"Your Makeup Is Terrible…"

“….but I love you anyway”

I have always looked a little like the femme cartoon villains of first crushes and gay roots: dramatic, rebellious hair; dark eyes; flushed cheeks my great-grandmother was sent home from school for, to wash her bare face. Bad because I’m drawn this way and dressed for the occasion. Overlay the butch-femme spectrum with jock-goth and prep-glam and I haunted the corner of the diagram with black boots, fur coats, and red lipstick. I was never an easy-breezy-beautiful girl, a clean make-up girl, or an athleisure girl. For most of my twenties, my fingers and toes were religiously dipped red, black was an all-year color, leopard was a neutral, I didn't own a nude lip or cozy pajamas, and my lingerie matched whether anyone saw it or not. 

On the podcast Race Chaser, hosts Alaska Thunderfuck and Willam Belli joked recently that all drag is one of four Fs: funny, fuckable, freak, or frumpy, each an intentional choice to exaggerate, exacerbate, or invoke something other than the everyday. While I don’t perform, my gender presentation sketches from similar source material of pop culture and art into an exaggerated queered femininity with the contrast turned up. Going out pre-illness, pre-pandemic, I dressed like an escape room: layered mesh, hidden zips, statement sleeves, pinched waists, buckles that undid nothing but my lovers’ patience. My girlfriend liked to work for her presents and I rose to and was the occasion, a mirror for her own good taste, the compliment from strangers for her feat of fancy. But I dressed also for myself: “feeling like pussy, feeling like cunt” (Stun, Alaska Thunderfuck feat. Gia Gunn), a sentiment somehow both deeply dyke-y and high drag.

Long COVID is an aesthetic and energetic ravaging; a literal curse on the body. My skin aged a decade right as every phone call became a visual engagement. I gained the serrated cleavage of a much older woman, the droop of botched botox without the benefit of the syringe, the sunken eyes of someone who slept far less than my two naps a day. My body used every spare nutrient working up an immunological sweat until my iron, zinc, and magnesium dropped to alarming levels; my microbiome emptied of vital bacteria; my nails pitted, streaked, and broke; inflammation lit every hair follicle on fire and my mane tore out in ember fists. There are illnesses where you might expect your appearance to be affected, such as cancer and liver disease. When my girlfriend’s wife was in chemo we joked about both losing our hair. Today, online Long COVID patient forums are still full of people asking bewilderedly about hives, skin infections, bruises, hair loss, and weight changes, in the absence of accurate public health information and informed family doctors.

At the height of Long COVID’s cognitive impairments, clothing was a skill-testing question I could not cleanly answer. I regularly forgot to pull up my pants after going to the bathroom or how to button a shirt. Instead of dressing for aesthetic effect or to be undressed by a lover, I dressed to give easy access to my biceps for blood pressure cuffs or to spot-wash cardiac electrode glue off my body. Often I did not get dressed at all. I slept in dirty white sheets, in a sparse white room, trying to save my overloaded brain from having to process additional visual information or decisions.

Against this physiological maelstrom, I had no aesthetic defences: no energy or dexterity or strength to pluck my eyebrows, no brain power to shop for new clothes or research new creams and potions. Every activity, even as slight as filing a nail, took more hit points than I had. I was a human ouroboros: it felt like there was no point wasting energy trying to eat since the effort of reheating and plating and digesting food I was suddenly allergic to burned more than I could consume. Something unseen was “eating away at me / with splendid teeth” (Gwendolyn MacEwan, Memoirs of a Mad Cook).

In movies, the invisible monster trope trusts the audience to imagine something worse than special effects. It’s a threat gestured at by sounds off-screen, through onlookers’ reactions, the destruction of sets, or the musical underscoring of an ordinary shadow. The camera vets viewers’ eyes and vaselines the screen, lingering on a foreground detail like a traumatized witness. Monstrosity in film is metaphoric or metachromatic: an acquisition, retribution, inhalant, infection, invasion, damnation, a failure to gracefully transition through puberty or illness or old age. Something to hide from the world or be hidden. "Capitalism, as its monsters tell us more or less explicitly," writes Annalee Newitz in their book on pop culture monsters, "makes us pretend that we're dead in order to live".

In illness, I live in isolation, at first in extended quarantine and again whenever I relapse and become too sick to meet friends in the park across the street. For months, my girlfriend refuses to see me and won’t say why. In the 16th month, she says I make her sick with self-loathing and I hear it as commentary on my failure to maintain appearances, and not her own feelings of failure to prevent this horror. It seemed reasonable for a lover to find these unbearable circumstances, and my barely-working body, unbearable; for my relationship to fail alongside bodily functions, in a pandemic of public policy failures.

While my pandemic social media timeline divided between people renouncing bras and those styling at-home #quarantinecouture, I had no choice in my aesthetic presentation. My nerves were on fire: I couldn’t bear hair elastics or earrings or fabric that wasn’t soft and oversized. I couldn’t bend over to zip a boot without fainting. After every vaccine I broke out in a disfiguring rash from fingers to face. I gave up dark nail polish because it impacts oximeter readings — absorbing wavelengths of light needed to measure oxygen saturation. When I stopped recognizing myself in mirrors, an encephalitis symptom I still cannot medically explain, I covered them in shiva. While others took up new hobbies and languages, I was in cognitive rehab to reteach my brain what it already knew but could not retrieve: the basics of bathing and dressing, the order of operations for everyday tasks, the names of my loved ones.

Many of my early recovery milestones were aesthetic: when my hair stopped falling out or I could follow a simple skincare routine, walking to the pharmacy for an errand that wasn’t picking up medication, my weight stabilizing once my heart stopped running a daily marathon. In a post-2020 world in which ‘hard pants’ were out of style, drag was what reminded me it is ok, desirable even, to dress to exaggerate your hips or your hair or eyes, or to distract or create, instead of enhance. I wasn’t very good at it. My closet was a black hole of clothing I forgot I owned and no longer fit, and no amount of fox-eye makeup tutorials would lift post-stroke droop. I lacked the dexterity, muscle memory, hand-eye coordination, and object recognition necessary to do a proper cut crease or contour, to juggle brushes and tools. To mis-quote another of Alaska’s songs, a send-up of drag shade and the valourization of the more polished aesthetics in mainstream drag: “"my makeup was terrible...but I loved it anyway."

After years of being a monster too tired even to crawl under the bed and scare myself, drag reminded me that my body could be a visual intent, an appearance, an ode, to evoke things other than, or alongside, desire. That the energy of turning a look pays dividends in feeling otherworldly or intimidating or intriguing or memorable or at least part of the artifice of an event’s ambiance. That even if people did not want to see me, I could want to be seen. Slowly, I start going out again. Not too late, not yet regaining my stamina and dancing feet post-curse, but to shows and scenes and into the storm eye of a crowd, dressed like a loaded gesture, a threat of a good time, love’s last look, a face to lose in a crowd, "all eyes on (me), (I) took the night" (Alaska Thunderfuck, Nails).