God Save the Queens
Punk, drag, and growing up in public with ADHD.
I was trained early in hyperbole. Extremes were in. You’ve seen the Sopranos. My family was nothing like the Sopranos …except that like the Sopranos, we lived in New Jersey, for my high school years anyway, and saw a certain amount of opera at home every day.
I learned to be deft, to balance in chaos. You know what birling is? It’s a watersport contest where you try to stay upright on a free-floating log, and I became a champion, metaphorically, a distinction I retain to this day—maybe the only thing I have in common with lumberjacks.
As an adult, I became quite good in a crisis, a North Star when things went south, cool-headed amid hysteria. But as a kid navigating other people’s crises, I didn’t have a hold on my own. What dramas? My entanglements with family, teachers, friends, and others seemed pretty normal to me. While I didn’t seek out trouble, I also didn’t resist when it sidled up and ingratiated itself.
You can psychoanalyze it all you want, and you won’t learn much. I get more from looking through the lens of ADHD. The risks I took—out loud and proud—didn’t feel foolish because I didn’t identify them as risks. Only now do I know they were hits. Dopamine hits. They felt necessary, like any scratching does when faced with an itch. My heart was all in it, too.
Stayin’ Alive in the ‘80s
With the ‘80s in view, I ran screaming from Princeton University to New York City, after a freshman year that proved a little too rich for my constitution. The apex was a date-cum-sexual assault perpetrated in an all-male “eating club” by the heir to an Italian auto dynasty who was photographed a few years later at a prayer service in Tehran presided over by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and who eventually jumped off a bridge. (I swear, I was nowhere near there at the time.)
I took a gap year (before the phrase "gap year" had been invented), moved to Manhattan, and never looked back. Off the leash in a sleepless city, I consumed and was consumed by copious amounts of pleasure and danger. My best teachers were Punk and Drag: boys in mascara, girls with swagger. Fun, fashionable, and good-looking, these queens were not just daring but deadly serious.
My sample weekend in 1985:
• Saturday, 2 p.m.: Rivington Street Lower East Side design studio, where our merry band of badass feminists make Caught Looking, a collection of sex-positive essays and graphics.
• Saturday, 10 p.m.: The World Alphabet City’s punk-disco-art venue, highlighting performers like Debbie Harry, David Bowie, and Prince. You might have even caught Public Enemy onstage or Afrika Bambaataa spinning in the balcony.
• Sunday, 2 a.m.: Escuelita Hell’s Kitchen after-hours club, catering to Latin and Black LGBTQ+, where drag and trans performers danced and lip-synced to Whitney Houston and Cher.
• Sunday, 12 p.m.: The Spike Far West Chelsea leather club/brunch establishment. Men in chaps eat eggs Benedict and all of us wear leather: tight motorcycle pants, hobnail boots, and studded jackets, with little daggers pierced in our ears.
Me and Madonna—Like This 🫰
Throughout the 1980s and into the ‘90s, despite AIDS, Reagan, greed, and all the other reasons to be fearful at the time, I sashayed and stomped across the gender spectrum— super-femme to baby-butch—making spectacles of self-presentation, zoomed-in, all caps, bold.
Later, while working at a series of large-circulation magazines, I tried moving the margins closer to the mainstream by introducing “alternative” work into those glossy pages. It was a tough act for various reasons and opened my life up to scrutiny.
Given my extracurricular activities over the preceding decade (or my whole life), I already knew I couldn’t run for president, or even dogcatcher. So, I did this instead. (Please refer to first image above.)
Photographic evidence confirms that Halloween was a good excuse to revel in my own bad self. (See also, not a real nun.) Due to the “holiday,” my outfit passed as a costume, and my coworkers would never realize this was the real me, a cross-dressing bisexual shock jock from way back, disguised as a mild, bookish girl from the suburbs.
Meta-Hari?
If anyone considered for a moment that I was trying to have it both ways, they would have been right. There, in the hallowed halls of a powerful media company, I was acknowledging the male gaze while attempting to subvert it (better than sex on your boss’s desk).
Anyway, a good dominatrix has it both ways.
Which recalls another transgressor who worked in pop and was reviled for claiming allegiance to both Girl Power and Sex Kitten. That would be Madonna.
(At this stage, I’d like to remind everyone—as if you needed reminding! —that people with ADHD often shoulder an enormous burden of grandiosity. Psych! Too late now to tally up the minutes my colleagues spent trying to puzzle me out. Too late to delete the comparison I made between Madonna and me above.)
To close the loop here, my outfit nodded to Dita Parlo, a sultry German actress whom Madonna used as an alter ego for her 1991 book, Sex, and album, Erotica, the title track of which begins with the line “My name is Dita, I’ll be your mistress tonight....”
Case Study No. 1
Have time to look at another still? Come back with me to a previous decade and a transformational place on the personal timeline, documenting a passage from boy-girl to middle-school libertine:
In seventh grade, Steven Carbeau sent me a nude photo with a letter asking me to reply in kind. What an opportunity! It was hard to make him out in the picture, but he did look naked, standing behind a pole that masked his privates, though I couldn’t…really…see that well.
Nevertheless, I complied with his request.
Without stray naked pics lying around the house, I pressed my little sister into service, and one afternoon, when my mother went out, we hopped to it. I quickly undressed, wrapped myself in a towel, and raced outside with Anne and an Instamatic. I had chosen a Safari theme, and my props were at the ready: a green floppy hat, bird-watching binoculars, and a five-foot-long stuffed toy snake.
I dropped the towel and draped the snake around my neck, making sure it fell just so over my chest and nether region. Then I lifted the binoculars to my eyes and commanded Anne to take the shot.
Somehow, the film got developed, and a week later, a photo was delivered to Steven. Were we going out yet, I wondered?
Not long after, I was in my room listening to The White Album and unfolded the poster that came with it. There, printed in the center of the poster, was the same little, out-of-focus photo Steven had sent me, and it was Paul McCartney.
Gender Euphoria
Undeterred, I threw myself into new adventures. One casualty: my membership in a gang of neighborhood boys was revoked after I tried to lure them, one by one, into a backyard shed for show and tell.
It was new, all right, but it followed. I was consistent in my reinventions. I had been a boyish kid, and not only because my father controlled the hair situation in my family, demanding that my sister and I cut our hair short to keep it neat (knot fair!). As a preschooler, I hauled my rocking horse across the lawn and played Cowboy past dusk. By second grade, I was calling myself a boy-girl. A bit later, I insisted on living in a tent out back and spent days rereading My Side of the Mountain, pretending to catch squirrels for breakfast, and aspiring to make my forever home inside a hollow tree. Dad schooled me in backyard baseball, chess, and cards, and took me to Knicks and Mets games.
I spent a lot of time on my own, directing lots of energy toward world-building, even on the small scale of my bedroom, which I often reconfigured at 3 a.m., following yet another new floor plan better suited to the kind of person I was becoming that week.
I grew into theatricality and found that, under cover of darkness, my cool head was slowly being replaced by a firecracker. I posed for photos in different guises (Russian peasant, housewife in a mouthwash commercial, grand dame) with a manic look on my face. And as a proud prepubescent gender-bender, I flouted the good-girl guise. Mounting evidence includes getting fired from the Brownies for refusing to follow the instructions for making a wishing well. My mother, a bit of a black sheep herself, volunteered as snack lady to support me, but she knew in her heart that I was not Scout material. Like her, I was trying things on.
By 6th grade, I had a mouth. I mounted a vigorous defense of my own style of handwriting in penmanship class, for which I received a C. When a bully librarian was nasty to me, I spat at her and got my face slapped. (And I love librarians!) I wrote a letter full of curse words that were so foreign to me, they glistened on the page, and I gave it to a kid to share with a playground of tormentors. I thought it was funny and cool, but soon enough, I was reprimanded by a beloved teacher.
Not that it deterred me. No. I had a taste for flying into storms.
Case Study No. 2
Whose idea was it to write a play that lampooned a teacher and then cajole students into performing it? Mrs. Palmer, the angry, awkward yet strangely powerful music teacher, once embarrassed me for yelling in class. When we were assigned to write a play illustrating a moral dilemma, my star character was Mrs. Palmer.
The day before I was to present, I heard we’d have a substitute teacher. I prepped my classmates. Tomorrow’s the day. Don’t forget your pie tins. In the girls’ bathroom, I draped myself in long strands of beads, a dowdy sweater and skirt, and a feather boa. I pulled on a short red wig and a giant pink sequined beret. The pie tins and whipped cream cans stayed in the bag, with the zither.
As Mrs. Palmer, I spoke in a piercing falsetto and dragged a spoon across the toy zither's strings. I hoped the kids would improvise. The chaos ended in a frenzy of whipped cream pies. Kids from the hall crowded the door. Some of them howled approvingly; more of them looked terrified. The sub got lost in the racket, which quieted down only when the assistant principal arrived, and I was taken from the room.
My first foray into guerrilla theater.
Please return for Part II, with anecdotes about adulting with ADHD, grappling with misogyny, and more.
What a rebel girl, even if it was in the service of seeking dopamine you were truly unique. Great writing!
I don't remember taking that pic. But I remember a lot of other things...