Priscilla Queen of the Desert is an excellent queer road trip film that highlights some of the struggles of marginalized people as they import themselves to a new place. A section of the movie that I appreciate is the breakdown section. I hear that the Australian outback is a genuinely desolate place. The occasional picture reaches my internet corner with signs like “Next Phone 200 Miles”. The film does an excellent job of portraying this. The breakdown shots look like the queens are stranded on Mars. Despite the dire circumstances, their decision to paint the bus solidifies the queen’s personality of unyielding strength in the face of impossible odds. Despite the arguments between the three, these scenes ensure the success of their adventure.
While the film has many redeeming qualities, one of the issues that the film seems to gloss over is the contentious point between drag queens and trans women (Jagose 104). As someone who identifies as neither cis nor trans, I think the drag show is fantastic. As a consumer of drag media, I think the shows and costumes are better than the most recent seasons of Ru Paul’s Drag Race and Dragula. However, there are issues between the people behind the drag. There is a social hierarchy with the trans person at the bottom. She repeatedly gets deadnamed, but that only happens a few times with the other queens. She also faces more vile actions of violence, where people are trying to have sex with her, while the other queens just get threatened to have their faces punched in. To explore this discourse, I turn to Jagose for answers as to why this hierarchy could be explained (Jagose 104). Jagose points out that it is easier to define gay and lesbian than other genderqueer terms. These difficulties are true in both straight and queer contexts. The terms queer and trans are rooted in homophobia and are in the process of being reclaimed by the respective marginalized communities. In this mainstream, Jagose points out that people dislike terms that remove women from the population of women because it depreciates their minority status. This stance is confirmed in both academic and personal contexts. Jagose points out that gay and lesbian studies are already established fields. In contrast, when talking about trans studies and trans philosophy for her thesis, Allison Landweber mentions that she could not tell us what trans philosophy was without buying into inherently transphobic systems. It is impossible to explain the gender pain of being trans or queer to someone who has not gone through it themselves. These unknowns do not excuse the pecking order, but they do explain it. However, the film does not touch on the gender pain as much as I would like. I can tell by her violent reaction when she is misgendered.
I would also love to see the interactions between the gender pain that Bernadette experiences with her drag. The standard construction of a drag queen is that someone who identifies as a man plays a character who is a woman. Drag kings are the reverse: someone born a woman who plays a man’s character. Since drag relies on these gender assumptions, it does not usually leave much room for trans and other genderqueer folks. This exclusion is why some trans and genderqueer folks have an aversion to drag: it plays with the pain that is very real for us. However, drag has also provided a public platform for many trans and genderqueer folks to come out to the world. At least twelve queens have used Ru Paul’s Drag Race to come out as trans (Duncan). If the film had a remake, I could see the queens having a small conversation with Bernadette about how she reconciles the inherent conflict between being trans and doing drag. If future directors approach this hypothetical conversation with the same lightheartedness found in most of the movie, they could add a lot of depth to the queens’ overall relationship. In general, the film did an inadequate job of differentiating between the cis and trans queens and did not showcase the nuance of what it means to be trans in relation to drag.
Another aspect I appreciate about the film is the focus on quiet fear (Mills 312). The queens are unafraid when confronted by a whole town of homophobes or moving from a liberal to a conservative area, yet one faints when he sees their kid at a drag show. This contrast feels like a unique but, unfortunately, crucial part of the queer experience. Almost everyone I know, myself included, is afraid to express their queerness in front of family, even when there is overwhelming evidence they would be supported. We know that in recent times, certain politicians have fought to discriminate and illegalize queerness (Mills 312), and we have also seen people so invested in these politicians that they would turn their children away. The need for love from people close to them is universal. In the movie, we know that Bernadette’s parents stop talking to her after she gets surgery. Understandably, Tick would be afraid to learn what his son would think about his drag. We can feel his desperation to be an excellent father to his son, and there is probably some internalized homophobia telling him that drag will corrupt the kids. However, he realizes that silence on this matter would kill that part of him, similar to how pro-LGBTQ+ protests throughout the years claim that silence equals death. He realizes that the persona he developed through drag is too valuable to throw away. Tick’s wife and child seem to not care about his career path, but they are happy to have him back in the family. The discussion of Tick’s child’s ability to choose his morals when he is older proves that children are accepting, which is the natural state of the world. This movie presents a new angle on universal queer fear, and this take helps make it a successful queer road trip film. While Priscilla Queen of the Desert could have tackled some specific issues better, the ways it uses road trip elements to express both quiet fear and queer resilience make it an enjoyable and effective queer road trip film.
Works cited
Duncan, Charlie. “How Rupaul’s Drag Race Went from Trans-Exclusionary to Trans Revolutionary.” PinkNews, Pink News, 31 Mar. 2023, www.thepinknews.com/2023/03/31/rupauls-drag-race-history-transgender-visibility-repres entation/.
Jagose, Annamarie, et al. Queer Theory Eine Einführung. Querverlag, 2021.
Mills, Robert. “Violent bodies and victim narratives: On the cinematic activism of Gregg Araki’s The living end.” Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture, vol. 2, no. 3, 1 Sept. 2017, pp. 309–321, https://doi.org/10.1386/qsmpc.2.3.309_1.
Allison Landweber, Philosophy in the Economy of Death: on Jamie Berrout, Trans Philosophy, and Difference Without Separabillity, 6, May 2024
Leave a Reply