KIND OF A DRAG
A Night with a Queen How a night with Skylar Michele-Monet increased my respect and appreciation for drag by Matt Comer :: qnotes staff writer
M
y friends have always made fun of me for wanting to go out to the bars way too early. It’s true. I’ll admit it. I’m always impatient for the fun to start. But walking into Chasers on a recent Saturday night at 8 p.m. was too much for even me. Not so for Bryan Black, the 32-year-old man behind the “Glitter Queen” stage performer Skylar Michele-Monet.
Bryan Black (right) with his boyfriend Brandon Addison before he transforms into his stage performer persona Skylar Michele-Monet.
With a couple of suitcases in hand and the largest traveling make-up case I’ve ever seen, Bryan walked into Chasers to meet me about 15 minutes after I’d arrived. A few courteous hellos and a shot of whiskey with Black started out our evening, heading back to the dressing room where he would slowly undergo transformation into Skylar. I’ve always admired drag — at least from a distance. I don’t know much about it, and I wouldn’t be able to tell you any of the names of this season’s contestants on “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” It’s entertaining, but I give it only a passing thought or appreciation. And that’s where Bryan comes in. My job on this sticky summer Saturday night was simple: shadow Bryan, get to know him, learn more about the art form he takes so seriously and give readers a tiny behind-thescenes glance at life as a local queen. Bryan’s a friendly personality — the kind you can immediately identify the moBryan Black applies makeup, wig and attire to become the ‘Glitter Queen’ stage performer Skylar Michele-Monet, shown here in process and in completion of the illusion.
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qnotes
July 13-26 . 2018
ment you meet them. I could tell it from the moment he walked into the door, smile a’blazing across his face. And, luckily for me, he’s a talker, too. There was certainly no shortage of answers to the bazillion questions I threw at him that evening. The transformation begins Once back in the dressing room, Bryan settled onto a bar stool in front of the mirror and began sifting through his mammoth make-up case. We started simple. You know — name, age, where Bryan had grown up. And Bryan’s love of artistic pursuits. Turns out, he had been a national champion dancer — clogging, to be exact — as a teenager. “By the age of 13, I’d won every title I could,” he said. He got started when he was four. His aunt had been a member of local clogging group. “Anytime they had a recital or competition, I was always the one in the audience in the middle of the aisle dancing along with them on the stage,” Bryan recalled. His mom asked him if he wanted to dance like his aunt, and he took her up on the offer. As a kid, dancing was Bryan’s way of getting attention and standing out from under his older
brother’s shadow, he says. His father had been a “sports guru,” he said. Both sides of his family had all gone to the same high school. “My dad literally held every single baseball record and every single football record you could hold,” Bryan explained. “My brother followed in those footsteps. I was never a big sports guy. I played, but I wasn’t into it a lot. I could get my attention by dancing and being on stage.” After winning his several clogging championships, Bryan turned to hip hop, contemporary and jazz. He says he even tried a little tap dancing before putting a short pause on his need to be on stage. All that desire to entertain and perform, though, came rushing back when Bryan saw his first drag show. “The first time I went to a gay bar and saw my first drag show I was 15 years old,” he said. “I can still remember the exact show it was. Three legendary divas. Instantly, I loved it — the whole dramatic, theatrical look of it.” By this time in our conversation, Bryan already had several make-up layers applied to his face. “When I first started doing drag, my make-up took me three hours to get ready,” he said as he picked up a glue stick. “What in the world is the glue for,” I asked him, stopping him mid-sentence. Flattening down his eyebrows, he explained. “If you don’t use enough, little hairs will start popping up through your foundation.” It’s been 11 years since Bryan first performed drag at a Scorpio’s talent show. Today, he’s cut his make-up time down to about an hour. Then it’s just another 25 or 30 minutes’ or so worth of pads, tights, the dress and finally the wig. It’s an incredible transformation, really, seeing Bryan slowly, methodically turn into Skylar. The process even now makes Bryan feel special. “The whole transformation aspect, it just blows me away,” he chatted. “The amount of make-up and what you have to do and