by Phoebe Oathout
Issue 78
Do You Know Her was a party at permanent risk of devolving into group therapy, a freak show fat with winos and gorgeous transvestites. Every Tuesday, nine to midnight, the regulars came to play their part. Mork worked the door. Sweet Bee played host. Roy covered the bar, and Delilah was the one queen we knew not to fuck with. Friends who rarely attended often asked us questions that started with, “Is it true…?” and always, the answer was yes. We’d tell them the scenes we watched from our barstools: kids waxing Marxist in the bathroom; derrick hands fondling over cigarettes; men transmuting into women. We’d tell them we saw miracles.
For twenty years, The High House’s audience served as jury to the latest generation of girls with unglued brows and unshaved legs attempting to strut their stuff. Not that we only saw amateurs at Do You Know Her. Our show pulled its share of performance artists and singer-songwriters. We, the fans of amateur hour, sat through shows featuring only Tumblr-ori- ented sapphics. The High House was just that kind of bar—a maximum capacity of thirty-seven, no bigger than a METRO bus. It sat garden level on the border between Bellaire and Tanglewood. The inside smelled terri- ble, like rose perfume mixed with deep-fried egg-something.
What was Do You Know Her on paper? Nothing but open mic night at a drag bar.
But in spirit, it was a second home. Who needed a condo in Galves- ton, a timeshare in the Hill Country, when we had Sweet Bee waxing poetic about her stint in Korea? Bad drag was our homeland, the origin story where trannies who later bloomed into glamazons got their start. Those of us in the audience have talked about writing this piece ever since we real- ized that. We all knew The High House would be priced out one day. We just didn’t think it would happen during our lifetimes. If anyone had been smart, we might have recorded these performances, maybe made a name for ourselves on the doc festival circuit. We were the kind of queens movies get made about, you know?
What we have now are the memories. After watching hundreds (thousands?) of performances, we’ve made quite a few. The tribute we came up with reflects that. It’s a repeat of the conversation we’ve been having since day one, an exhibition of our best, our worst, our wildest nights. Here, you’ll find nine acts we think about when considering the last two decades of Tuesdays, the performances we saw while coming into ourselves. When we’re done writing this, we’ll staple it to telephone poles across the city or maybe just email it to everyone who came through. Not all of the acts are bad, but some certainly were.
* * *
- “Bittersweet Symphony”
Years before the Pulse shooting, but a week after the Virginia Tech shooting, two kids with fake IDs told the bar to get on their feet. Oh great, we thought, an interactive piece of performance art. We expected Björk or Berlin techno, a commentary both underdeveloped and cringe. What we got was an undergrad screaming into the mic, “For the next six minutes, my friend and I are going to shoot all of you with our fingers!” She formed an L with her thumb and index and waved it over her head. “It’s your job, when you get shot, to spend the remaining six minutes dying in slow motion. I want to believe you. I want to see shock, denial, anger, regret, the history of your lives flash before my eyes! I want to know if your life was worth it! I don’t want any of you to stop till the song ends, okay?”
“Sure!” we said.
The boy pulled a balaclava over his head and passed the other to his friend. That was when the music started.
No one is prepared for death, right? Like any surprise, different reac- tions are a given. That night, no one died exactly like anyone else. Where blood came out of some in glub glub glubs, it spewed from others in tight- lipped splish splashes. Friends drifted to the carpeted floor like foliage, hands reaching out to unrequited crushes. A few of us went silently, then Delilah got down on all fours, like a cat, and mewed. Patrons at the bar spent a minute lunging for one last sip of rum and coke, G&T, Tequila Sun- rise, their pulls lasting thirty seconds. By the time they were back in their starting positions with three minutes left, they reinitiated the sequence. The room vibrated with the sounds of moans, prayers, tears both real and crocodile. New intricacies were revealed as the process of death was pro- tracted to a tenth of its normal speed. Beyond the five stages there was nostalgia, calm, jealousy, and gratitude. Some got down and spent their remaining time simply listening, reflecting on the wondrousness of it all.
When Bittersweet Symphony ended, and we were all lying dead on the ground, that was when the boy spoke.
“Guns get me real horny,” he said, half twang, half snicker, like he knew just how stupid and inappropriate the joke was. It worked. We all started laughing, which got us all moving, which got us all standing, which led to hugging. A second before, we’d been happy to stay dead, removed by degrees from this world. All it took was one dumb joke to make us happy to be alive.
* * *
- “Beautiful”
We never knew when one of The High House regulars would stand up one night, casually approach the call sheet, and sign their name. It got us all gossiping. We knew something big must have gone down to necessitate performance. An unspoken rule at Do You Know Her was to never treat the place like karaoke night (you can go to The Accomplice by the Galleria for that), so when Angelica announced that she had a number in store, we knew something bigger than a breakup was up. That something was Angelica’s new pair of silicone tatas.
What is it that makes us snore and groan through one queen’s ver- sion of Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful,” then jump up, stomp our feet at the next? We used to think it came down to the room’s mood, but if that was the case, we would have rolled our eyes as Angelica took the stage. To tell you straight, none of us really liked Angelica—she was the type to borrow a lighter and never return it—so it had to be some other quality that made the room light up when she twisted her tube top down, mouthing, “Don’t look at me.”
Anyone at The High House that night will tell you: We lost our goddamn minds. Her chest looked like two princess tortes glued to her ribcage. They were shiny as marzipan and bounced like Jell-O. Our blood flipped when she unzipped her fly after the first chorus. Fingers snapped, throats howled. You couldn’t tell us she wasn’t our hero, some anime prin- cess saving the world through a tremendous act of love and dark magic. Her index finger moved under the lip of her underwear. She shimmied it down. Out popped a teeny tiny thing, waxed and pink, wrinkly as a piglet. More testicles than anything else.
And the bitch kept singing!
Exhibitionists were a fixture of Do You Know Her, but none unscrewed our hearts quite like Angelica that night. As the song faded, the room fell into an embrace. “You are beautiful!” we said. “And crazy!”
Angelica flushed. She didn’t put her clothes back on until closing, but Roy made sure she laid a jacket down before taking a seat.
If you’re curious, you can still find Angelica on a stage, now in East Aldine. Fridays at noon, Saturdays at six, and yes, Tuesdays, she dances at the Girls! Girls! Girls! Club. When contacted about this feature, she told us “Beautiful” was still on her regular rotation, and that it always landed her the best tips.
* * *
- “Dancing Queen”
Name a song any of us would be happier to never hear again! The dance floor dissociation that opening crescendo inspires at weddings, drag shows, bar mitzvahs across the nation produced a particular stink at Do You Know Her: insecurity.
Still, none of us wanted to see the amateur queens who picked this track feel hopeless. We clapped along. We sang to their robotic shimmies, “You can dance!” Afterward, we nodded our heads when they proudly explained, “I thought it was a good choice because of the pun. Dancing Queen, right?”
“Gosh, that’s clever!” we said. We wanted to die; we wanted everyone
to feel confident.
On the night we were celebrating Sweet Bee’s seventy-first, no one came up as the track hit. Crescendo, nothing. “Friday night and the lights are low,” zip. We thought maybe the baby was in the bathroom, but the door was unlocked. We looked at one another. The chorus was hitting. That was when Roy picked up the sad little geranium he kept behind the bar. You know the type: brown stems, no bloom, looking like a mess of clover. He set it on a stool at the front, and we all started to cheer.
“Pop off, sis!” Bee shouted. “Real cunty!” Roy said.
The effect was that by the start of the second chorus, we were all egg- ing the geranium on. She was our dancing queen, young and sweet. We got up, shook our bodies with arms raised, tongues out, eyes closed. We rocked so hard that the floor bounced, rattling the geranium until she shimmied for us. A few regulars left tips in the soil. The performance was something enacted, an expression of the audience’s capacity to entertain itself. For evidence, you can still find cash in the pot.
When the song finished, we all found our seats, and the next number started like any other.
* * *
- “Hot Stuff “
Miraculously, one of our Amateur Queens became one of our Actu- ally Talented Queens, booking gigs that paid more than drink tickets. Her stage name was Bluebonnet. She did come back through The High House after taking off, but treated the place like a workshop, a space to get the half-baked, soon-to-be-binned ideas off her chest. Only a few of her ideas showed real promise, and she knew it. We didn’t mind because she was still better than the newbies.
Any girl worth her time slot has a signature quality, magic other performers can only impersonate. You either got it or you don’t, and once you have it, there’s nothing you can do to shake it. It’s what lifts a girl from amateur hour to the professional leagues of crossdressing. At Do You Know Her, we saw signatures whenever a queen twisted her limbs into freakish knots or painted her face into beauty never before witnessed by man. In the case of Bluebonnet, her signature was actual magic. The queen could levitate five feet off the ground.
If you’re wondering why you’ve never heard of a levitating queen before, we’ll mention that the problem with Bluebonnet was that she had to focus really, really hard to make the miracle happen. Picture furrowed brows, rough grunts, floating over your lap. Maybe then you can see why she wasn’t a Provincetown name.
Fortunately, no messes were made the night Bluebonnet returned. While the opening bass of Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff ” riffed, she rose first one, then four feet into the air. Her head bumped against the ceil- ing. She spun around to lie flat against the ceiling, arms and legs scurrying spiderlike. Bluebonnet’s smile caught the bit of red light that made it up there. Dollar bills slipped out of her corset. A drop of sweat landed in Del- ilah’s Modelo. Plus, the lyrics: “Wanna share my love with a warm-blooded lover!” Some queens just aren’t meant to be sexy.
After Bluebonnet took her leave (she had another, paying gig that night), several of the greener aspirants started whining, “How will we make it as queens when we can’t even float?” We told them to chill. Magic takes a while to discover, longer to master. Bluebonnet was one example. Early on, she’d been another overeager queen with bad contour and no padding, mouthing the words to “Firework” without a bit of life. It wasn’t until the bridge that Roy noticed she was floating an inch off the carpet, and that detail changed everything.
The aspirants nodded, wide-eyed.
Of course, the story we told was a lie. In truth, Bluebonnet had been floating long before she became a queen. Early on in her career, just after she finished flapping around to ABBA, she told us about the time she went into her mom’s closet as a boy and slipped on a pair of white opera gloves. She’d danced around the room, whacking her little wrists. It wasn’t until she paused to admire herself in the mirror that she realized she was no longer on the ground.
* * *
5. “Wuthering Heights”
Do you remember when corner stores used to give receipts that were meters in length? We do, probably because we once saw a middle-aged man staple them to his body for four and a half minutes. It took that long because he performed Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights.” What Heathcliff, Cathy, and the moors had to do with a literally on-the-nose commentary on consumer culture, we don’t know. We will say that we were grateful for Bush’s cartoon falsetto because the number was awful to watch. There were fresh gags with every clack of the stapler. Not all of the receipts stuck, and the few that fell to the floor revealed concerning transactions. One for two Red Bulls, five Diet Pepsis, and a copy of Good Housekeeping. Another for a bottle of Nexium and three boxes of wax strips.
All through the song, the performer maintained an unsatisfactory smile. The face of a kid posing for his school portrait. Every few staples, the smile flashed into something sly and gratified. We could tell he was pleased none of us could turn away. We might be looking through spread fingers, furrowed brows, but we were still watching.
The week after the stapler act, Do You Know Her was more crowded than usual, word having spread that our show was where the crazy shit went down. Most left disappointed. Pain artists were rare, even in this type of gig. You saw them once a season at most.
* * *
- “Deceptacon”
By the time Bluebonnet made it on one of TV’s drag queen com- petitions, we’d already started organizing weekly watch parties for those shows. We tuned into Drag Race, Dragula, the 2016 election results, all the while demanding Sweet Bee take the mic during commercial break to spit some clever commentary. The audience’s taste was moving from live per- formance to the prerecorded. We wanted the polish only postproduction could provide, no more cringe amateurism.
We weren’t surprised when Bluebonnet made it on TV—she was the biggest star to come out of The High House—just like we weren’t surprised when, on episode four, she was up for elimination. The hosts and Twitter crowd had tired of her miracle schtick. “Could you try to be sexy?” the token British judge suggested. “That’s what the kids are into.” Bluebonnet tried to sell sex, failed, and was now lip synching to Le Tigre’s “Decepta- con” in the box television over our heads.
She levitated only two feet, her lips twisted tight as she tried to mouth “bompalompalomp” in focus. The other queen up for elimination somersaulted and ka-ka-ka-boomed, her mouth wide and expressive. She was sexy. Our star finished sixth place in the show’s eleventh season.
As the credits rolled, we individually texted Bluebonnet our con- dolences, our declarations of pride in her showing, how she had a bigger career ahead. We really believed this. Of all the crazy shit we saw, Bluebon- net was the one we still talked about.
We messaged that she always had a home with us.
Only a few in the room received responses, which makes sense given the attention and messages she must have been receiving online. As Sweet Bee wrapped up her commentary for the night (“Nothing changes the fact that we produced a goddamn miracle!”), she checked her phone and saw a text from Bluebonnet.
“She wants us to know she’s got a show at South Beach next week,” she said.
We nodded, bought our tickets ahead of time. At South Beach, we brushed shoulders with muscle mascs. We tried to flirt by saying we knew Bluebonnet. They let us down gently. We blamed the rejection on our queen. It was impossible to hit on anyone with the freaky vibe she created.
* * *
- “Officer Krupke”
In the final days of Do You Know Her, The High House’s reserves exhausted by the pandemic and Hurricane Harvey repairs, queers packed the bar trying to bail the red out. At the same time, we started seeing more teens after the Texas governor passed the law about separating trans kids from their parents. Not the typical twinks, but lilac-haired ephebes in manga shirts whose sex we couldn’t guess. Gen Z was on something differ- ent; we knew that already.
On one of these post-pandemic nights, just after Sweet Bee finished her opening remarks behind a mask, a kid who couldn’t be more than six-teen stood up and said, “I thought to do this after the news from Austin.” We all clapped. You had to be in the know to recognize the kid was trans— otherwise you might have just thought he was some elfin dyke, the straps under his hoodie a tight bra and not a binder.
The kid performed every single part in West Side Story‘s “Officer Krupke”: policeman, judge, headshrinker, social worker, and of course, the kid. From our seats, we watched a whole system try to find an answer for his problem, and we quietly fell in love.
* * *
- “Danny Boy”
Way back in the show’s first year, after open mic night became a rec- ognized part of the Houston scene, the OG drag queen came through, with more magic in her yellow Texas hair than Bluebonnet had in her whole act. Most people assume Barbie, the doll, is a ditz. They wouldn’t be completely wrong. Her brain is literally the size of a peanut, but she can also be nuanced if you get to know her. Like any doll at The High House, she toed the line between self-aware performance and delusion.
The first thing Barbie did after walking in was toss a palm-sized leather jacket onto the bar, a pink triangle embroidered on the back. Along her arm we spotted a masticated line where a dog had chewed.
“I’m AIDS Crisis Barbie,” she said, like we didn’t recognize the name of the world’s only eleven-inch platinum blonde.
No one asked about the change in image. Word had spread that sales were down with the rise of Pokémon and those goddamn Bratz. A few of Barbie’s best friends had been recently discontinued. A rebrand was the next logical step. When she told the room she’d be singing “Danny Boy” from the bar a cappella, no one made a peep.
She cleared her throat, one tiny squeak. Let’s just say this: the doll had some pipes.
Imagine a voice that is bright. Push it through a voice box the size of a pencil eraser. Imagine that voice singing about a kid, a boy, about to lose his innocence in war. Imagine the person singing this song has known many young boys, that all her life she has been kept a secret by them, pil-fered from sisters’ rooms, stashed in underwear drawers, only to be taken out in moments of utmost privacy and stared at for hours. Imagine being used in games of make-believe, never real life. Imagine your body becom- ing a conduit of fantasy. Sit with that. Now imagine that you are in a room full of the boys who once used you that way, singing a sad song of aban- donment. Some of them are now women. All of them feel nothing but grat- itude at the sight of you.
Would you have hard feelings?
We never got a chance to ask AIDS Crisis Barbie that question. As soon as the song ended, while we were trying to piece ourselves back together, she hopped off the bar and duck-marched her way right out of The High House. Mork watched as a band of strays stopped at the sight of her. They had those desperate yet furtive looks animals get when hungry for a bite. She looped her deformed arm behind one of their ears. She rode deeper into the night.
She forgot her jacket.
* * *
- “Future Plans”
Anyone who came to Do You Know Her had some plan in the works. They were our favorite topics of conversation: the essays we would write, the one-woman shows we would tour with, grad school. Roy swore he would get around to opening a vegan bakery in the Heights where we could all get fat off sourdough instead of gin. These plans became our greatest performances insofar as we actually believed in them.
When asked what his next steps would be now that The High House was closing, Roy told us he planned to leave town by the end of the month—his mom in Dallas needed a caretaker. Classic Roy, that good egg. Maybe one of his admirers will finally make a move? We heard a few of the younger queens say they’d like to take him out for happy hour, hear his stories about old Houston, but where do you take the bartender who makes the strongest drinks in the city? As far as the older queens go, well, they’ve always landed on their feet. Bee says she might turn into one of those chess hawks out by Hermann Park. She’s certainly the right age for it. The alcoholics promise they’ll join her, only if they stay on the bandwagon long enough to enjoy daylight. Otherwise, we’ll catch them in bars across the city complaining about the rising cost of everything, especially drinks. We did hear a few of the theory queens are starting their master’s degrees in social work, urban planning, history of consciousness, whatever that means. Bluebonnet’s got a show running in P-Town, and Mork landed a new job as club security through Angelica. The showtune queens are organizing an experimental queer theater society, as if the city needs any more of those.
Does that cover everyone?
If not, then the rest of us will just say we’ll be fine, promise. You saw us that last night, lingering past closing. We told everyone we’d be around for coffee or drinks in case anyone had another story to tell. We mentioned the other parties we had to get to. Parties in Midtown warehouses. Par- ties our new Burner friends were throwing on the Gulf. Parties at some other, cleaner club with a better sound system, though admittedly, less fun. Somewhere the queens perform the same numbers week to week, and no one offers to buy them drinks. You’ll recognize us by the way we eye you across the dance floor. Don’t act like you don’t remember our names, even if we pretend not to remember yours. We’ll only be that way because we’re shy in new scenes with cooler people. We’ll act like we didn’t miss you when, sweetie, we did.