In the sixties, the recycling of pop culture turning it into Pop art and camp had its own satirical zest. Now we're into a different kind of recycling. Moviemakers give movies of the past an authority that those movies didn't have; they inflate images that may never have compelled belief, images that were no more than shorthand gestures and they use them not as larger-than-life jokes but as altars.
Drag will always find a way to be weird.
I think drag is universal, no matter who does it. I mean, yeah, I am homosexual, but I think everybody likes to toy with their image. I love those guys. I love Milton Berle and Flip Wilson and all those people.
I think that drag makes anything better.
There's so many more themes of drag than just fierceness.
The audience of 'Drag Race' and the fans of drag queens are often very surprising.
To camp is a mode of seduction... Behind the 'straight' public sense in which something can be taken, one has found a private zany experience of the thing.
David Bowie and Boy George created a safely contained theatrical expression of gay style.
Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn't reverse things. It doesn't argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art, and life, a different - a supplementary - set of standards.
Drag is pastiche and parody and satire. Drag queens are never meant to be stars. We make fun of stars. Drag queens are the people that 'point' at the star.
Drag is there to remind culture not to take itself too seriously. All of this is illusion.
I guess historically, drag queens were imitating movie stars and luminaries. It's kind of nice to have a movie star imitating a drag queen.
Drag culture has always been about excess.
The crux of drag is outsiders looking in. That's all it is.
Not all drag queens but certainly the ones who empowered me, are people who pushed buttons, and poked fun at society from Leigh Bowery, to Lady Bunny and Divine.
