Desmond Napoles

The drag Queen kid.

There are not too many photos of his mother, and the father is conspicuously absent, but this photo tells the story.

He wasn’t born knowing how to vogue down the catwalk. He wasn’t born with false eyelashes. She had to call him over to her makeup table and say ‘let’s see how this looks on you’ and then exclaim happily over the result, turning her mirror to her toddler son so they could both admire the glitter on his eyelids. She had to buy him his first feather boa. She had to bring home gauzy material to fashion into costumes for them to play dress up together. She had to say ‘oh that’s great! Now do this pose with your arms like so. Yes, that’s it! Open your lips just a little see , like this. Oh you look amazing’.

The mental illness of the mother is a clinical misandry coupled with narcissism by proxy. She loves her son but hates men and so has recreated her penis-born boy into something she could be happy with and relate with sans his masculinity—a fantastical version of herself as she would wish to be. She couldn’t be the center of sexual attention, but her son could.

She, like Gollum, both hates and loves herself. The world in her head is a glittering landscape of fear she can’t be loved. Inside, she always felt like she was Maryanne Summers dying to be Ginger Grant and have sexual power over the men she held in such contempt. Sexual power can control and enslave men. But she didn’t feel good enough to try to be Ginger on her own.

With her son, she could kill two cajones with one stone. She could undo his contemptuous masculinity before it started, and as well, remake him into her obsessively sexual queen that lived in her head and to whom oen is-owners would bow to and shower with affection.

She could morph from Maryanne wishing to be Ginger into Vincent Price creating Edward Scissorhands, creating and curtailing with the same surgical strikes.

Her deep-seated desires are vicariously fulfilled every time men’s eyes widened at her sons performances. More than sexual satisfaction for her, it was sexual validation. She had created the goddess she would never be.

Now as a teenager, her son has announced he is ending his drag involvement and going to make skin care products. He may not realize it, but it is a step away from moms mental illness.

There was no one to show him how fun it could be, to be a boy. To watch shave in the morning, to help fix a car with, to ‘ssh don’t tell mom or she’ll be mad at me for letting you use a pocketknife’. There was only wet and wild extreme glitter lipstick to play with.

And mom bought a tube for each of them.