This summer, I was given the job of marrying my two best friends. We all became close through a drag troupe we started at university and now, here they were: my two drag sisters, my unconditional queer siblings, two of my favourite people in the world, marrying each other after years of unrequited love, unadulterated passion and many trying circumstances – and I had the mammoth responsibility of conducting the ceremony. Having been deeply sceptical about marriage for years – and single my entire adult life – I was dubious about whether I could do the job justice.
As young queers at university, we had followed the fashionable discourse about how marriage was a “heteronormative construct that shackles us all” and how, as gay people, we were liberated from such arcane traditions, following our own path of true autonomy and forming relationships outside the Hallmark romance framework that has brainwashed the world. The three of us spent our 20s getting into as much trouble as we could: playing drag gigs in the middle of the countryside to hostile crowds, performing sets on the most obscure stages at Glastonbury while inebriated beyond belief, and generally dedicating our lives to drag, queer friendship and the pursuit of creativity. We believed our queerness was a gift – a kind of prophecy that allowed us to bypass the desires that trapped so many other people.
