While avoiding election coverage, I’m sending y’all some highlights from “Under the Barstool,” the early 90s gossip, drag-review and musings column of Libertee Belle, a Birmingham drag queen.
Those were the worst years of AIDS, here and elsewhere in the US, and besides the thousands of gay Alabamans dying, many of the bars, clubs, etc., that I’d gotten used to reading about in earlier issues of the gay paper closed because owners and clients disappeared. Belle’s column—funny, bitchy, dishy, mean, unhinged and politically incoherent but (as I think you’ll see) ultimately committed to the gay community and capable of real pathos—was one of the few regular bright spots.
Let’s start with a typical example:
I love—and of course relate to—the combination of telling it like it is (loved it! hated it!), being exaggeratedly nasty, and insisting it’s all in good fun. Liberty was actually a carpetbagger, but had lived in Birmingham for many years and is by my lights an honorary southerner insofar as she’s a lively, messy woman who’s always joking but also not joking. Or rather, making something funny, over-the-top, too wild to be merely correct, is how you show that it matters (not by insisting earnestly ‘this matters. it matters to me’). Anything worth doing—like drag or writing—is worth doing unseriously, worth being rancid about.
Much of the column covers reviews of local drag shows and gossip about feuds among queens—it’s Drag Race, Untucked, and the social media analysis all at once, but it’s also the small-town paper that tells you who had a party last weekend.
There’s your arts coverage. Politics-wise, LB hates PC culture and supports the Iraq War (one of the paper’s ‘serious’ columnists, in contrast, had a long screed about how the war was distracting from AIDS research, hurting people of color and damaging the environment)
She has no time for her many detractors, but admires anyone who can put up with her (she knows she’s difficult!)
She’s silly, catty, nasty, etc., but she also is a real writer with a degree in journalism (think of Trixie’s BFA in Theater!) as she often reminded—without giving away any details like her year of graduation (a lady never tells)…
Flashing back to that ‘proudest moment’ of the March on Washington (I hope you ignorant queens know about our marches on Washington—if not, Google!), her column after she got back is touching, critical, camp—and proud to be an Alabama homo
Finally, many of her columns, amid shitting on talentless stupid queens and stirring rumors, pay tribute to friends who have died of AIDS
This is very tender and almost earnest—except that Miss Devine has been snatched from our grasp by AIDS, carried off in a such a campy way. We are shook— death has left us gooped and gagged! What a distressing turn of events—the combination of dramatic and aristocratic registers, intensity and distance, don’t, for me, cancel each other out but make together the right neobaroque embellishment of something (a lost someone) too precious for plain sincerity. You have to pull all the stops.
And there’s something so wonderful in telling her not only to sleep well (many of the columns end “Goodnight Juan, sleep well. I love you,” and of course I assume Juan was also dead) but to stay happy—as if it were not a question of either disappearing into nothing or going to bliss, but of having to keep pushing hard at happiness (which is after all a performance and endlessly iterated achievement not an unmerited random grace). You better work, you dead bitch.