Excerpt from Drag Thing

by Gabe Montesanti

---

“Lose Yourself” is an excerpt from my book, Drag Thing: A Memoir of Mania and Mirrors, (Arsenal Pulp Press, April 2026). The book chronicles my immersion in the drag scene in St. Louis, Missouri and the way in which my drag persona and my rapid- cycling mania gradually become indistinguishable from each other. This chapter takes place in the first half of the book when I am befriending Rocky B. Goode, a non-binary drag performer, contending with difficulties at home with my wife, Kelly, and at the bookstore where I work. My connection with Rocky grows as we compete at Rising Stars each week, an open stage talent show for drag performers in the city of St. Louis.

---

7.

Lose Yourself

After our lunch on Delmar, it’s suddenly like Rocky and I are attached with the E6000 glue we use to affix rhinestones to our costumes. There are fake rubies scattered like red ants all over the floor of my house. Before shows, we paint together in the Prism dressing room, where queens do coke and poppers. We perform a duet on the creaky stage, a lip-synch to “I Fucked Yr Mom” by Sorry Mom, which the judges declare to be crass, as well as griping that my shoes don’t match my outfit. At two in the morning, we idle in the parking lot of the apartment building where she lives with her dad, belting Nelly’s greatest hits at the top of our lungs. We pop lithium and Zoloft before performing and wonder why it never feels like it’s working. On mornings when Rocky isn’t teaching, we often leave the St. Louis city limits just for the French toast and fried chicken at the Cracker Barrel by the airport. Sometimes, we scream just to feel the vibration in our vocal chords.

For my second individual performance, I swipe a safety cone from a construction site and stone it, along with a hard hat and safety vest, so I can fulfill my vision of Starship’s “We Built This City.” Aaliyah reads me for the safety cone―“No bitch has one of those lying around”―but applauds my resourcefulness. One thing quickly becoming clear is that I need to learn some better moves.

“Everything’s about the balls. Everything’s about the scrotum,” one friend tells me. She was once part of the St. Louis Professional Cheerleaders and Dancers, and she volunteers an afternoon to teach me how to dance. “Once you get onstage, you just need to think, ‘You want my dick and you know it.’”

“How the fuck do you know this?” I ask her.

She ignores me and proceeds to walk as though she’s just shit her pants, pointing to her pelvis like I should be taking notes.

Rocky finds this woman’s advice hilarious and shrieks while watching me practise. With each passing day, I loosen up. I perform a number where I hand out lollipops to audience members, and I also perform to “Dick in a Box” by the Lonely Island, which requires covering a shoebox in penis-themed gift wrap and hot-glueing it to the front of my pants. All I want is to impress the judges every Sunday, Aaliyah in particular. In their critiques, nothing is off limits. They make comments about my tits (they’re never bound tightly enough), my pants (they’re always too tight), my shoes (they never match what I’m wearing), and my makeup (it’s never blended or contoured quite right). I’m used to critiques from my background in visual art and writing, but it occurs to me that I’m also used to hearing these kinds of comments from just walking down the street.

One night, after showcasing a particularly bad Freddie Mercury impersonation, I sit on the back steps of Prism while people blow vape smoke around me. As I try to scrub the Freddie moustache off my face using just spit and my fingernails, Rocky attempts to liven my spirits.

“You can do this, bestie!” she says. “You just have to have fun. That’s all it is at this point.”

I decide on a different approach. Instead of picking songs that are too complicated, or new to me, or so familiar that everybody already has a preconceived idea of how they should be performed, I choose songs that meant something to me at various points in my life, songs I can pop off to without missing a single word. One of those songs is Eminem’s “Lose Yourself,” which was on my first iPod. I used to play it on the pool deck before every competitive swimming race, when my parents watched from the stands, jumping up and down as I clawed my way to whatever farfetched goal I had set for myself. Of course, I love the urgency of the beat in “Lose Yourself,” the slippery wordplay, the brokeness, and the brokenness of the people in the lyrics, but I also love that it seems to ask the question my therapist is always posing: Who were you before you were born?

The first time she said those words, I wanted to walk out of the session. I could barely sit still, I was angry, I was manic. Who was I before I was born? I was nothingness. I was a motherfucking egg. As she continued to prod, I realized her question really revolved around identity. I was asked by my family and my hometown and the people in my life to lose myself, to lose my selfhood entirely. I performed all the holy sacraments in the Catholic Church, from first communion through confirmation. I performed as an athlete, from collegiate swimming to roller derby, where I had a persona of my own: Joan of Spark, modelled after my favourite warrior in history, who was also thought to be crazy. I performed as a student who double-majored in mathematics and studio art and graduated with a BA in three years. I also performed as an enmeshed daughter who wanted a tight-knit relationship with her family but also her own life―her own queer life. If I don’t think about it too hard, I can dismiss drag as a literal performance separate from the therapist’s question, but when I stare into the mirror for the three hours it takes to become Fender, I often wonder if the art of drag is getting me closer to my true nature or farther away. The night I perform “Lose Yourself,” something shifts. I rap about a man who refuses to give up, a man with chunks of puke on his sweater, a man as anxious as I am to seize his shot. Rocky stands in her normal place at the bottom of the stage, screaming every word. I am so grateful to have her in my life that I can barely focus on Aaliyah’s critiques, which are shockingly positive.

I always stand at the bottom of the stage for Rocky’s performances too, but she doesn’t need the same kind of support I do. She is winning Rising Stars almost every week; it doesn’t matter whether she focuses on dance elements or props or park and barks. It doesn’t matter what songs she does: the musical Six, Lizzo, or her favourite number from Falsettos, “I’m Breaking Down.” Sometimes her hair is teased high or braided in cornrows, and sometimes she wears her biggest ʼfro. She can be in a pink jumpsuit with silver accents or a plaid schoolgirl skirt with a cardboard butcher’s knife. Her visions are as sharp as her winged liner. Watching her energizes me, like seeing someone win the strongman game at the amusement park. I can feel my mood shooting up every night that I stay out at Prism past midnight, every time I hit the stage and feel the spotlight on my face. Six months ago, when I left my teaching job in Texas, I felt like I was fading away permanently, but now drag is making me feel like I will live forever.

The cost of this feeling is high. At home, Kelly has started expressing frustration about all the work she does around the house and the documentation she does at my shows, namely snapping pictures and videos of my performances. “I feel like I work for you,” she says. Worse, Rising Stars is on a work night, and we rarely get home before 1:00 a.m. I try to push aside the empty buzzing feeling to make room for empathy, but it’s difficult. I’m moving too fast―I have too much energy, too much excitement. The ideas make my brain feel like it’s carbonated. I tell her I’m sorry, and I mean it, but I’m too wired to stop. There’s nowhere for my energy to go, nowhere to put the mania besides my drag and my art.

One day, after Rocko shreds Kelly’s shoes, she yells up the stairs to where I’m working on a costume: “I feel like I have two puppies!” I freeze for several seconds, unsure of what to do or what she wants. I love Kelly, but I’m also in love with drag, with making costumes, with insomnia, with being in a crowd of queer people listening to a thumping bass I can feel in my spine and gut. This is fucking living, I tell myself.

At the bookstore, things are equally difficult. I’ve gradually lost my filter and over time have started integrating drag vernacular into my interactions with the customers, like the time I called a grown man in a business suit “girl,” shocking both of us. He stares at me, open mouthed, and slowly slides his books off the counter without a word. I also can’t stop hysterically laughing at things that aren’t funny, like when a customer asks for a book on having “the puberty talk” with her kid.

When I plead with my manager to take me off the desk before I cause a problem for the non-existent HR department, she puts me on inventory, which makes my head feel foggy. The numbers won’t unscramble. I simply can’t locate any of the missing stock. When I come to her hours later, hiding my tears but obviously frustrated, she assigns other tasks to me too: mindless things that will make me sweat, like unloading a truckload of books for an author event, which requires going up and down the rickety stairs dozens of times. I’m grateful for anything physical. When the truck is empty and my new task is simply to stand in one spot in the basement and prepare the books for signing, it feels impossible, because my feet won’t stay planted. After finishing every few books, I jump up and down. I talk to myself. I put on “Bubblegum Bitch” by Marina since I am the only one in the room.

Finally, I text my manager and tell her I have to get out. I tell her I’m sorry, but I can’t do the job anymore. The door to the bookstore slams shut behind me before I’ve even received her response. She tells me to take care of myself.

Across the street is a series of scorched storefronts wrapped in caution tape. The usually bustling corner is dormant right now. I think of all the houses that burned down on the street where we used to live―the electrical fire that trapped Girlfriend and her kittens inside my neighbour’s house. Something tightens in my torso. I stumble toward the parking lot and only then remember that Kelly dropped me off at work earlier today. I don’t have a car. In our last session, my therapist said that at this point, driving is too dangerous for me. I call Kelly: voicemail. Again: voicemail. I start walking. I pass dust hearts drawn on windows. I pass a shattered glass bottle and pick up the pieces like shells from sand. I pass the arcade bar where people are popping pinball machines, and screams of encouragement mingle with a couple’s brawl on the fire escape above. “You fucking bastard! You fucking prick! You fucking liar! I’ll never let you fuck me again!”

I can’t feel my extremities. I’ve lost my peripheral vision. I need someone to talk to me right now. Would they think I’m tripping? Would they back away? Tipped-over safety cones litter the pavement. The dumpsters in the alleys are overflowing. My body feels so electric that I could pry a cigarette butt out of a sidewalk crevice and light it with just my fingertips. I see a man picking through the garbage near the bus stop and feel a pull toward him. I want to strike up a conversation, but the urge to get home is stronger. I wonder how Kelly will take it when she learns that my mania has prevented me from keeping yet another job. When I make it to the Delmar intersection, I realize I have never stood still long enough to notice all the broken parking meters, the peeling murals on the brick facades, the Big Gulp cups lining the perimeter of the Episcopal church.

Only when a dark vehicle drives by slowly with the windows down does my feeling of invincibility falter. It’s been only a few months since I was struck by the pellet gun from a dark vehicle with its window down, just like this one. The shooter’s goal seemed to be causing as much mass panic as possible―panic just like I’m feeling now.

Why can’t I untangle my thoughts? Why does everything feel so unrecognizable? Why isn’t Kelly answering her phone? Why can’t I remember where she is right now? Does she somehow already know what happened, and she’s screening my call? How will I tell her? A text? A letter? Smoke signals? I can’t look her in the face. Maybe she saw it coming. Maybe we all did. Ground yourself, bitch. What’s around you?

To my left: Mom’s Sweet Fried Kitchen, which doesn’t look like it’s been open in decades. To my right: Beauty and More. “Wigs! Braiding! Hair Bundles! Fashion!” I snag on the word fashion, envisioning the clothing, wigs, nails, dicks, earrings, and shoes I’m collecting upstairs in my attic loft.

I stumble and squint until I’m so jittery that the sound of a passing car snapping a branch in the road causes me to jump. I sit down in a hot parking lot and call a friend. She arrives within twenty minutes. She doesn’t ask questions.

My therapist does. My doctors do too. They start me on two more mood stabilizers, an anti-psychotic, and “a little something to take the edge off” whenever I need it. I’m prescribed changes to my diet, a mood tracking app to use twice a day, and more therapy appointments.

Kelly’s reaction isn’t quite what I feared, but it’s certainly not ideal. After my diagnosis a few years earlier, she started setting her phone alarm for every night at dinnertime, a reminder for me to take my lithium. Whenever the alarm sounded, as we were watching TV or sitting in a restaurant, she would elbow me in the ribs. I resented this. I didn’t have trouble remembering to take my meds―in fact, I was very good at remembering. It’s a common stereotype that bipolar people are not “medication compliant,” as she put it. The message I received was that she didn’t trust me.

By the time of the bookstore incident, the lithium alarm is history, but it still feels like the majority of my conversations with Kelly revolve around controlling my mania. When we sit down to have dinner, she constantly references what she’s reading in The Bipolar Disorder Survival Guide by David J. Miklowitz. She asks for my therapist’s number and enforces all her rules, especially the no driving policy. She makes a bipolar friend―someone in her sign language class―and they discuss me constantly: my drag antics, my late nights, my chances of getting on disability. I know she’s acting out of deep care and love for me, but patient and caretaker roles are starting to develop, and all I really want is to go back to how it was before. All I really want is my wife.

***

“Bestie, where have you been?” Rocky asks me. Because I can’t drive, I haven’t seen her in a few weeks, so we’re video-chatting on a Saturday morning. As usual, all I can see is the top of her head and occasionally a single eye.

“Things got weird,” I say.

She cackles and fills me in on the saga with the bitch who borrowed her wig and never gave it back and this cute trans girl she might be into. She tells me about the kindergartener at school with a hunch that she was a lesbian and the third-grader who straight up asked if she was a man. “I fucking thanked him,” she says. “When are you coming back, anyway?”

“Ho, hold your horses, I’ll be back tomorrow night,” I say.

At Rising Stars the next evening, I stand onstage in a hospital gown and yellow grippy socks. I hold a tinted pill bottle filled with white Tic Tacs. My hair is dishevelled. There’s a hospital bracelet on my wrist. Even though I can barely see Aaliyah and the guest judge in the rafters, I can make out their features well enough to tell that they are confused and maybe even apprehensive. What I’m serving is so far from the drag that wins pageants and titles. No one would ever affix a crown to my fucked-up hair. When my song plays, I see them exchange a glance. It’s Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy.”

My number is more complex than crazy, though, which I hope the judges and audience can see from the way I’m moving my body. I don’t need to think about emphasizing an imaginary dick or scrotum, as my professional cheerleader friend said: at least not for this song. This is about losing myself one way or another. Am I scared of losing my independence? Am I aware of the damage I’m causing in my wake?  Would I stop it if I could? It’s possible the mania simply feels too good.

As I lip-synch, the audience is quiet. Straight backed. They hand me dollars without looking into my eyes. Since we have drawn sequential numbers in the show lineup, Rocky is downstairs getting ready for her own song, so I feel her absence at the bottom of the stage.

When the song ends, Aaliyah says, “Girl, I don’t know what to say about that, but let’s do a toast. To self-expression.” She raises her glass of red wine.

“To self-expression,” the crowd chants back.

I know I should feel something positive when I see everyone raising their glasses for me, but all I feel is buzzing. That’s something I’m learning about mania: When I’m manic, certain feelings remain outside my orbit. A few weeks ago, a drag king I know died suddenly. We all found out at Rising Stars, but the whir of my brain was too loud to hear my own grief or anyone else’s. When I heard someone say that he died of COVID-19, that felt outside my capability to understand.

I can’t even begin to comprehend all that suffering when the mania is taking up so much space in my head. I’m too busy running, akathisia powering me away from myself and the pain surrounding me. Away from other things outside my scope: the HIV and houselessness that are realities for the people contouring their faces beside me in the dressing room; second puberties; immigration statuses. I want to be everywhere, but I’m nowhere, scattered as the constellation of fake nails on the dressing room floor.

---

Gabe Montesanti, (she/they) is a queer writer and artist who resides in St. Louis, Missouri. She is the author of Brace for Impact: A Memoir (2022), which chronicles her time skating for Arch Rival Roller Derby, and Drag Thing: A Memoir of Mania and Mirrors (2026). Gabe has been a competitive swimmer, a drag artist, and an educator. She was raised in the working-class

Midwest.