Shave your whole face. Now take an Elmer’s glue stick and rub it firmly against your eyebrows. Let it dry (hair dryers are helpful here), then repeat the process until your eyebrows are a slick sheet of dried glue. Next, put on a thick layer of foundation that’s slightly lighter than your skin tone. Contour your cheekbones, nose, and brow bones with bronzer or a darker foundation. Apply blush to the apples of your cheeks. Draw your eyebrows with an eyebrow pencil wherever and however you’d like. Lip Liner should exceed the natural lip line to enhance the size. Put on fake eyelashes and nails if you desire. Finish by generously applying lipstick, eyeshadow, eyeliner, mascara, and translucent powder. If all went correctly, then congratulations, you’ve just painted your face for drag.
* * *
There comes a time in every little gay boy’s life when they discover RuPaul. For me, that time came before I even knew I was gay. I used to prance around my room to “Covergirl” (“you betta work!”) in elementary school. I told everyone it was my favorite song. It was amazing that nobody picked up on my sexuality back then, and even more amazing that I surprised people when I came out at age 13. In high school, I took a liking to RuPaul’s Drag Race, a reality competition show featuring some of America’s most talented drag queens, hosted by the legendary RuPaul Charles. I watched these fierce men put on their wigs, lashes, and earrings in awe. They were famous just for being fabulous.
Wait, I thought, I should be famous just for being fabulous!
I could see it: Flashing lights all around me, one dollar bills being flung in my name’s sake, people cheering and clapping just for my fashion sense and talent for lip-syncing songs by my favorite divas. I would become a drag queen, and I would do it well.
I used to dream of playing the part of Ursula in The Little Mermaid, but I always disregarded it as only a pipe dream, even though I could belt the shit out of “Poor Unfortunate Souls.” Then, during my senior year of high school, my community theater announced that they would be doing a production of The Little Mermaid. I went into the audition confidently, knowing my confidence in both singing and acting the part. Two days later, the director called me and offered me the part of Ursula. I was ecstatic.
After pleading that I had to paint my face purple for the show (I didn’t), I convinced my mother that the $60 worth of stage makeup was totally worth it. When it came in the mail, I practiced making myself up for the part and singing my iconic song (much to the annoyance of my family). Before I knew it, it was show time. I put on all my makeup, my wig, my dress, my heels, and I became a drag queen for the very first time.
My performance was certainly memorable. I scared lots of children and even made one kid cry so hard that her parents had to take her out of the theater. When my family came to see the show, they got to see me doing what I loved doing the most: the art of drag. They loved it. Even though they were proud of me as their little boy, they were also proud of me as their strange, half-octopus, little girl. Well, except for my grandfather, who was entirely bewildered by the fact that I enjoyed dressing like a woman. He didn’t say much, but I could tell that he was proud of me just for the performance. Besides that, I felt like I had finally explored the part of me that I had been dreaming about for years. Better yet, I felt that my family accepted me for who I was.
My mother loved me on the stage. She was the one who pushed me to do theater at age six, and has been a proud stage mom ever since. But when the performances stopped, our relationship was shaky at best. She and I were oppositional forces for as long as I can remember. After my expedition into the world of drag with Ursula, I felt a new sense of understanding who I was, and that person did not like to conform to gender stereotypes anymore. I started wearing vintage women’s clothing that I’d buy in thrift shops. Fur coats, printed blouses, neon jackets from the 90s. I pierced my ears. I dyed my hair. And my mom did not take a liking to this newly awakened persona.
“I hate those earrings,” she said about my bright pink plastic studs.
“I hate that shirt,” she said about my velvet leopard print blouse.
“I hate those leggings,” she said about my multicolored stained glass style leggings.
“I hate those shorts,” she said about my tight spandex shorts with a jungle pattern.
And every time, she attacked my person. I saw my clothes as an extension of my personality. My very being and essence was hurt every time she told me she hated what I wore, even though I thought I looked fabulous. I tried not to let it get to me, since I knew she had terrible fashion sense, but she was my mother. Wasn’t she supposed to love me no matter what? I mean, I loved her even though she had outbursts of extreme mania and panic. Even when she was stressed at work, then took it out on me by pointing out any small messes in my room, ordering me to “clean it or else I didn’t appreciate her.” Even though she targeted me above everyone else with her outrageous claims that I didn’t love her because I didn’t want to watch stupid celebrity gossip television with her. Even though she insulted me, she still told me she loved and accepted me, and though I found her acceptance hard to believe, I still loved and accepted her. She was my mother, and even though she wasn’t perfect, I understood that she suffered from mental illness, and there wasn’t much I could do to fight back against her own misunderstandings.
The following fall, I came to Penn State, where I immediately got into the queer culture and found the LGBT community. I learned that every year, they organized a student drag show, and I fully committed to participating. I adopted the name Rubi Zafiro, which means “Ruby Sapphire” in Spanish, named after my favorite Pokémon games. I designed my look, bought all of my makeup, and got my outfit together in time for the show.
When I took the stage for the first time as Rubi, I felt that same feeling I got from playing Ursula. The crowd loved me for who I was, even if I wasn’t doing masculine things or being the male that I was born as. I danced my ass off in a tiny dress from Forever 21, six inch stilettos, and my black undergarments borrowed from some female friends. My lips moved in sync with Beyoncé and Lady Gaga’s words as I pulled in dollar bills from the crowd. The screaming when I shook my butt, the hooting when I dropped down low, the whistling for the ending pose – they all made me feel like I was on top of the world. That’s a feeling that doesn’t come easy. I felt it once and became addicted to the sensation. I felt like the stars were aligning, so I fashioned myself into one of them.
When the show was done, I went out to the crowd to thank friends for coming. At every turn, strangers showered me with admiration and adoration. Tons of people friend-requested me on Facebook. I even set up a fan page for myself and got over 100 likes in a day. I didn’t know if I deserved all of that, but I took it anyways. As long as I didn’t have an ego trip, I didn’t see any harm in giving it a little boost.
Following the student drag show performance, I didn’t have another chance to perform until my sophomore year of college. Over the summer, Levels Nightclub reached out to the kings and queens of State College in hopes of putting on a drag show. Despite the possibility of not being paid, I was all in to perform. I had been practicing numbers in my room, alone, dancing in front of my mirror in my high heels all summer. All that practice had to be for something!
However, I did undergo some changes between my first and second performance.
Ever since the death of my 13-year-old cousin and close friend at age 17, I began questioning my own existence and mortality. That path led me down a road away from my agnostic atheism toward a more spiritual outlook. I read plenty on spiritual philosophies, esoteric religions like Rosicrucianism and Pantheism, and eventually I came across the writings of the brilliant author and esteemed occultist Aleister Crowley. As I read more and more of his work over the summer between my freshman and sophomore year, I attached myself to his work and his occult religion of Thelema. The religion’s motto is “Love is the law, law under will.” I found a resonance with it that I had never found with other religions before, so I began working with his brand of tarot cards – essentially making it my own Holy Book. Others had Bibles, Torahs, Qur’ans, and I had a deck of cards with symbolic pictures.
I began learning how to read them. After I reached a certain amount of comfort in reading and interpreting the cards, I began to give out readings for my friends. They all said how great I was at reading accurately. Often times they were quite surprised, even scared, when I would mention something totally outside of my knowledge but within their own.
“He’s going to propose to you in the next month,” I said to my friend on my apartment floor.
“Weird. He did just show me his grandma’s wedding ring last week,” she said.
They’re engaged now. Regardless of the weird scenarios that occurred in my readings, and despite my friends’ comments and speculations, I did not believe I was “psychic;” however, the idea – and even the aesthetic – became more and more appealing to me.
This self-image reflected outward in terms of dark clothing, occult imagery in my art and fashion, and several phases of hair dye. I felt like a different person than the naïve, bubbly freshman Steve. I felt different about drag than he did, too. He thought it was all about giving the crowd all that hyper-femininity: lust-filled grins, cherry lips parted ever so slightly, dark eyelashes batting over flirting eyes that say, “Can I take you home tonight?” But the new me understood so much more than that. I understood drag as an art form – one that has no rules except the ones you make for it, that engages the audience with performance, that leaves them stunned with brilliance, and that I would perfect to send the exact message that I wanted to transmit about who I was as a human being.
So, I changed my name. Rubi Zafiro had died. Ca$$andra Prophit was here to stay.
I chose the name carefully. I took the name Cassandra after the Greek prophetess who saw the future yet nobody believed her. Prophit was a portmanteau of “prophet” and “profit.” And of course, the SS (being my initials) in Cassandra, I replaced with dollar signs to give my name its weight in gold. I told the organizers for the show of my name change, and they promptly changed the official list in due respect of my wishes.
Preparing for my first show as Ca$$ was stressful to say the least. I was nearly broke from having to buy college textbooks and then I had to put together two distinct outfits (complete with wig and heels) for the event. Goodwill and Amazon soon became my best friends – along with my father who, bless his soul, paid for a lot of the superfluous extras without his immediate knowledge. Since he was the only source of income at the time, I had to use his money to buy my drag stuff, but I never explicitly told him. However, I knew that it would be worth it and saw each purchase as a future investment. I designed each look five times over, yet once I had all of the pieces together, the outfits looked nothing like what I had originally planned. Not that it was a problem, really. I was still happy that I had something to wear that night, regardless of whether or not it turned out perfectly.
Before I knew it, it was time to perform. I started preparing three hours before the show began. The makeup process turned out to be difficult. I had to problem-solve when my drawn-on eyebrows turned out looking like smeary, overly-angular shapes. I had to wipe them clean, then draw them back on with the pink lipstick I was using to match my pink wig, skirt, and legwarmers. Once I got past that point, I put all of my clothes on piece by piece, eventually creating a character that looked and felt nothing like the role of Steve [x] which I played in my day to day life.
My friends, after heavily pre-gaming, escorted me from my apartment past hordes of frat bros who street harassed me in utter disrespect, shouting out homophobic slurs.
“Fucking faggot,” one said. Living next to a frat, I have come to the conclusion that this phrase permeates their language and vocabulary to the point that it might even be considered a greeting or possibly an end stop of a sentence. However idiotic I found their speech that night, I brushed it off since I was feeling so confident in my new self, giving them the good fortune of me not caring enough to kick them in the face with a six-inch stiletto. After stumbling downhill on the sidewalk for a few minutes, we arrived at the nightclub, which was already teeming with people.
I made my way backstage, where I waited for what seemed like hours to be introduced for the first time on stage as Ca$$andra. When that moment came, it was all worth it. The audience went wild as I performed “Baby One More Time” by Britney Spears in my science fiction-inspired, retro-futuristic, neon rainbow costume. My next song was “Oblivion” by Grimes, an eerie yet playful number that left the audience shocked.
For “Oblivion,” I took to the stage in a pale pink sheer top with a black lacy bra underneath, a long black velvet skirt, topped by a short white-blonde bob wig and dark sunglasses. Behind my sunglasses, fake blood encircled my eyes underneath sharp-looking black eyebrows. When I took off my sunglasses, the audience yelled for me in a way I had never heard before. My art was coming alive for the first time. I felt like I was creating a real experience for everyone seeing my performance. At the end of the number, I staged a very dramatic fake death under a flashing strobe light. Everyone replied by pounding on the stage and cheering for me. Even though I was face down and pretending to be dead, I had never felt more alive.
I ended up earning tons of money in tips, the club paid me after all, and I could go a few more weeks without asking my dad for money again. I’d like to say that I was responsible with my nouveaux riches, but alas, I used my fat stack of ones mostly to buy beer and pot. Typical. At the end of the stack were two two-dollar bills. I kept those to hold on to as a reminder of my first real gig at a club.
On social media, my friends and family showed overwhelming support for me following the show. But in the meantime, I was having a crisis with school. My extreme states of mania induced me into believing that I should drop out of school and pursue my dreams full time. My friends and I always talked about opening a business – a café that served spiritual and artistic needs – and we would go to a big city in California to do it. I contacted my friend who lived in Los Angeles, telling him about my excitement of over my plans, and he offered me a place to stay if I went. The doors of opportunity swung open wherever I looked; I thought it would be stupid not to take an amazing chance. I would go and open a small business while pursuing my artistic endeavors like drag, writing, and the visual arts, and hopefully become famous.
A phone conversation or two with my dad had me changing my mind the very next week. He convinced me that, since he was paying for my school and I never had to worry about taking out student loans, it was worth my time to at least graduate from Penn State with any sort of degree. Not long after, the inevitable stages of depression hit me, following the mania hot on its trail, reminding me that, like my mother, I also had mental health issues that made me misunderstand the world.
Even though my delusions of grandeur faded after a few visits to the psychiatrist, the dreams didn’t die. I still had the business plan written out. I still had dreams of being the rich, famous, esteemed Ca$$andra Prophit, and I wasn’t going to let anything stop me. If I had to stay in school, I would do it on my own terms. I applied to the Integrative Arts program at Penn State for theater and English, to which I was eagerly accepted. My parents took some convincing that it was a degree worth pursuing for me, but once I told them that I could graduate a semester early, they were pretty much on board. I informed them of my upcoming drag shows, to which they responded unenthusiastically, once again crushing my hope that they might attend just one of my performances.
A month after the first show, I performed once again at the annual student drag show. The audience was smaller that year, but my performance was much, much larger. In my closing act, “Hollaback Girl,” I pulled bananas out of my pants (“this shit is bananas…”), desecrated them with my glittery blue lips, and then threw them into the audience. One of my good friends in the front row picked up the banana and ate it. I believe it was a defining moment of my career.
My last show was at Levels again, and the theme was “Red Runway.” I gave it my all to the Lana del Rey song “Off to the Races” to begin, acting out all of my joys and sorrows of being in a doomed relationship. Then, in true Ca$$andra Prophit fashion, I closed the show with a very special rendition of “Bloody Mary” by Lady Gaga. I dressed as a contemporary, gothic Virgin Mary: blood red skirt, cloak, and heels; my beloved stained-glass leggings; a huge necklace bearing dozens of gold and silver crosses; a black wig with a gold sequin halo; a fake blood heart on my white shirt; and my face covered in tears of blood. I was told that “fake blood is my shtick.” Others said I resembled a few modern day examples of witches (à la “The Craft” and “American Horror Story”). Some of the queens even admitted that they didn’t understand my drag. But I knew what I was doing – I was making my art. Whether it was understood or not, loved or hated, I didn’t care. I was doing on that stage exactly what I knew I wanted to do.
Though I didn’t make as many tips as I had hoped for, though the club didn’t even pay us that time, I still wouldn’t have changed a thing. Struggling through a semester full of classes that no longer had bearing on my degree requirements, the single thing that kept me going from day to day was my drag. I thought about it constantly. No matter who I spoke to, it somehow found its way into the conversation.
“Come to my drag show! It’s at [place] at [time] p.m., and it costs $[amount] to get in!” became a very popular phrase for me, both in real life and while promoting on social media. By the time I had finished the second nightclub performance, my Facebook fan page had over double the likes it had the year before, and I was even getting friend requested by drag queens from other cities that took up an interest in me after watching me perform at Levels.
Two more performances as Ca$$andra later, I feel like drag has become an even bigger part of my life than I ever imagined. If I could go back in time and tell the 15-year-old me about the person I am now, I don’t think he would believe it. First of all, I was a die-hard atheist, so the whole occult thing would have probably shaken me pretty hard. But at the time, I only revered and admired drag performers – I never thought that I would ever actually pursue something like that, even if I did secretly dream about it. It wasn’t even until my senior year that I started expanding my fashion tastes across the gender binary.
Who I am today isn’t who I was then. I’m a new Steve [x]. I’m no longer Rubi Zafiro, I’m Ca$$andra Prophit. I may not fit the labels for this or that. I may not be accepted by everyone immediately. I might not even feel like the same person tomorrow. But I do know myself better than ever, regardless if I’m someone my mother is confused by because of what I wear, or if I’m someone that frat boys harass on the street for being a “faggot,” or if I’m someone who thrills an audience with every high-heeled dance move and lip-sticked motion of the mouth. At least I can call myself someone.
And if I’ve learned one thing after all…it’s that you betta work!