You Better Work, BITCH!

Alright, so I hate to be a Johnny come lately, but I have just started watching Rupaul's Drag Race on logo, but I've been watching it on my Zune since we don't get Logo at my sober living. First of all I LOOOOOOOOOOOVE drag, I think it can be such an underrated art form if done correctly. I have so many connections to it, it's not funny! First of all, I used to be neighbors with Larry T who wrote “Supermodel (You better work) For RuPaul. I also have this fierce painting of Rupaul that I used to have hanging in my apartment that I found at a dumpster in my building in NYC! I've seen Tammie Brown a gazillion times here in West Hollywood, during Jackie Beat's hilarious show at Here Lounge, and let me tell you that was a gazillion too many. I personally don't like her very much, she is such a one note drag queen, she does the exact same faces, choreography and attitude for EVERY song she does, me and my friend Eric (KnuckleCrack) totally loved making fun of her when we saw her perform. In fact I used to tell him that she totally reminded me of a horrible copy of my favorite girl in the show Nina Flowers.
I know OF Nina Flowers from my days back in Puerto Rico. She used to perform at our main gay club Krash/Eros. I had been going to this club since I was 12 or 13 thanks to my sister. My sister who is a fierce dancer, used to choreograph for this fierce drag queen named Alex Soto. They used to put on these amazing epic numbers, and she and her husband would choreograph and dance for Ms. Soto. Now before you start accusing my sister of child endangerment, I used to only go to rehearsals during the day, so I was never there at night till I was of age. Anyway, she is a HUGE part of why I am so open and loving of my self, and rarely let anyone tell me what to do, how to feel. But I digress back to Nina Flowers, I remember seeing a video of her doing Zombie and just being BLOWN AWAY immensely, she was doing things that no other drag queen had ever done in PR. She was being totally rock and roll and anti-establishment in her own way. I remember just falling to PIECES watching her perform. The only other time I have been blown away by a drag performer like this was with Ms. Kevin Aviance in NYC, who used to call me her little Pop Tart, because of my Pop Rocks! Fame! I think I might have met Nina once out of drag at one of my most vivid and favorite movie experiences in my life.

The year was 1994, I was 13 and quite the gay history aficionado, at that age I knew all about Stonewall, and the Matachine society, how did I learn so much? I honestly don't remember. Anyway, my whole family and some of my friends already knew I was gay, and my sister said that she and all her gay friends were going to the film festival to watch this new gay comedy called The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert. I had no idea what I was getting myself into, but here I was in a theater full of all of San Juan's gay population. I was sitting next to my sister and her husband, and next to them were all the dragas from Krash (or had it become Eros by that point?) which might have included Nina. Anyway the movie starts and every time a new fierce outfit would come on screen the whole theater would resound with “ESO NENA” (You go girl), snaps galore, and hooting and hollering for days. I totally ate this up of course, being this little 13 year old gay boy in training. It is still embedded in my brain, even after ten years of frying my brains out on meth, which should tell you something. So ANYWAY I will continue to download Rupaul's Drag Race and root for my girl Nina Flowers! I hope you do too!

I will leave you with a clip of her doing what she does best to one of my favorite songs right now, Here Comes The Rain Again by the Eurythmics!