as an art form tied to creative close-reading. Onstage, Crystal is a captain of subtext, her “glorious transgression” “proving that being a misfit is the best place to be.”
But, on the page, Tom’s more didactic passages can leave little room for interpretation. “It’s stupid to think drag queens are stupid,” they write. Or: “What was cracked by others, I put together and sealed with sequins and lipstick and feathers.” For understandable reasons, the book appears not to entirely trust its audience, and that leads it to eschew certain forms of nuance and indirection. The role that Tom has chosen, that of ambassador or guide, involves the practical challenge of titrating the mysterious with the familiar. Ethical questions arise, too. At what point does outside attention turn invasive? What separates entertainment and exploitation? These issues pressurize Tom’s story of being attacked by a stranger. No sane person would enjoy reading about hate crimes, but the incident is darkly gripping, the threat seeming to slacken and then grow taut as, for a haunting moment, Tom and Crystal come face to face. (“ ‘Get up! Get up!’ Crystal urged as she stood over me, watching my blood pool onto the pavement.”) While the tale is told with care and sensitivity, it’s lurid, ipso facto, and it highlights the extent to which Tom and Crystal, as narrators, must expose their own pain.
In the end, “Diary” manages to be several things at once. Conjuring a sex club, Tom serves simultaneously as ethnographer, poet, and participant. “Upon entry,” they write, “a sea of shadowed bodies in various states of undress and pleasure greets you; some people on their knees, some in a circle looking down at one hard-working blow jobber sucking eight to ten dicks, some sitting on dicks. . . . Until you’re inside it, it all appears as one big, beating mass of flesh.” Notice the “you”: Tom is thinking about voyeurism, spectatorship. And yet their tone is loving; the memory feels like a personal keepsake. “Once you’re in,” Tom marvels, “it’s like being absorbed into a sponge . . . you lose all idea of space and time.” The passage may educate newcomers, but it also seems designed to make those in the know feel seen.
Give “Diary of a Drag Queen” a 23andMe kit, and its genetic lineage will be revealed to be at least seventy per cent rom-com. Tom has a cinema-ready—which is to say, not entirely naturalistic—sense of scene. (At one point, fed up with their demeaning job, they storm out of a meeting with the boss. “I’m gonna to be a star,” they declare. “No. I am a star!”) The book’s plot runs on traditional will-they-or-won’t-they suspense, plus or minus a gimp suit. Tom is in love with their best friend, Ace, who loves them back, but is dating William, “an incredibly handsome, thin, floppy black-haired, very cool East London boy whose demeanour flexes toward the masc.” William, Tom emphasizes, is “the polar opposite of me: a northern drag queen with a flabby Lancashire accent and an even flabbier belly.”
Falling for your hot best friend, cathartically quitting your nine-to-five: these are tried-and-true components of the rom-com, and their presence here speaks to a larger trend. “Diary” captures the tensions flowing through a subculture which, a decade or so after the launch of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” crackles with a mainstream allure. There’s more of an expectation now that queens perform both for a general audience and for a niche group of fans. This balancing act requires charisma and quick intelligence—two qualities that have long been prerequisites for drag, but that “Diary” puts on technicolor display. “Every year I think how funny it is that so many Christian denominations (not all, I know) hate gay but love Christmas,” Rasmussen writes. “Like, aren’t they basically the same thing? Tinsel? . . . A guy with major abs on a cross?”
This reviewer, for her part, delighted in the deftness with which the book took ownership of inherited tropes. Queering the rom-com, or at least seeming to do so, actually spotlights the genre’s persistent debts to queerness, from the gender antics of “Twelfth Night” to Oscar Wilde’s silky social critiques. What felt less satisfying were the tropes themselves—their broadness, their lack of precision. After Tom endures the homophobic attack, their mother tearfully tells them, “Don’t you dare change the way you are. Be loud.” The moment registers as too lovely, too perfect: artistically false even if historically true.
And yet, paradoxically, such scenes might mitigate the book’s occasional tendency to spoon-feed ideas rather than letting the reader discover them for herself. We wonder: Did Rasmussen’s mum really say that, or has fantasy crept in? “Diary” trembles with this mutable quality; it glides between reverie and reality, inviting constant, active interpretation. A reader can take the more extravagant passages literally, or not—just as, perhaps, she can take Crystal literally, or not. The fact that metaphor is always available, that stylized moments might express what Tom yearns for, or deserves, rather than what actually happened, suggests that all of the personal history contained in the book is subject to self-invention. Drag, Rasmussen implies, means dreaming up something better than what you’ve been given. It means willing yourself into a fabulous life.
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