I love photographing drag kings and queens - my only complaint is that there aren't nearly enough drag kings in South Africa.  If I had the (ho ho) bollocks to perform, I'd start doing it myself.  Anyway, while photographing a gay beauty pageant and cabaret in East London the other night, I thought about the last time I photographed lots of drag queens - which was Johannesburg Pride 2008.  It gave me a lot of great photographs and some new Facebook friends ... there was one particularly nasty little side effect though.  You know how on Facebook people tag people they know?  Well, loads of Jozi queers were fabulous enough to tag a lot of my photographs and almost invariably, I became friends with those people too.  Then a while later, a handful of young male Americans started tagging drag queens' photos with each others' names.  Once I worked that out, I was pissed off. 



My photographs were not only good, thank you very much, they were respectful too.  I see a lot of dignity in true drag (as opposed to the pantomime/farce kind, which has its place too, but it's a different place) and so I treat 'em with respect.  They tend, in my experience, to be extremely thoughtful and brave people.  Who was at the forefront of the Stonewall riots, after all?  Drag queens, that's who.  So not only do they deserve a huge amount of respect, because they're fellow human beings, we owe them an enormous debt historically too.  Drag queens, butch dykes like me, camp faggots... we're the people who give the community a "bad" name in some eyes, but we're also the people who stand up, get counted and sometimes bashed.  We're visible, we cannot and do not pass.



I had a look at the profiles of the dudes who tagged the drags at the time and they were all from one American college - I wish I remembered which one, because what I should have done is bitched to their dean or something.  OK it'd very likely have been ignored, but still.  I got this mental image of idiot jocks sniggering as they played those pranks on their buddies and maybe I even took it too seriously, but it annoyed me badly.  You know how it is - you're out, you're out there in the largely heterosexual world and you suck up quite a lot of homophobia (is queerphobia a word yet?) along the way.  You handle a lot of it well and then something happens, one last little straw, and suddenly you're fed up with straight people.  It's yet another reason that we as the queer community quite often feel the need to retreat into a nice, safe ghetto; where nobody yells obscenties at us, beats us up, rapes us to cure us, tortures us, puts us into concentration camps or kills us.

Mild homophobia - like the "prank" I described, like the way people say, "Oh that's so gay!" - is bullshit.  It's the thin end of the wedge and the acceptable face of bigotry that can and has in many, many cases, led to hate crimes.  And laughing at drag queens is only cool if it's a comedy act.  If you can't show respect, fuck OFF and do something straight, like scrapbooking or genocide.  How d'you like them heterophobic apples?

(Disclaimer: no heterosexuals were harmed in the writing of this article and some of my best friends are straight).