Independence Day Drag

I spent the Fourth of July with some of the few sane people left in the United States: Drag queens.

Diva Don - by Mr. Fish

FIRE ISLAND, New York – I am on a boat with 100 drag queens who are traveling from the gay enclave of Cherry Grove on Fire Island to the neighboring community of the Pines. They have staged this “invasion” every year since 1976, after a drag queen was denied service at a restaurant. Incensed by the discrimination, a group of 17 drag queens from Cherry Grove piled into a water taxi and traveled to the Pines before storming the restaurant.

The invasion is part political statement, part party. But in the age of Trump, when drag queens, people who identify as transgender, immigrants, feminists, people of color and the so-called radical left are demonized and targeted, the invasion is at once outrageous and poignant. It captures the best of the United States of America — what it means to be a patriot and what compassion, individual liberty and a civil society looks like.

If I was going to celebrate the nation’s 250^th birthday, it could only be here.

“Just last year, the Kennedy Center featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth — THIS WILL STOP,” Trump posted on Truth Social last year, later announcing he would allow “NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA.”

Former Miss Fire Island 2022, Zelina Duval, is wearing a topaz sequin gown, stiletto heels decorated with rhinestones and huge flower droplet earrings with a matching ring and bracelet. She has an auburn wig and long, black false eyelashes. Like the other drag queens, she instantly sees through Trump.

“Trump’s a queen,” Zelina says. “We all know. He wears makeup, bronzer and highlighter. He has a new costume every day.”

“Our founding fathers wore wigs, heels and makeup,” says Paige Monroe, dressed in a champagne sequin gown, a honey-blond wig, rhinestone earrings and redolent in Cap Camarat perfume. “Drag is nothing new. It has been with us since the beginning of time. In ancient Greece and Japan, men played women’s roles.”

Trump’s gaudy ballroom, his smothering of the Oval Office in gold leaf and gold ornaments, his finicky concern about the color of his drapes, his penchant for old show tunes, his love of the gay national anthem “Y.M.C.A” by the Village People, his 1950s aesthetic of men in dark suits and black Florsheim shoes and his Mar-a-Lago women, whose surgically enhanced bodies sport huge breasts, puffed up lips and taut death masks, could be transferred to any of the evening drag shows held next door to my hotel at the Ice Palace.

The shows are very loud. They often don’t end until 4 a. m. The hotel staff leave ear plugs on the nightstand. It helps. A little.

During this Fourth of July weekend there was an “underwear dance party,” where in the morning, blurry eyed men told me their underwear swiftly became optional. There was also Alaska Thunderfuck’s “Fourth of July Alien Invasion Party.” Alaska sang selections from her albums “Anus” and “Poundcake.” Songs included “Your Makeup in Terrible,” “This is My Hair” and one song, whose refrain, repeated over and over, was “I fucking love you.”

The frequent sexual liaisons — the Ice Place has a curtained off area for those who want immediate and often anonymous gratification — mirror the promiscuity of the Epstein Class, but with one important difference: Epstein’s girls and women were trafficked and enslaved. Here, relations are consensual.

Fascism is an inverted form of camp. Its evil side. It is devoid of irony and humor. It takes itself seriously. It uses exaggerated, theatricalized art to turn a leader — like any drag queen — into a larger-than-life persona. The outward forms are the same. But fascist camp is about instilling obedience. Drag queen camp is rebellious. Drag queen camp seeks to expand human possibilities and identities. Fascist camp crushes identities into narrow, state-approved molds of good and bad, man and woman, patriot and traitor.

“Trump doesn’t know its camp,” says Bob Levine, who arrived in Cherry Grove in 1955 and has been performing for 70 years under his alter ego, Rose Levine. He was one of the original 17 drag queens who invaded the Pines. At 93, he is still performing. His next show at Cherry Grove Community House and Theatre is on August 5. It is the oldest continually operating gay summer theater in the country.

He was here in the 1960s when police sent undercover officers to entrap gay men. Once arrested, the men’s names were published in the papers. Most were fired from their jobs.

“So many lives were destroyed,” Levine says.

As rights are rolled back, as all who do not conform to the Trump administration’s rigid definition of what it means to be a man or woman are attacked, the darkness of the past becomes that of the present.

Thom Hansen, known in drag as “Panzi,” is dressed as the Statue of Liberty. She wears a long green gown, has a towering white wig with a crown and a small torch. In 1976, Panzi was one of the drag queens who stormed the Pines.

As our boat enters the harbor at the Pines, hundreds of people line the docks. They clap and cheer. Docked boats let out loud blasts. Sirens wail.

A singer in shorts wearing red, white and blue socks on the dock sings “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” He changes the lyrics to, “My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the queens.” When he closes with “The queens are marching on,” the crowd erupts in sustained cheers.

Panzi, disembarks. She stands on the pink carpet rolled out on the dock. She grips a microphone. Signs in the crowd read: “We will not be erased.” “We the People Means Everyone.” “Drag sets our imagination free.” “Fuck Fascists.” “Fuck ICE.”

“The invasion was founded because someone here in the Pines did not allow a trans woman to dine in a restaurant,” she says to the crowd. “That’s all history. We all love each other, well, most of you anyway. If you have phones on, if you are recording this, send these recordings to our little trans brothers and sisters in fucking Texas, Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota and Washington because they are alone. They need to know we are there with them. I will fight until I die for their freedom and mine.”

The crowd roars in appreciation.

“I love you Panzi,” a man screams.

“I love you too!” Panzi replies. “Are you pretty? Do you have a big dick?”

The drag queens who disembark are announced to the onlookers. There is a group of men dressed as “trad wives.” They have brown and blond wigs and matching beige dresses. There are crosses dangling from their necks. They are holding wicker baskets and are wearing straw sun hats. There is a group of drag queens who call themselves “America’s Sweethearts,” carrying blue pom-poms and dressed in blue and white cheerleader outfits. There is a drag queen in a short green skirt with a sash that reads, “Best Ass.” A group of men in shorts wear white hard hats with the words “Trad Repair.” Sophya Medina, Miss Fire Island 2025, wearing her sash and crown, disembarks to sustained applause.

“I keep praying that the administration and the policies will change,” Panzi tells me later. “Everybody is praying for that, but nobody wants to do anything. I don’t understand it. I don’t understand why the immigrant community doesn’t rise up. Why don’t the Black and Hispanic communities rise up? Why don’t ethnic communities rise up? Everybody is quiet. The LGBTQ community is quiet. If we all get together and rise up, it might mean something. But people are terrified. In my day we were rebels. We fought. We burned cars, for God’s sake. We broke windows. But nowadays, I don’t know. They are rolling us back to the 1950s.”

There are many here who have been rejected by their families and communities. For them, gay enclaves such as Cherry Grove are like oxygen.

“Why can’t we have a country where it’s just okay to be yourself?” asks Basit Noor, an oral surgeon who moved to New York from Pakistan after repeated death threats. “Why should anyone feel endangered for being themselves if it’s not hurting anyone? We fought for our rights. We fought for our freedoms. We fought for where we are today. If this movement stops, we won’t have a place to be who we are. We get tired, like ‘Oh my gosh, when is the change going to happen?’”

The melancholy is a constant theme.

“Back in 1984, I was 15 years old,” says Flaggarina Ivanna Diamond, this year’s Cherry Grove Homecoming Queen. “I was on a ninth-grade field trip at Sailors Haven’s Sunken Forest. One of the boys points to Cherry Grove. I didn’t know anything about Cherry Grove. I didn’t even know it existed. At that time I’m this closeted gay, teen boy. And there’s a lot of homophobia at the school. The boy says ‘Watch out, those guys, they’ll grab you.’ I’m praying as hard as I can, ‘Oh please grab me, please grab me, please grab me.’ And after all these years, Cherry Grove did grab me. It grabbed my heart.”

Fascism is not only a poisonous political movement. It is a poisonous cultural and social movement. It eliminates the space for those who do not submit to the narrow definitions of what it means to be a citizen, a man, a woman or a patriot. It ruthlessly crushes independent lives and identities. It leaves in its wake loneliness and trauma. Fascism begins with the marginalized and demonized, but it does not stop there. It destroys community after community until we are orphans in our own land.

I wanted to be in my country on July Fourth before it disappeared.