In 2016, I bought a ticket to a drag show that promised to recap the entire history of American democracy. It was a musical, it lasted 24 hours, and the audience was not supposed to leave.
I almost skipped this marathon performance, which began the day after news broke that Donald Trump had bragged on video about grabbing women by the pussy. I was exhausted by the 24-hour news cycle of American politics, and unsure if I could take another 24 hours of the performance art version.
But I dragged myself to a draughty warehouse theatre in Brooklyn, New York, and was there at noon when the show’s star teetered on stage in heels and a giant 18th-century wig made of tinsel, and started reading from Thomas Paine’s Common Sense.
“Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence,” Taylor Mac drawled. “The palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers of paradise.”
For the next 24 hours, Mac, who would later be named a MacArthur genius and Pulitzer prize finalist, would sing some of the most popular songs of each decade of US history: 246 in all, starting with Amazing Grace and a hit from the 1770s, Everybody Hates the Congress.
To enact this “radical faerie realness ritual,” Mac donned elaborate new costumes every decade, all designed by artist Machine Dazzle: a barbed-wire hoop skirt studded with hotdogs for the 1860s; a pop art Jackie Kennedy suit for the 60s; a Lesbian Avenger outfit of denim, shredded flannel shirts and massive vulvar wings for the 1990s. The audience – more than 600 performance arts enthusiasts – were asked to reenact the American civil war and the Oklahoma land grab and the first world war, to line up for bread during the Great Depression and rearrange their seats to mimic white flight. There was dinner and breakfast and snacks, shadow puppets, readings from Walt Whitman, a troupe of burlesque performers, even an entire marching band.
This was a lurid, maximalist version of American history, told from the very queer margins. Mac, who uses the gender pronoun judy, after Judy Garland, was exploring the country’s 240 years of anxiety over gender and sexuality, from the fraught effeminate figure of the 18th-century dandy, lampooned and reclaimed in Yankee Doodle Dandy, to the 1926 vaudeville song decrying the rise of “masculine women and feminine men,” to the grief and terror of the Aids crisis.
For all its excess, this was an intimate performance – an attempt to explore, as Mac puts it in a new HBO documentary about the show, “what happens when history is filtered through one body,” and “the idea that a queer body could become a metaphor for America”.
It’s almost too appropriate that Mac’s drag history documentary is being released during a violent Pride month, as the Human Rights Campaign announces a “state of emergency” for LGBTQ+ people in the US, lawmakers have introduced hundreds of bills targeting transgender youth and adults, and multiple states have attempted to ban or restrict drag performances. The 24-Decade History of Popular Music explores the defiant fabulousness of queer Americans as well as their intense vulnerability to shame and violence, and it forces its audience to experience the exhaustion and exhilaration of queer endurance.
Mac sang and joked and narrated almost nonstop the entire 24 hours, with brief pauses for pee breaks or to chug smoothies, during which the orchestra played on. Each decade, one musician departed the stage, a constant reminder of the losses of the Aids epidemic, and Mac kept singing on, voice fraying to its absolute limits.
A New York Times critic called the performance “one of the great experiences of my life”; the Guardian said it was “everything”. I have spent the past seven years thinking about it – trying to understand what Mac managed to explain about American democracy that I and my fellow news journalists still cannot.
By early October 2016, when I showed up to see Mac’s spectacle, plenty of people who were not performance artists had already weighed in on the state of American politics. Confronted with Trump, they had come up with buzzwords: economic anxiety, populism, the “alt-right”. Onscreen at Fox and CNN and NBC, surrogates and outrage peddlers assuaged and contested, and behind them the fact-checkers said: “True”, “true”, “mostly true”, “false”, “pants on fire”.
The vast machinery of American politics had predicted that Clinton would win. President Trump would spend the next years gloating: Democrats, the media, all his enemies had been wrong. But Mac, dancing in false eyelashes and glitter, had not been wrong.
The Democratic party had come into the 2016 election with pretty ideas: civility, tolerance: “They go low, we go high.” Then the moral arc of the universe bent right past Obama towards a president who told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” and whose supporters stormed the Capitol.
Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music was crammed with catchy tunes, but the backstories of these hits were dark. Mac’s America was not marching in a slow line of dutiful liberal progress. It was struggling in a compulsive spiral of hope and trauma and repression and denial. It was glittering and terrifying; vulnerable and vicious.
This was a country powered by a violent sentimentality that stole its popular culture from the people it enslaved, imprisoned, or refused to recognise as citizens. It was an American dream founded by people who had built their stolen nation with waves of people who had been kidnapped or who had come to this promised land from homes set aflame.
Mac demanded that we understand all of this. And Mac also made clear, as so many politicians and pundits still do not, that understanding is not the same as forgiveness.
Mac grew up in Stockton, California, a town the artist recalls as full of depressing tract houses and intense homophobia. There were no gay role models, or even out adults, and the Aids crisis was fueling an intense backlash. In 1986, as Mac tells it, judy’s first wet dream featured Maggie Smith riding a Pegasus and two men having sex, and Mac spent next day at school worrying, “I must have given myself Aids.”
Then Mac and a friend finally made it to the Aids walk in San Francisco: “The very first time I met an out homosexual, it was thousands all at the same time.”
This was a profound experience for a teenager. “The reason they were all together was, of course, they were dying, and their loved ones were dying, and they were screaming and laughing and dancing and joyous while at the same time horrified and full of sorrow,” Mac recalls in the HBO documentary. “They were pushing loved ones in wheelchairs. What I experienced was a community of people that were being built as a result of being torn apart.”
This was the inspiration for what would turn into the 24-Decade History of Popular Music, an attempt, Mac says, to make audiences feel what it is like to try to build community under extreme duress.
It’s strange to look back now at how this marathon of American song seemed to contain within it all the major news events of the years to come: it narrated explicit white supremacist violence and xenophobia, uprisings against police violence, threats of civil war, tensions with Russia, a devastating epidemic. This was a more accurate vision of what was ahead for the US than most political analysts had provided in 2016. I’ve kept asking myself: what do artists tell us that CNN can’t?
Part of the answer is simply that Mac’s drag show took the violence of American history seriously. People lost to war and accident tend to show up in popular songs: when will Johnny come marching home? Mac and music director Matt Ray added songs to this tradition, writing a ballad for the show’s final decade to honour the people killed in the mass shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando that year. But they also investigated the American songbook, finding passing references to the Trail of Tears in folk songs and twisting apart racist minstrel tunes.
“Don’t applaud it,” Mac warned the audience as judy finished one of the most gorgeous numbers of the entire show, the lilting sea shanty Coal Black Rose. The rhythm of the sailor’s physical labor is in the pace of the lines, but, Mac explained, it was also a song about gang-rape – about men building community through sexual violence. Midway through the show, and 10 months before Charlottesville, the performers also staged a furious exorcism of a Confederate soldier – denying him honour, demanding that he stay dead.
It is also the case that American politics is much more bizarre, theatrical and absurd than most of the tidy news coverage produced about it. Trump himself is, of course, an incredible performance artist, a master of audience participation.
Part of what made Mac’s 24 hour show so accurate was simply that it contained multitudes. There were people knitting on stage as a tribute to American handicrafts. There was a production of the Mikado staged on Mars.
There was the burlesque artist Tigger!, who pantomimed an elaborate striptease while not wearing any clothes at all, the best preparation I can imagine for eight years of watching the jiggle and droop of a president’s naked ego.
Mac and judy’s collaborators had built failure into their marathon performance, arguing that greatness could only be achieved when perfection was physically impossible. Would Mac even be able to sing for the full 24 hours? Nobody knew. But Mac was also arguing for failure on a deeper level, proposing a queer American origin story rooted in grief and struggle. We did not need to wait for a better time, the show suggested. Right here, in the middle of losing everything – this is the heart of our country. This is the only place to build.
At around 7am, the sleepiest part of an all-nighter, Mac asked us to take revenge on Ted Nugent by staging a gay prom to Snakeskin Cowboys, a country song about gay bashing.
Find someone of the same gender to dance with, Mac commanded us, and I wandered through the crowd. “There are so many men in this room,” another woman told me, as we finally turned towards each other. I had not realised it, but it was true. Then a third woman found us, and we sighed and wound our arms around each other.
We were so impossibly tired by then, but somehow we swayed gently to the music, held each other up. I knew already, in those slow news days of 2016, that history does not stop, but if you are lucky it will ignore you for a little while, and you can hide together, rest in the smell of her shampoo.
At some point in the last of the 24 hours, I stumbled out of the dark cave of song and into the lobby. I was surprised to find it was light again, a gray, dim light, and the world was still there. Rain. The Brooklyn Bridge. We had made it til morning.
Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music, the documentary, is available now to watch on HBO Max
