Today’s episode is guest hosted by Leslie Sainz.

Transcript

I’m Leslie Sainz, and this is The Slowdown.

Back in March, my partner surprised me with VIP, front orchestra-seat tickets to see one of my favorite drag artists, Sasha Velour, perform her spectacular, scholarship-informed stage show titled “The Big Reveal Live.” The package included a meet-and-greet, and I nearly fainted when I first caught glimpse of Sasha in person. Statuesque beyond belief, she wore a breathtaking “Bad Sandy”-inspired black faux leather corset and pant, (paired with matching boots, of course) created by fashion and costume designer Casey Caldwell. She was generous with her time and her words, and the main event remains one of the most impressive, evocative, and inspiring works of art I’ve ever experienced.

An author, illustrator, designer, and producer, Sasha Velour is perhaps most known for winning season 9 of RuPaul’s Drag Race. Outside of her legendary, rose petal-ladden performance of Whitney Houston’s “I Get So Emotional,” and her charming portrayal of German actress and singer Marlene Dietrich, I think most often about how she used her television platform to discuss gender theory—how drag functions as a tool of both deconstruction and empowerment.

In the weeks leading up to “The Big Reveal Live,” I agonized over what I’d wear to the show, what I’d say to Sasha in our limited but meaningful one-on-one time, and how I’d style my hair and makeup. I turned to social media—TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest—for ideas. Among clips and stills of makeup artists showing off their graphic eyeliner looks, and recreations of Miu Miu’s spring/summer 2023 collection, was meme video after meme video showcasing “girl dinner” versus “boy dinner.” Periodically, the algorithm would deliver me an ad from the LA-based luxury candle brand, Boy Smells. Like the sucker I am, I bought their LES (Lower East Side) candle, which is meant to create an “olfactive exploration that reaches far beyond the binary.”

But when did we become so culturally obsessed with making the binary ironic as a means of rejecting it? And is that really the end goal, the end result here? Just the other day, I heard the term “boy air,” referring to the unhygienic air that fills heterosexual men’s apartments and gives their girlfriends acne each time they spend the night. Have we lost the plot here? Are these gendered terms contributing to our collective infantilization? Am I just needlessly poking at something innocuous? Yet, as I write this, I’m listening to the latest album by the ironically named indie supergroup, Boy Genius, on repeat.

Today’s poem, with its phantom-like repetition and delicate renderings of stereotypically gendered décor, demands our aesthetic attention. It is at once domestic and elemental, modest and suggestive, buoyant and exacting.

Love Poem by the Light of the Refrigerator
by Alisha Dietzman

If you open the door, the light
blue light is watery as girls in those
limp posters, overhead. I am listening
to your memory and it sounds like
UNLIMITED ACCESS. I call your name,
tenderly. We live in a world
with few headboards, left.
Their little decency
offends me, anyway/anyway
I call your name, tenderly.
I spit in the sink. The near miss
of this always makes my hands cold,

loose, and then I feel few—that’s it,
that’s what I wanted to say: few.

“Love Poem by the Light of the Refrigerator” by Alisha Dietzman from SWEET MOVIE copyright © 2023 Alisha Dietzman. Used by permission of Beacon Press.