“It’s based on me and everyone in that theatre knew that and everyone was sitting there thinking —”

“No one — No, no one thinks you’re a monster.”

“Everyone in that theatre did! No one would make eye contact with me as I was leaving!”

“But it’s obviously —”

“The line between fact and fiction is very blurry.”

“Mom, nobody thinks you killed your husband.”

“Yes, of course, but I’m talking about painting me as some kind of — of overbearing, smothering mother from Psycho, or some kind of workaholic slave driver, always on my phone, always pushing you to —”

“It’s a character!”

“Using real words I’ve said. I just — I found the whole thing very upsetting.”

“Well —”

“And hurtful.”

“I’m sorry.”

“And disappointing. Frankly.”

“…”

“Mostly I was disappointed.”

Sometimes Will and I would throw ragers, where the front window fogged and people stumbled home in the light of morning. It was on these nights, dancing with Will, that I understood the word ecstatic. To feel my body emptied of self and filled with sound and sensation. To dance past the point of exhaustion and dehydration, the music shaking me to my core, rattling my bones, causing me to convulse and even weep at a transcendent chord progression or bass drop. On those nights I understood bodies in trances, bodies possessed, bodies fainting and speaking in tongues, holy laughter, spasming, shaking, groaning, roaring. I understood what it was for the shaman to become a divine conduit, emptied of their person and filled with a spirit. The idea of becoming a vessel for a divine being, to abdicate my autonomy and selfhood through this temporary death, had always seemed terrifying to me. The purview of the gullible and superstitious.

But how was what we were doing at Videofag any different? I remember one night watching Christeene, a “drag terrorist” from Austin, Texas, with heavy, smeared makeup, a catastrophic wig, and crazed husky-blue contact lenses, flinging herself around the rickety stage, deep-throating the microphone, grunting and howling and rubbing her “shtanky puss-ay” in the faces of the adoring crowd. It was like she was channelling the pure Platonic forms of excess and debauchery. I was entranced. She was the definition of abandon. And for the briefest of moments, while watching Christeene and simultaneously watching performer Paul Soileau as Christeene, I was not afraid of death.