Warrior Queens: Mister Sister, Everybody's Talking About Jamie and Southern Baptist Sissies

REVIEW by Drew Rowsome

29 SeP 2021 - Photos of Mister Sister courtesy of publicist

Thanks in no small part to the starmakers at RuPaul's Drag Race, the once underground art of drag has gone mainstream. In the last few days alone, I, totally by chance, watched three films with drag protagonists: one indie, one a lavish musical, and one a resurrected classic. 

First up (though in reverse order to my viewing) is Mister Sister, a film festival acclaimed, determinedly underground, film having its Canadian premiere on Saturday, October 9. The film begins with a tattered drag queen (Jack James Busa) having a meltdown on the streets of NYC, begging for change and screaming for help. Breaking the code of New York indifference, she is taken in by the luminous Princess Diandra as Charmaine. The tattered she turns out to be a he named Jordan who was a struggling rock musician in Milwaukee. When his girlfriend ran off with the drummer from a rival band, Jordan decided to reinvent himself as a drag queen in NYC. I guess no-one told him that drummers always get the girls and are a universal free pass.

Jordan is introduced to Charmaine's drag family and the gang of artistes who hang out at a dive bar. He is also given a nun's outfit to wear and discovers a previously unknown talent: after imbibing a few drinks, he becomes an insult comic and therefore imminently qualified to become the host of the talent shows that the bar seems to stage around the clock. Unfortunately the cinema verité style (ie: shaky camerawork and muffled sound) works against Jordan's act though, to be honest, he is no Don Rickles, Lisa Lampanelli or even Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. To balance the lacklustre comedy on which the plot depends, the filmmakers insert a multitude of scenes where the audience reacts in shocked hilarity and even a segment where an unfortunate actor breaks the fourth wall and explains why each joke is funny. 

Turns out that Jordan is just a bitch with an inferiority complex expressed as being superior to everyone else. He makes a malicious point to return to insult everyone who wouldn't previously hire him and that plotline climaxes with him and an evil drug dealing drag queen harassing people while riding the subway. An appalled woman notes quite accurately, "So this is what you do? Ride the subway all day being rude to people?" There are a lot more little plotlines mixed into Mister Sister before it returns to the career trajectory main story. Jordan falls in love with a tapdancing waitress who is a single mother with a cloying daughter who owns a gecko. Charmaine goes on a date. The queens crash a ball and steal a trophy. Jordan wanders repeatedly through the streets of New York, looking fabulously androgynous while the camera lingers on the colourful characters he meets and mournful electo-folk plays in the background. The queens are taken shoe shopping by a mysterious Arabian man and his mortified secretary. Jordan becomes a methhead for a few hours and it almost wrecks his budding relationship with the waitress. 

The addiction plotline leads to a career change when Charmaine notes that, "There are other jobs besides being a drunk, mean drag queen." Though Jordan is a huge success hosting the next logical step, Drag Queen Bingo, he decides he should become a rock star. To no-one's surprise, and as the audience at his first club date tell the camera, his wan Bowie/Jobraith imitation turns out to be a happy ending. Mister Sister winds up being a twisted mash-up between Kinky Boots, Stage Mother and a Hallmark Christmas movie shot by Nan Goldin. The plucky drag queens help an obnoxious straight boy find his way in the world. As all tropes where an oppressed minority saves the emotional life of someone privileged, it is more than mildly offensive. Bursa isn't charming enough, though you can see him trying, to become an anti-hero, and the writer/director Mars Roberge is himself an equal opportunity insult comic. While the bridge and tunnel people who wander into the club are treated with disdain, the queens and a leatherman are also treated as freaks or comic relief. 

A slew of New York underground celebrities pop up in cameos - Ari Gold, Tym Moss, Brandon Olson, Gazelle Paulo, Jim Sclavunos, Brad Englund, etc - with the venerable Michael Musto having the meatiest role as the owner of a dry cleaning dynasty in New Jersey. He pressures Jordan to come back to his estate to swing with his wife, a former Miss Hoboken and porn star, promising "sex dwarves" and "warm sushi." This and every other sexual proposition that is offered Jordan is treated with comic horror and disgust. Only the, as it is repeatedly stated, straight Jordan is given a romantic and sexual life. It is a shame because the sassy queens who populate the fringes of Mister Sister - Princess Diandra, Shia Ho, Chaka Khanvict, Brandon Olson as the evil Vera, and Gazelle Paulo who is also the costume designer - are undoubtedly heartbreakers who are demons in bed and have great stories to tell.

Everybody's Talking About Jamie is the slick version of Mister Sister. A self-centred aspiring artist achieves his goals with the help of loveable drag queens. Max Harwood, as Jamie, and Bursa, as Jordan, are even physically similar with high cheekbones, large eyes and limber, lean bodies born for heels. Jamie wants to be a star and drag is his chosen mode of achieving celebrity. Fortunately, aside from a supportive mother (Sarah Lancashire) and a Muslim best friend (Lauren Petel whose dilemma is delegated to a sub-plot when it should be an entire film), Jamie has Richard E Grant as Loco Chanelle, a somewhat faded drag queen to guide him. While there are lots of peppy and lively musical numbers in Everybody's Talking About Jamie, Grant (lip-synching to vocals by the iconic Holly Johnson) upstages everything before and after with "This Was Me." Chanelle is trying to explain to the naïve Jamie why drag is not just putting on a frock, that drag queens were once "warrior queens." Mixing archival footage with historical recreations, "This Was Me" dives deeply into the gay liberation movement, AIDS, and how a bit of lipliner, compassion, grit and mascara can change the world. By the mid-point, I was sobbing.

Unfortunately the rest of the plot does not have as much resonance, and there is never any doubt that Jamie will get to the prom, become a dynamic drag queen, and rise above the rift with his homophobic father. Not that getting there isn't a lot of fun and stories of perseverance and gay triumph are always emotionally satisfying. Though Jamie is proudly gay and out, the film neuters him by not providing a love interest. I kept expecting the main bully, played by Sam Bottomley, to bust out of his closet at the last minute but, alas, that would be too Hollywood. I do have to admit that I did tear up when Jamie got his group selfie at the prom. 

As a stage play, it is easy to see how Everybody's Talking About Jamie would slay. The writers/directors Jonathan Butterell, Dan Gillespie Sells and Tom MacRae were all involved in turning a true story into a hit stage musical and now a film. They manage to add visual energy and panache to numbers that would be much easier to sell on stage where all it takes is a lot of talent and a big voice to grab an audience's heart. And musicals are irresistible. When the lunchroom dissolves into a disco ball palace and the cleaners become a facsimile of Two Tons O'Fun, Everybody's Talking About Jamie is bliss. And of course the red thigh high cha cha heels are a delicious mix of gay references from The Wizard of Oz to Female Trouble. Notably, the same footwear appears briefly in Mister Sister. Everybody's Talking About Jamie also has a celebrity cameo: Bianca Del Rio who rose to fame thanks to, once again, Drag Race.

It is incredibly heartening to find something as gay as Everybody's Talking About Jamie as a big budget streaming service product from Amazon. But Prime has also given a boost to an older (a stage play debuting in 2000 and filmed in 2013) gay classic, Southern Baptist Sissies. Writer/director Del Shores should be a familiar name to gay audiences having produced the astounding Sordid Lives films and television series. With Southern Baptist Sissies, he takes the focus off the strong eccentric southern women he adores and enshrines, and puts it on four boys who sing in a Baptist choral group. And who all happen to be gay and extremely closeted. It does not end well for all of them, but the melodrama of multiple coming out stories is balanced by wit, humorous anecdotes, and rambling shaggy (and shagging) dog stories. Shores can't completely resist his true calling and Dale Dickey and Leslie Jordan play barflies who have their own reality situated in the gay dive bar situated stage left, but intersect with the other plot at a very crucial point.

It is no surprise that Jordan is magnificent. So much of his career has been spent elevating mediocre material by sheer strength of personality and timing, that we forget how good he can be when given the opportunity. From his one-man show My Trip Down the Pink Carpet to his recent Instagram feed, from Emmys for Will & Grace to blithely showing sitcom pros how it's done in Call Me Kat, Jordan may still never get to top his role as Brother Boy in the Sordid Lives universe. With Southern Baptist Sissies he and Shores almost do. Jordan tells stories of hustlers and the many, many men he's loved and lost (apparently much of it based on anecdotes that Jordan told to Shores) and commiserates with Dickey's equally white trash incandescent Odette. Of course one of the boys meets a tragic end when the appeal of a stripper and sex cannot compete with the guilt provided by the church. Jordan provides hope of escaping that fate, though his character never transcends it.

Because it is a filmed stage play, there is some awkward camera work and a need for reliance on breaking the fourth wall with narration. Emerson Collins, playing the writer who escaped and came out, manages to be conversational as well as theatrical and is the heart of Southern Baptist Sissies. It requires crack timing to combine an intense emotional arc with nostalgic recounting. Though his nude scenes with the closeted man who broke his heart are eye-catching, the show is stopped by Willam Belli as Benny, the boy who escapes the south by becoming a drag queen. Belli is now better known as Willam, one word, a queen who rose to drag superstardom due to a controversial near win and messy exit from Drag Race season 4. Of course Benny also has a tragic side, Southern Baptist Sissies has no shortage of gay clichés, but when Willam rips into a Tina Turner impersonation, nothing can stand in his/her way. A warrior queen.

If parts of Southern Baptist Sissies are dated, like "This Was Me" from Everybody's Talking About Jamie, they are a history lesson of our past told in a way that inspires and reminds. Years from now the queens in Mister Sister may provide the same despite being relegated to the fringe of the main love and ambition story. The timing matters. Southern Baptist Sissies, the only film that is not contemporary, also feels the most urgent and the most sexual. These boys were fighting for their lives, for their very existence, as opposed to struggling in pursuit of celebrity. That dilemma is the heart of gay life, of drag and what Drag Race has accomplished: we now have the freedom to put on a frock and be fabulous as a career move or just for giggles. And that is thanks to warrior queens of whom RuPaul was one.

We were children in the night
Every star burned twice as bright 
We were tough and we could fight
And we held the line 
This was me 
Every sorrow had a song 
Every lost boy could belong 
We were young and never wrong 
And I was divine 
This was me
(Music and lyrics by Dan Gillespie Sells and Tom McRae)