Whistleblower ✓

30 | out the window

"Okay, first question," Olivia said, consulting the numbered list in her notebook. "When did you start doing drag?"

Dulce cleared his throat and propped his elbows on the table.

His fingernails were painted a brilliant sunflower yellow.

"My senior year of college," he said. "I was a theater major. I did a lot of Shakespeare, a bit of contemporary work. It wasn't until after I turned twenty-one and started going out to bars that I got interested in drag."

Ryan cleared his throat hesitantly and looked to Olivia like he needed her permission to speak.

"Yeah, go ahead," she said.

"So how'd you go from, like, Shakespeare to being a drag queen?" Ryan asked.

"Alright, alright," Dulce said, scooting his chair up to the table and looking entirely too excited to play history professor. "So, drag is a type of theater. It's always been about performance, although in ancient civilizations—South America, Egypt, Japan—crossdressing was used in spiritual or religious ceremonies. It wasn't until the popularization of original dramatic works that drag really evolved. In Shakespeare's day, for instance, women weren't allowed to take the stage, so boys played the female roles and dressed the part."

Olivia and I groaned with displeasure at the same time.

"Right?" Dulce said. "Anyway, on to the twentieth century, and you've got vaudeville, which is a type of musical theater that centers around comedy. That's when female impersonation took on this new edge. It became about the personality, the caricature, the satire. So then we got Rocky Horror Picture Show—as you mentioned," he said to Ryan, "and RuPaul's Drag Race, and bam, it's today, and I'm getting paid to sing Cher at a Mexican restaurant. Living the dream."

Olivia frowned down at her bullet points, frantically trying to find the ones she could cross off.

When she'd reoriented herself, she asked another round of basic questions—where Dulce had been born, if he had siblings. I itched to jump in and pick up the compelling conversation Olivia had let drop (Dulce was clearly well-learned in the history of drag culture and theater, and though I'd tried stalking his LinkedIn, I wasn't sure where he'd gone to college), but I didn't want to bulldoze her.

"Have you always been a singer?" Olivia asked, finally circling back around to a more productive line of questioning.

"I did a capella in college," Dulce said. "And I grew up watching a lot of theater with my mom."

I saw an opening for the tricky question Olivia had delegated to me.

So I leaned forward, reached for the chip basket, and asked, "Were your parents involved in performance arts?"

Bodie propped his elbow on the table and rested his hand over his mouth, like he was covering a smile. I tried not to let it go to my head.

"No, no. Not their skill set," Dulce said with a laugh. "Dad's a lawyer, mom's a physical therapist. But she—my mom—she always liked watching musical theater with me. She took me to New York when I was in high school to tour colleges and see a few Broadway shows."

"So she's... supportive?" Olivia asked tentatively.

"Oh, she loves it," Dulce said with a bashful smile. "She comes a couple of times a year to watch. She gets rowdy. It's embarrassing, sometimes, but I perform with a couple of girls who don't even talk to their moms anymore, so I like to be thankful for what I've got."

I'd been five years old when my mom died.

Everything I really knew about her was from pictures framed around our house and stories my dad and abuelita told over and over again, until I couldn't untangle which memories were mine and which were theirs. I'd been too young, and she passed too suddenly, so I'd never had the chance to think, I am so thankful for this woman.