CREATIVE NON-FICTION
I Was a Drag Queen at My Own Wedding
An awkward experience of the late transitioner
I looked good in drag, didn’t I?
It’s okay. You can admit it. I was kind of pretty in drag.
Are you squirming in your seat yet? If not, you probably should be. It’s a risky business telling a trans man that he was pretty before he transitioned. It can be invalidating, especially if the implication is that we looked better before.
I won’t tell anyone if you say it just this once, though. I’m okay with having been a pretty boy back in the day. I didn’t transition because I thought I was ugly or that I’d be hotter with some rocking biceps and abs. I transitioned because I was (and am) way too cute to die and gender dysphoria was killing me slowly over a period of decades.
And if I don’t turn out cute in the end? I’m of the apparently controversial opinion that I deserve to exist, even if I’m not deemed cute by everyone.
It makes me laugh though, looking at this picture
I was a drag queen at my own wedding and nobody even noticed! I was wearing glittery gold eyeshadow with heavy eyeliner and mascara. The picture you see is a caricature of a woman, a painstaking imitation of a femme.
My act was so spot on that I didn’t even notice I was a drag queen at my own wedding! That is one hell of a stunt to pull. Twice! I had two weddings in two days and I was a drag queen for both of them! We had ceremonies to honor the expectations of two cultures and one government.
Can you see the dark circles under my eyes, or did I hide them well enough? I was exhausted, having graded exam papers until about 3am the night before my first wedding. The ceremony itself began at 7am the next morning.
My energy was sustained only with the help of an early morning In-N-Out burger and various other junk foods inhaled throughout the days for comfort, outside of the official delicious meals. Always a big believer in using comfort food to cope, I had a decently large appetite even before starting Testosterone. I wouldn’t get much more sleep before the second wedding pictured above, so I needed that fuel to perk me up.
Look at that hair!
Don’t you dare take that hairdo for granted. That hair took hours and hours to put together both times, as I was telling Yena Choi in the comments section of “The Bun HairDo”. She captured well the frustrating behind-the-scenes trials and tribulations of the underappreciated ballerina bun look.
I am nothing if not sympathetic to the plight of ladies and femmes! I’ve done my time in high heels. I feel your pain and have nothing but respect and empathy to offer in response.
I sort of picked out my own wedding dress
The process was somewhat adjacent to autonomy. I pretended to feel very strongly about the first dress my mother-in-law showed me that sort of fit because I wanted the shopping part of that day to end and the eating part to begin as soon as possible.
Finding a dress that fit was an issue. Thanks to many months of diligent practice with Rosetta Stone, I understood one person after another yelling back and forth across the mall hallway with far more clarity than I needed. They were all agreeing wholeheartedly that they were going to need to find something much larger to accommodate this really big white person that came in needing help.
I’m not a big guy
I was 5 feet and 2 inches tall before Testosterone. After almost a year of Testosterone, I’m now 5 feet and 1 inch tall because life isn’t always fair.
I was just the biggest drag queen they’d had to find a wedding dress for in recent history.
I don’t remember what my own wedding cake tasted like
I couldn’t have told you even the day after. I think it was black forest with Champaign pink strawberry something or other layers. Whatever it was, it sounded really fancy. I have no idea what we ate, either. I think it was probably tasty, but I can’t say for sure.
All that I remember was a random stranger making us put the seashell chocolate candies between each of our teeth and holding them together between our mouths as if we were kissing, so that they could take a million pictures of us. It turned out that stranger was a wedding crasher, so we were just making asses of ourselves without actually getting any pictures of the cake.
Unfortunately, someone who was genuinely invited caught video of me doing some terrible dancing at the reception. I never claimed to be a particularly talented drag queen. I did not pull off that part of the performance well.
The real highlight of the evening for me was watching the child of my sibling rock out to heavy metal music during the reception of the second wedding. That moment was pure gold.
My trans dream is to do the whole wedding thing over someday
I want to do the whole wedding thing right this time around. I watched my wife cry during that episode of Pose where all of the trans women got to wear wedding dresses. I know what this would mean to them. They’d been living vicariously through their drag queen husband throughout our wedding ceremonies.
I might have cried while watching that episode, too. I probably just had something really large stuck in my eye, since trans guys don’t ever cry. It might have been allergies or several onions that I was cutting in front of me while watching. It’s also possible that I was pretending that Lil Papi’s character was a trans guy while watching that show over and over.
My wife deserves to get to wear their dream wedding dress
I deserve to get to finally wear a tuxedo and actually feel comfortable as a groom. It’s my dream to have a wedding on our queer trans terms someday: a ceremony that is just to make us happy.
It is also my dream to remember what my own damn wedding cake tastes like. I probably won’t get to pick out the flavor, but am going to lobby for something large with lots of protein. Maybe pistachios or pecan bits.
The people who would be there would all be people who accepted us exactly as we are, without any qualifications or conditions.
This was written in response to this writing prompt from “Logan’s Corner” in Queerly Trans:
Thinking about joining Medium to read all of our great articles? If you would like part of your $5/month membership fees to support me at no additional cost to you, sign up here or click on the membership link of your favorite writer to support them!
