LGBT Book & Video Blog

“I have never wanted to be a woman...” So begins Daniel Harris’s paradoxical memoir “Diary of a Drag Queen,” a witty, satisfying examination of gender and loneliness in the contemporary age.

After his partner left him at the age of 45, Harris found himself an unwanted middle-aged man in a youth-obsessed gay world. Instead of “burrowing into my books, hibernating for the rest of my life, safe from the indignities of old age” like any sane, less adventurous individual—or perhaps one without a book contract to fulfill—Harris lights upon the idea that as a drag queen named “Denial” he might occasionally have better success enticing an attractive man into his bed.

The stunt revolutionizes his sex life.

“I was overwhelmed with an embarrassment of riches. Gorgeous men hailing from every country in the world came crawling out of all five boroughs of New York City,” he writes.

Despite looking like a “dilapidated harridan” even in an expensive wig and buried under several layers of foundation, eyeliner, lipstick, and powder, Harris is able to snare the favors of many men, most self-professed straights, and many half his age.

It is this paradox of expectations that fuels “Diary of a Drag Queen.” Throughout, Harris’s keen eye discerns the essential contradictions of his circumstances, how causes do not produce the expected effects, and what this wrings on his personality. It transforms a simple memoir into a powerful self-examination.

Often these contradictions result in humor. Instead of shock or outrage, Harris’s family actually encourages his hobby, lending him jewelry and clothing. As he shows his sister pictures of himself posing in a blue teddy she lent him, a teddy her boyfriend bought her, the boyfriend merely says, “So that’s where that went,” upon seeing the photographs.

However, most of the time the contradictions provoke despair. The interminable efforts Harris goes through to make himself more feminine, more desirable, a sort of trans-sexual Bridget Jones, only reinforce the details of his aging masculinity. Instead of a simple matter of shaving closely, packing on makeup and donning a wig, Harris discovers that such accouterments can only erase his masculine jaw and nose so much. He ends up resembling either a corpse or a mannish dowager.

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