In “A Poet’s Boyhood at the Burning Crossroads”, the word “drag” appears twice. Both in the context of racial violence, the act of holding or pulling someone down. In the poem “Drag,” the word “drag” now has a different meaning. It means to cross-dress. To perform gender. How can a word originally associated with violence and constraint come to represent such liberation and self-expression? It is of great irony that we queer people are so good at turning pain into pageantry. We say queer joy is resistance. We laugh because it’s the only way we can keep going. There’s a dazzling kind of alchemy in that: to take what was meant to erase us and turn it into something radiant. As Jones writes:
“From here, I see a city that doesn’t know it’s already drowning,” and “How old were you when America taught you that being who you are could get you killed?” The reality that you see, the society that you’re fully aware of the oppression, and it’s you who chooses to put a glamor into it. Make it gorgeous, make it legendary, make it something of your own, and through “the dress” is one of the many ways Saeed Jones did it. The dress, that performs gender, “the dress” that acts as a symbol of perceived weakness, and “the dress” that acts as a means of creating a powerful, new identity. But then, something uncanny happens. The dress becomes animated.
“The dress begins to move without me.”
“I don’t even know what I am in this dress.”
The poem “Drag” doesn’t give us a neat, triumphant arc. Instead, it gives us something more raw and honest: the complicated, often painful, and vulnerable process of transformation. He is caught between empowerment and confusion. Wearing the dress, he feels a kind of becoming, but also estrangement. Is this freedom or another kind of confinement? Is this who I really am, or just who I’m allowed to be?
And yet, within this instability, there is something unstoppable blooming. Little does he know, inside the pupa of a caterpillar, is the most gorgeous butterfly, and inside each of us queer people, often the most unique “dress” of our own that cannot be stopped. As Saeed Jones wrote:
“Slow like some-
thing that knows it cannot be stopped,(…)”
I like to think it started off as confinement because in the “Boy at Threshold” a part of this poem feels like the speaker is repressing his desires to “dress” as a drag. There were also subtle hints of expressing this desire to “drag” as well like how the “rough-tongued” wind drags the speaker out of his comfort zone to show him this larger world as a child. In addition, the way it is written and said can come off as performative like how “The air” has a mind of its own and basically knocks down the front door.
I connect your wonderful analysis to the “Boy in a Whalebone Corset” poem, in which the boy continues to wear his corset in the aftermath of what his father had done to him. In a devastating scene that the boy is healing from, he continues to wear his corset as a symbol of his queerness that his father could not destroy. Like you put it very beautifully, even in those moments of instability there is that unique “dress” inside the boy.