ÿunfl 20. 2003
Documenting Dapcelle
She oughta be in pictures—and now she is
by
G ary M orris
|| arcelle (like Garbo, Brando or Anna
§ Nicole, a full name would be superfluous)
is both institution and icon in Portlands
queer community. Proprietress of the
longest-surviving drag club in the United
States, mother hen to a gaggle of performing
queens, tireless community activist and, in her
own bemused words, “a gorgeous, very large
blond lady!” she can now add another credit to
her résumé: star of her own documentary.
Some fans at Portland State University have
been working for the past several months on
S/He Shows: Drag as Social Action— a portrait of
the divine Miss D. To date, they’ve shot 60-plus
hours of perfonnance and interview footage,
with the aim of a late 2004 release (depending
on the success of fund raising and grant writing).
Co-directors Wendy Kohn, a filmmaker
associated with Portlands Kwamba Produc
tions, and Jan Haaken, professor of psychology,
along with a handful of Haaken’s students,
have become fixtures at the club, discreetly
documenting Darcelle XV and Co. on film.
The former Empress of Portland and her
team of dancing divas “have contributed a
tremendous amount of time and energy to the
community, including many charitable events,”
Haaken explains. “The club has become a kind
of community center. The performers
also...have a reputation for engaging audiences
in a warm, respectful yet challenging way. Dar
celle seems to relate well to people from rural
communities or small towns.”
B
Indeed, Darcelle (aka Walter Cole) has
the brio and the balls to speak with equal
panache to straight truck drivers, seasoned
dyke fans, nervous queens in the process of
coming out and, in one recent case, a woman
who’d just had a double mastectomy, who
watched the show through laughter and tears.
At another recent performance, Darcelle
movingly recalled the joy of working for
many years with a drag queen named Tina,
who had died that morning.
“Most people think of drag as wildly frenet
ic, fun and celebratory,” says Haaken. “It is, but
Darcelle and Roxy [her partner of 36 years] have
also made the club a place to acknowledge loss
and sorrow. Whether it is illness, death, divorce,
coming out or a birthday party, the club seems
to be a place where it is acknowledged that you
can be ‘somewhere in-between.’ ”
This sense of suspending, at least temporari
ly, rigid boundaries of roles and emotions, per
vades the ethos of the club and the perform
ances. Darcelle knows this is part of her mis
sion. “Whenever I’m asked about boundaries,”
she says in a film short that served as a kind of
rehearsal for SI H e Shows, “1 say wait a minute,
maybe there are boundaries for countries. D )
there have to be boundaries for people?”
The Darcelle shows stylishly smash that sta
tus quo with a wild mix of audience participa
tion, vaudeville schtick, Broadway belting,
“naughty” sex routines and disco excess, with
Darcelle herself as likely to appear in elaborate
D irector Jan
Haaken backstage
with Darcelle
during filming
of S/H e Shows:
D rag as Social
A ction
cowboy gear (well, the chaps are made of white
feathers) as in a glittery dress.
O f course, one of the major attractions for
audiences and the filmmakers is the playful
approach to gender the shows take. Haaken
says that’s just one of the areas in which
Darcelle provides a kind of safety valve— a re
inforcement that being different is cause for
celebration, not withdrawal.
“We think that part of the appeal is that
the humor taps into areas of people’s
lives...that get loaded up with conflict,” notes
Haaken. "Much of the humor is ‘body talk’ as
well as related to sex and gender. Differences
based on fat/thin, short/tall, young/old are cen
tral to the parody. In this society, many people
are made to feel they don’t have the right kind
of txxly. Oppressed people are particularly
made to feel bad about their bodies and other
aspects of who they are in a range of ways.”
Darcelle is quite aware of these aspects but
doesn’t feel constrained by them. Above all,
she’s a performer trying to move her audi
ences— whether to laughter or tears.
“The last thing I’m trying to be is a real
woman,” she remarks. “If I worried about gen
der, I wouldn’t do what I do for a living. You
have to know who you are on this planet. One
of the first things we do at Darcelle’s is we
learn to laugh at ourselves. Then we can laugh
at everybody else!” JT1
Watch for fund-raising events for S/H e SHOWS:
D rag as S ocial A c tio n . In the meantime,
send those contributions to Darcelle Project,
Portland State University Foundation, P O . Box
243, Portland, OR 97207.
G ary M orris is a Portland free-lance writer
whose favorite movie is Showgirls.
REVIEW
W hale R ider
Pioneer Place Stadium 6
hale Rider opens on a
grim note: In a New
Zealand coastal town
hospital, a woman is in difficult
childbirth while her husband
engages in an ongoing feud
with his own father. A mother
dies; a baby girl is bom.
In their traditional Maori
culture, this is a wrenching
development, as a boy would
have been groomed by his
grandfather, Koro, for the role
of chieftain. The girl, Pai, grows
W
Pai takes on patriarchal tradition in the beautiful W hale R ider
up embraced by her grandmother and loved by
Koro— as long as she’s just a typical little girl.
When she begins exhibiting unmistakable signs
of ambition to become a chieftain herself, Koro
becomes her enemy.
They make for powerful adversaries— one
obsessed with an imperiled tradition, the other
determined to reinvent it. “Whale rider” is a ref
erence to the mythological character who start
ed the Maori race. Pai learns the ancient songs
and rituals of their ancestors, while K oto tries
desperately to thwart her. Matters escalate when
a pod of whales washes up nearly dead on the
beach, a dire event that Koro blames entirely on
Pais alleged hubris.
This simple storyline, like that of the Cana
dian Inuit film The Fast Runner (Atanarjuat), has
EVERY BOOK OF GAY EROTICA
ALW AYS N STOCK!
<@> Pacific Kouros. Nude pix of crude, un
shaven, rough men. Omigod, it’s your pop! $45.
( new ) Coley Running Wild. Swashbuckler has
bone for ladies and gents. Dirty comix. $19.95.
( new )Strapped for Cash.History of the hustler.
Chech out the Just Friends personals on page 51
and use the form or go to w w w .justout.com
to w rite your own free 50 word ad'
Corner o f Sancty Btvcf. & NE 64th
3106 NE 64th • Portland, OR 97213
Straight boys drop trou for (gasp!) money. $20.
DOWNTOWN s> 927 SW OAK • 226-8141
the poetic power of ancient myth, with a primal
narrative enriched by an element of genderplay
in its pitting of patriarchy and the rigid, repres
sive roles it represents against an expanding fem
inine (arai feminist) spirit It’s this conflict that
gives the film much of its considerable force.
The native actors are uniformly strong, par
ticularly Vicky Haughton as Pai s sympathetic
grandmother and Rawiri Paratene as Koro.
But the most riveting performance is that
o f 12-year-old Keisha Castle-Hughes as Pai,
who is simply extraordinary in this com plex
role. It’s impossible not to be moved by her
incarnation o f a small and suffering yet pow
erful girl, driven by a force that seems equally
likely t o transform or destroy her.
— G M jn