Photo courtesy of Peter Palladino.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article and its accompanying video contains language and subject matter that may be offensive to some. Reader discretion advised.
The moment I heard she was coming to perform in Long Beach, I was brought back to a pivotal moment in my life and, before I can go any further about the privilege it is as a community to have her here — “I love Long Beach. It just has that small town feel but big enough; the perfect small big city,” she emphasized repeatedly — I ask that you allow me to indulge.
For anyone who has ever felt marginalized — and I am talking in the deepest sense of the term, where one feels as if practically everyone and everything around them is seemingly against one thing: you — and for anyone who is fortunate enough to have had the resilience needed to move beyond the social outcasting, there is usually this important cog in the machinery of lifting one’s self out of it all.
Like many young queers from rural places, there were, of course, many cogs to the machine that was me Coming Out of the Closet: writers, artists, science, philosophers… The myriad cogs often become hard to distinguish because coming out is such a process: first there are usually friends, which differ from parents, which differ from siblings, which differ from professional networks — it isn’t this single moment where all is said and done, thereby the cogs end up shifting in importance or all together being sadly forgotten as one becomes comfortable with one’s self.
But one of those initial cogs for me will never be forgotten because it, first and foremost, made me laugh about my identity. Everyone has their grave and serious cogs — the first time they saw a Mapplethorpe image or read Howl or heard Harvey Milk speak — but for me, this cog was a game-changer for the exact opposite reason. It was the first time I was able to truly laugh at myself and at how people so massively misperceived me.
See, having grown up the small mountain town of Big Bear, my access to gay culture was highly limited. But the advent of the internet and Amazon helped with that, my being able to rather inconspicuously access gay-themed films (much more a rarity in the 90s than now) and awkwardly pushing family members out of the way when packages arrived in fear they might open them. One of those ensconced films of my teenage years was Trick. And in it — moving from her brilliant lip-synch of “I Am Woman” to a single speaking scene that not only stole the movie but stole my heart — was one Ms. Coco Peru.
A legend in the gay community, I had no idea who she was perched on my mountain top. All I knew is that this drag queen had a monologue of epic proportions that made me laugh at myself and, more importantly, show me how small I really was (a key part in coming out is to be big enough to understand that you are but a speck in the larger movement that is human rights).
And she is coming to Long Beach for a single night to perform her show, “There Comes a Time,” in what I can only imagine to be the same spirit she so easily captivated me with years back, as well as recent audiences in New York, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles, all of whom gave her standing ovations.
The show itself is different from what she has normally done and Coco herself has changed. “Y’know, I was talking to my husband and he told me that perhaps I was alienating a younger generation by discussing the past,” she said. “But the amazing thing is that it is being received well by not only people of my generation but twenty-somethings and straight people who are saying they are really resonating with what I’m talking about.”
In this same vein of alienating her, I was hesitant to bring up Trick because, as I had imagined, many a gay boys have probably mauled her with regards to her performance and had little else to reference her by (and of course, I was to talk to her about her show, not my teenage-coming-out-inspiration story) — but the sheer giddiness I was experiencing at having Coco Peru on my phone overrode my weak sense of propriety. And her response was as graceful as she is, “[Bringing up Trick] never gets old. Y’know, I always wanted to be two things: a gay activist and an entertainer. And I had dreams of being in a gay themed movie in order to get my role of activism going — and Trick gave me that. It never gets old.”
That sense of entertainment-as-activism has always been with Coco though initially it may have been repressed. After studying acting and being told to “butch it up,” she was severely depressed at graduation. “I was lost, not knowing to do with my life… And AIDS was hitting New York City really hard and I had this desire to become an activist — but wasn’t quite mature enough to fully take that on.” She was, after all, a young gay man who was still trying to figure out what everything meant — why people were out in the streets, what ACT UP was all about, what Silence=Death meant, and the odd discomfort with, whenever she had sex, the obligatory feeling she had to call AIDS hotlines “just to double-check.”
So an idea came to her: dress up and tell her stories of life — and not like most drag queens via lip synching, but through theatre via drag. Though she hadn’t known it at the time, her self-referential quip that her maturity wasn’t up to par was a bit misguided, as her act became activism itself. “I learned to start talking about everything I hated about myself… And prove that I can do drag and still be doing theatre, being effeminate and not butch, doing everything I told was wrong in college.”
And Coco was born. Even with cockeyed glances from friends and family alike — “You’re gonna be a… drag queen?” — the focus and drive that became her performance persona began to overtake her. And it overtook her to the path of success.
“It was a calling,” she said, not out of arrogance or divinity but with the air of confidence that what one is doing is — simply put — the right thing to do. From her first show at the now-closed Rose’s Turn Piano Bar in New York City to her performance here in Long Beach, the path that Coco has burned behind her is indelible and, despite which generation you come from, her story is a key part of our history that should be continuously heard.
And for me, her presence in that monologue (any theatre nerd can tell you: it’s performance at its finest) was also a reminder that a man who could fill heels without the bat of an eye was much more of a man than I was in my pathetically vain and sad attempt to act straight. She was (and is) beyond being a cog in my coming out tale, far beyond that; she helped me love my strangeness and lack of political correctness and awkwardness and incommensurability with normality.
I assure you that if you go watch her, she will do the same for you.
“There Comes a Time” will be at the Art Theatre this Saturday, June 30; the Art is located at 2025 E 4th Street. Tickets can be purchased here. For more information, click here.