CHARLES BUSCH i'VIEW

DRAG LEGEND CHARLES BUSCH INTERVIEWED ON EVERYTHING FROM DRAG RACE TO BERT SAVOY.



AN EXCERPT:

Yet I just couldn’t fathom those wannabe Next Drag Superstars. To be
sure, I spotted the eventual winner, Tyra Sanchez, early on, but if you
asked me why she was destined to win, I couldn’t have told you. She
...wasn’t as pretty as Tatianna or Morgan McMichaels, as glamorous as Raven
or Sahara Davenport, or as witty as Jessica Wild or Pandora Boxx. Tyra
was sullen, uncooperative, slow on the uptake, and ignorant of anything
in popular culture beyond Beyoncé: at one point she lost the thread of a
backstage conversation and asked in her gravely monotone “What’s
Bollywood?”

This is drag? I always thought drag was about camp style, a parody of
femininity and middle-class values. Camp is certainly a through-line of
drag from its modern beginnings in vaudeville female impersonation acts
like Julian Eltinge and Bert Savoy.

Savoy’s untimely death in 1923, in fact, may have been the ultimate
act of camp. According to legend, he was strolling on the beach with a
few friends as a storm approached. Startled by a sudden thunderclap, he
squealed, “Ain’t Miss God cuttin’ up somethin’ awful?” And then he was
struck dead by a bolt of lightning.

MORE: THIRTEEN