A Ferocious Drag Queen
Jeff Mann
One of my favorite memories of Okey is from April 2016. He drove us in his junky old car along the Ohio River north to Lesage, where we had lunch at the infamous Hillbilly Hot Dogs. It’s a place I visit every time I get to Huntington, West Virginia, Okey’s stomping grounds; we scions of the Mountain State are hot-dog connoisseurs. The roadside wiener joint is a deliberately dilapidated mess, an amalgam of shacks with old school buses as dining areas. The indoor space is claustrophobic with kitschy decorations, and neither Okey nor I are small men, so after ordering our dogs, we wedged ourselves back outside to eat at picnic tables by the parking area. Above us, big box elders were leafing, that fragile green-gold that Robert Frost’s thinking of in his poem, “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” Across the road, the wide river flowed south towards the Mississippi and the sea.
I don’t remember what we talked about as we sipped our iced tea and devoured our dogs. I probably bitched about other Appalachian writers, ones whose work gets more attention than mine, either because they’re straight or they’ve pretended to be straight. (I’m eaten up with professional envy about 98% of the time.) Okey probably complained about his poorly-paid, heavy workload as a gypsy instructor, teaching four or five sections of Intro to Sociology at Mountwest Community College and/or the Proctorville branch of Ohio University. I probably told him about a short story I was finishing up, one about the Greek hero Hercules and his many, many male lovers. He probably told me about the memoir he was working on, Rainbow in the Mountains, a book about his life as an Appalachian drag queen, and about his plans to apply to the low-residency MFA in creative writing at West Virginia Wesleyan College. Perhaps, looking out over the river, I told one of my favorite jokes—“What’s the difference between a hillbilly and a son of a bitch? The Ohio River!”—before explaining that I was actually pretty fond of O-Hi, as I pronounce it. Afterwards, we drove back to Huntington for the first of two professional gigs I had at Marshall University. That evening, I served as a respondent to scholar Allison Carey’s presentation on “LGBTQ Literature in Appalachia.” The next night, I read from my works in the student center.
Of all the memories I have of Okey, why does this one stand out? I wrote in my journal about that lunch, “Nice to be w/ a gay man who enjoyed the rural setting as much as I did.” So many gay guys I’ve known would have recoiled from such a down-home/redneck establishment deep in the boonies, but Okey and I were at home there, out in the country, enjoying the spring air, watching scruffy locals come and go. Hell, we were scruffy locals, albeit queer ones.
That combination in my journal entry, “gay” and “rural,” was the crux of our connection. We were both West Virginians, he a defiant drag queen, I a contrary leather bear. He’d grown up in remote Wayne County, “out Wayne,” as they say there, and I’d grown up in equally remote Summers County. Both of us had struggled over the years, coming to terms with and learning to accept our gay and Appalachian identities. Both of us had mastered that struggle, saying “Fuck You!” to queers who didn’t like country hillfolk and “Up Yours!” to hillfolk who didn’t like queers. We were both pagan, he an acolyte of Artemis, Athena, and other warrior goddesses, I a follower of battle-gods like Thor and Odin and horny/horned deities of nature and the manly erotic like Cernunnos. We were two halves of the same eccentric hillbilly-homo coin. How could we not have become tribesmen and comrades-in-arms?
*
In Fall 1977, I was eighteen years old, beginning my freshman year at West Virginia University. I was a shy, insecure bear cub, lumbering around in my first black-leather jacket, just beginning to cultivate a decent beard and a sparse crop of chest hair, and trying hard to figure out how to reconcile my lust for men with the traditions of Appalachian masculinity I’d been brought up around. Seeing drag queens at the Fox, the local gay bar, blew my country-boy mind. I was both flummoxed and fascinated by their wildly colorful and shameless “gender non-normativity,” as scholars would put it these days.
Miss Jerry and I were introduced by mutual lesbian friends. He cared not a whit for the conventional manhood I was enamored of and bent on emulating. Instead, he was an outrageous, flamboyant creature who prided himself on resembling the blonde actress Suzanne Somers when his drag transformation—chrysalis to butterfly—was complete. One wintry evening, in a trailer in rural Osage, I watched him prepare for one of the big parties we young queers lived for in the late 70s. The wigs! The jewelry! The bevy of spangly dresses! “Look here now, honey,” he said, using Scotch tape to bunch up his pecs and create cleavage. “This here’s how you make yourself some titties.”
Once, he and Bill, a butch lesbian buddy of ours, took me to Pittsburgh for my first visit to a big-city gay bar, The Venture Inn. As we stood on a street corner outside the place, Miss Jerry pointed at nearby landmarks and regaled me with tales of his erotic exploits. “Honey,” he confided breathlessly, “I’ve sucked dick there, and there, and there, and there!” I was still an idealistic naïf, looking for love, not sexual adventure, so I was probably embarrassed and horrified by his storied promiscuity. Now, I can only grin. Good for him! Carpe diem!
Time spent with Miss Jerry taught me that a drag queen would say or do most anything. This unpredictability was mildly frightening to a sheltered kid who’d grown up in a small, conservative town. When, one night at the bar, Miss Jerry’s cohort, Miss Leroy, gave me an indignant cussing over God knows what small slight, I was mortified, intimidated, and thoroughly chagrined. I was also educated: never, never, never piss off a drag queen…unless you enjoy being publicly humiliated.
When, on Halloween night 1978, Miss Jerry and Miss Leroy came into the bar in full drag, complete with parasols and humongous floppy hats, had a few stiff cocktails, and then sashayed out the bar door and up Pleasant Street, I was flabbergasted at the courage such a public display must have taken. Addicted I might have been to the courage of mythical Greek and Roman heroes, Arthurian knights, and Confederate soldiers, but I knew I would never be as brave as those two furbelowed drag queens stalking the nighttime streets of Morgantown.
Years later, during my graduate-school days at WVU, I had an affair with a close friend of Leroy’s, an older man who lived in South Park, the old-money neighborhood of Morgantown. Briefly, Emery was my sugar daddy, treating my poverty to fancy meals of London broil and crab casserole and teaching me how to enjoy getting topped, but just about the time I got used to such luxurious treatment, he dumped me for a more cosmopolitan grad student in theater.
Soon after, to my surprise, I received a fancy party invitation from Leroy in the mail. At the party, I roused myself from my bereft moping long enough to grab Leroy by the arm and stammer out a few words. “H-Hey, thanks for inviting me. I was kinda surprised to get the invitation. I, I know you and I don’t know one another all that well, and I, uh, know you and Emery are pretty close. Maybe you don’t know this, but, uh, he broke up with me. He probably wouldn’t be pleased to know that you invited me here.”
Leroy tugged at the scruff on my chin. “Darling, I heard about that sad soap opera. That’s why I invited you. I thought some party company would do you good. And I don’t care if Emery finds out that you were here. He doesn’t tell me who my friends are. Now stop pouting and have another drink. Try the spinach dip. It’s divine.”
That’s when I discovered the magical quartet of qualities that just about every drag queen I’ve ever known has owned. Not only are they fearless, ferocious, and funny, they’re also kind. Who could resist such a combination?
*
Meeting someone who will prove to be very important to you is just like meeting someone whom you’ll never see again or care to see again. On a day apparently like every other day, you encounter a new face, a new name. You smile and shake hands, with no sense of coming consequence, with no knowledge of what’s to come.
Okey and I met in Spring 1999, at the Appalachian Studies Association (ASA) Conference, held that year at the Southwest Virginia Center for Higher Education in Abingdon, Virginia. Both of us spoke on a panel focusing on Denise Giardina’s work, and both of us discussed gay characters in her novels. “Amazing,” I thought, listening to his frank and lively presentation. “I get to meet another mountaineer queer!” Okey, a big-built, balding guy in his thirties, was a sociologist connected with Marshall University.
In 2005, Ohio University Press published my collection of memoir and poetry, Loving Mountains, Loving Men, and, soon after that, I spoke about gay and lesbian issues at another ASA conference. In between sessions, Okey and I had several very welcome simpatico chats. When he was younger, he told me, he’d been a drag queen named Ilene Over. In those days, he’d encountered such homophobic violence in Huntington that he carried a brick in his purse. I thought that juxtaposition was downright delicious and often took vicarious pleasure in the thought of a big, ferocious drag queen beating the hell out of hapless homophobes. On the other hand, Okey was so large and impressive that he made me—a fairly brawny, bulky guy—feel small. I don’t think he ever really needed the brick.
A few years after our first meeting, I encountered Okey at another ASA conference, where he told me he’d had a heart attack. Cardiac woes weren’t unusual in his family, he explained, and he knew that smoking and being overweight hadn’t helped. Still, he said, he’d quit smoking, and he was recovering nicely, even contemplating the resurrection of his drag career as Ilene Over. It was a move I enthusiastically encouraged. As much as he’d referred to his drag past, I’d never seen Ilene perform.
That changed in March 2014 at the ASA conference in Huntington. There, I moderated “LGBT in Appalachia: A Queer Quartet,” a panel composed of my good friend and political theorist, Cindy Burack; Carol Mason, a lesbian author; Richard Parmer, a hopelessly handsome young gay scholar; and myself. Right after our panel, Cindy and I hurried off to another, much anticipated session: Okey was performing in “Diary of an Appalachian Drag Queen.”
There he was, in an over-crowded Marshall University classroom, with elaborate makeup, towering turban, flowery house dress, furry pink bedroom slippers, and elegant cigarette holder sans cigarette. His mixture of humor, social and political commentary, and autobiography was spot-on. Everyone loved him. Afterwards, I congratulated him on his triumphant return to drag.
That summer, Okey’s drag persona inspired my writing. I was working on new fiction about my ongoing vampire alter ego, Derek Maclaine. I’d created Derek back in the summer of 2002, writing “Devoured,” a novella, which appeared in a Kensington Books collection, Masters of Midnight: Erotic Tales of the Vampire (2003). I’d continued Derek’s adventures in a series of short stories published in erotic anthologies and eventually collected in Desire and Devour: Stories of Blood and Sweat (2010). Now, fueled by my hatred for mountaintop-removal mining in West Virginia, I was planning a full-length novel about Derek called Insatiable. I already had a big cast of queer characters: my leather-bear vampire protagonist, his lesbian cohort (based on Cindy, of course), a lesbian werewolf, a bear-cub werewolf, and Derek’s harem of bearded, hairy human thralls. But someone else was needed to lend Derek magical aid and add a little levity. How about a witch? How about a drag-queen witch?
Excitedly, I emailed Okey, asking for permission to fictionalize him and wanting suggestions for that depiction. Here’s his response.
Hello my friend,
I’ve thought about your questions and here is what came to me.
The drag name should be something funny. Mine was Ilene Over. You could go with anything that is funny or saucy like Anita Mann. Her real name should be just a regular old Appalachian name like Randall Jones or something like that. Those in the gay community will always refer to her by her drag name (in or out of drag). In fact, many would not even know her “boy” name.
As far as what she would wear. Imagine Delta Burke as Suzanne Sugarbaker (off stage in drag) and Phyllis Dilleresque clothing while onstage (with many kaftans and dusters). Her dress as a boy would be sloppy comfortable (sweatshirt and sweats or shorts and t-shirts). For a big convocation of fangs, she would be in high drag. She would wear something like a sequined and bugle beaded dress, lots of glittery jewelry and her hair in an updo. Imagine elegance incarnate. Perfect hair, nails, shoes, clutch purse, and a $5000 or more dollar dress (of course it would be black and blood red, with deep red lips and deep red nails, and black fishnet hose, which would show from the slit in the dress).
Is this a good start?
My God, I thought, what the fuck are bugle beads? I am out of my element! I googled them, then carefully copied and pasted Okey’s email message into my notes for the novel.
*
Okey first came to Hinton in December 2014. John and I had bought my family home there the previous summer, so now we’re fortunate enough to own two roomy houses in which to entertain friends: our main residence in Pulaski, Virginia, and that home in Hinton.
Same-sex marriage in Virginia became legal on October 6, 2014, and in West Virginia on October 9, 2014. John and I arranged a trial-run wedding in West Virginia before the legally recognized one in Pulaski, where we officially reside, and Okey drove down to Hinton to officiate, since I wanted a pagan-style ceremony. I’ve described that wedding elsewhere: a wonderfully diverse gathering of three lesbians, two Jews, my Appalachian father and sister, my biracial nephew, and the grooms, two gay bears. Okey wore a purple robe, with a striking necklace made by a Shoshone acquaintance of his in Idaho, and the ceremony he’d written—one that called the four elements and the four quarters, as do most Wiccan rituals—was perfect.
He came down to Hinton many times after that, for those gatherings I came to call Big Queer Convocations, weekends complete with lots of wine, booze, and country cooking. Cindy often joined us, bearing with her delicious desserts from Just Pies in Columbus, Ohio. “Leather bears and drag queens and bull dykes, oh my!” the three of us often chanted, a triumvirate of inverts that any self-respecting Christian fundamentalist would, we hoped, find sinister, sordid, and horrifying.
Our BQC conversations were always passionate and entertaining, and Okey was a natural storyteller. One of my favorite tales concerned his encounter with a Hollywood star. “Honey, one time I was sashaying down the street there near the Black Sheep, right across from the Marshall campus, and I turned the corner, and a jogger ran right into me. You’ll never guess who it was. Matthew McConaughey! He was in town filming We Are Marshall. Honey, he bounced! He bounced right off me like a rubber ball. I had to help him up off the pavement. And gurrrrl, he stank! He smelled like funk. That boy was just rank! I didn’t know whether I should ravish him right there or throw him into the Ohio for a good warshing.”
Like Miss Jerry before him, Okey was fond of recounting his erotic exploits, though he tended to save those bawdy tales for late-night discussions the two of us would have after Cindy and John headed up to bed. Like me, when he went into storytelling mode, his accent thickened and he peppered his tales with regional expressions.
“Gurrl, Miss Todd and I used to drive down to Charleston on a Saturday night to hit them wicked-naughty erotic bookstores, ‘cause we needed to feed!”
“Feed?” I’d say, sipping Drambuie and acting naive.
“Feed! You don’t fool me, Butch. You want it as much as I do. Cock!”
I grinned. “Cock? Why, Ah wouldn’t know what to do with such a thing. Which is to say, hell, yes! The more, the better, though I’m more of a tits-and-ass man myself.”
“Not this gurl. I needed to feed! To gobble up a man, right down to the marrow, and then spit out the bones! One night, I got into a knock-down drag-out with an old cooter of a queen who wouldn’t leave the erotic video cubicle I wanted to use. She stuck out her finger and poked me hard in the chest and said, ‘Git out of here, you whore,’ and I rared back and backhanded the bitch, and she fell against the wall and started to squall like a wildcat in heat! She run right outta there! It was like a scene off Dynasty! So then I was free to feast on the man of my dreams.”
Not all our conversations were as colorful or as blithe. When I snarled,
“All my life, I’ve been giving the finger to the Right and saying, ‘Screw you! Don’t tell me how to live and how to think!’ and now I’m having to do and say the same to the Left,” Okey understood absolutely. Caught between political extremes, we worried about the ways that West Virginia was turning more and more into Republican-red Trump Land, at the same time that we often complained about the oversensitive sanctimony of young queers, especially the transgender thought police, who not only want to control what language we use but to abolish drag as somehow transphobic. Okey was particularly angry when Glasglow’s Free Pride tried to bar drag acts at their 2015 festival, and he got into savage fights on Facebook with politically correct queers over this issue. He was a terror on Facebook, Abso-Fucking-Lutely Not To Be Crossed. He sent all sorts of folks packing with his dry “Get lost, you gobshite. Buh-Bye, Felicia.”
We chatted about pagan pantheons those late nights in Hinton, how to invite the energy of certain deities into our lives. Sometimes I read from my works-in-progress; to my pleasure and relief, he heartily approved of the way I’d fictionalized him in Insatiable. Sometimes, he’d read to me, wonderful excerpts from books he was working on: a gay werewolf novel set in France; his memoir, Rainbow in the Mountains; and his drag-queen romance, Make Me Pretty, Sissy. We talked comic-book movies: my love of the X-Men and the Avengers, my crush on Marvel role models Captain America, Thor, and Wolverine; his life-long role model, Wonder Woman, his ecstatic delight over Gal Gadot in the 2017 WW film. We talked Lord of the Rings: I always wore my Aragorn ring when I knew he and I would be spending time together, and he often wore his Galadriel ring. One year, I bought him Arwen’s evenstar necklace as a Yuletide present. Trump to us was Sauron, a poisonous glare blighting the national landscape. Once in a rare while, I’d play the piano. Karla Bonoff’s “Goodbye, My Friend” was his favorite. “Lord, honey, that’s beautiful,” he’d say. “I’ve heard that at so many funerals…friends who died of AIDS.”
Okey often talked about his years of political activism in the Huntington area, the conservatives he’d offended, the city officials he’d pissed off, the LGBT group he’d helped organize at Marshall, acts of real courage and citizen resistance that he knew would have negative consequences for him but which he carried out anyway. Other times he’d tell me about his estrangement from his homophobic, conservative Christian mother and father in Wayne County, but how much he adored his grandmother, how unmoored he would feel when she died.
Many times I shared with him my struggles with depression, and Okey theorized that I was having difficulty moving from the Thor-stage of my life to the Odin-stage as I aged. He helped me understand my own paganism, my own warrior mentality, and he was hugely supportive when I suffered a series of sharp career disappointments at Virginia Tech, patiently listening to me rant on and on about assorted pit-viper colleagues. When I told him that what I’d really needed at a certain MFA Committee meeting was a knife, he got me to laugh despite my wrath by declaring, “There! That should be your drag name! Ahneeda Kniph!”
“Hmm, really?” I said, going with the joke. “But don’t all West Virginia drag queens have ‘St. Clair’ as their last name? I was thinking ‘Gorgopotamus St. Clair.’ Or ‘M’Orbesity St. Clair.’ Or ‘Rantarella St. Clair.’ Or ‘Tyrannosaurus Rexapotamus St. Clair.’ Or even ‘Fertilizante St Clair.’ Urrr, I mean…‘Santa Clara?’”
“Lord, where’d that come from?”
“A sign I saw in the gardening section of Walmart.”
“Oh, no, gurl, not that one. You’re not a Latina. That would be cultural appropriation. Heaven forfend. No, no, Ahneeda Kniph it is.”
Most helpfully, every time I asked, “Why the fuck do I keep writing? Who the fuck cares? Why the fuck should I bother?” he gently convinced me of the worth of my publications and the need to be resilient and to persevere. In encouraging me to continue, he liked to read two of his favorite quotations. One was from a sociologist hero of his, Patricia Hill Collins, from her Black Feminist Thought: “Oppressed groups are frequently placed in the situation of being listened to only if we frame our ideas in the language that is familiar to and comfortable for a dominant group. This requirement often changes the meaning of our ideas and works to elevate the ideas of dominant groups.”
“The reason mainstream folks resist or ignore or refuse to recognize your work is because you’re not framing your ideas for them, you’re not trying to make them comfortable,” he’d explain. “You’re not packaging your publications for straight people by creating polite, sanitized, tasteful little stories with inoffensive gays and funny-faggot best friends. Instead, you’re writing for other queers, and that’s a good thing, an important thing. There’s sex in your books, kinky sex, there’s men who use their dicks, who rim ass and lick armpits and fuck butt. Keep it up! Don’t be silenced! No more of that ‘love that dare not speak its name’ bullshit.”
Another quotation was by Starhawk, a Wiccan author and priestess we both admired. “‘The stories of the oppressed are not told under systems of domination and telling them can be a revolutionary act,’” she says. “You’re telling those stories. Fuck a tight-assed mainstream audience. You got more important things to do. Write for hillbillies and queers. Telling the stories that you feel compelled to tell’s an act of rebellion and resistance.”
The book of mine that he enjoyed the most was Cub, a novel I’d set in Summers County in the early 1990’s, so when he visited Hinton, I often gave him “Cub Tours” of the novel’s settings. I took him to our family farm at Forest Hill, where my sister now lives, and the family graveyard. We drove down to Brooks Falls and Sandstone Falls, and over to Kirk’s, where we sat on the patio overlooking the New River and ate hot dogs just as Travis and Mike, Cub’s main characters, had done. One winter day, we had barbeque sandwiches and sweet iced tea in the Bluestone Dining Room at Pipestem State Park, and, despite the amazing view over the Bluestone River Gorge and the mountains beyond, both of us fixated on and fell desperately in love with the same man, a fellow diner. The guy was young, tall, and burly, with a big blond beard, dressed in jeans, cowboy boots, and flannel shirt, and carrying a guitar.
“Ummmm,” I growled, “I’d like to strip that boy down and keep him trussed and gagged in my bed for a few days. Who knows what cruel uses I’d put him to?”
“Honey, I shudder to think, preee-verse leather daddybear that you are. Me, I have a simple need to feed. What a morsel.”
“Damn right. Yum. Grade-A beef. I’ll bet he has golden fuzz all over his chest and belly, and a big, round, furry ass…skin pale as the flesh of a McIntosh apple and tasting just as sweet…”
“Mercy, Mr. Mann! Stop! You’re a’rilin’ Mama up! Big-built boy like that has got to have a prodigious tallywacker.”
“Let’s take him,” I said, sinking my teeth into more available meat, i.e., my barbeque. “We can divvy up the haul, so to speak. I get that pretty bearded mouth, his nipples and butt, and—"
“And I get the pecker. Deal?”
“Deal.”
This concurrent salacious fascination was to occur again and again over the years: a broad-shouldered, ponytailed waiter at Draper Mercantile; a lean, black-bearded Middle Eastern waiter at Virginia Tech’s Skelton Inn; various goateed, firm-rumped redneck boys on the streets of Hinton. Both keen connoisseurs of male beauty, Okey and I would spot something toothsome, then catch each other’s eyes with a look that meant, “I’d climb all over that.” I’d grin and tongue a canine tooth, imitating my vampire alter ego, Derek Maclaine, Okey’d arch an eyebrow, mutter, “Gurrrrrrrrrrl…” and then, palpitating with lust, we’d shift our glances back to our innocent and unknowing would-be prey. We were ruthless erotic predators, if only in our own minds…though Okey was bolder and sometimes acted in ways I’ve always been too shy, sheepish, and downright afraid to. I still remember how puffed up with concupiscent triumph he was, telling me how he’d chatted up a hot cop serving as crowd control at a political protest Okey’d attended and promptly seduced him. “Honey,” he said, in response to my disbelieving gape, “sometimes you gotta grab life by the balls…and I mean that literally.”
*
In my writing career, I’ve gotten little to no help from older or more recognized authors. They haven’t offered, and I’ve been too proud to ask. This lack of nourishing networking has had a profoundly negative effect on my reputation, so I’ve done my best to give to other writers and artists what I rarely got, arranging opportunities and making connections for them in any way I can. As supportive of my writing as Okey was, the least I could do was talk him up and encourage folks to invite Miss Ilene to perform. I managed this twice, finagling him gigs with honoraria at Virginia Tech in October 2015 and again at VT when the university hosted the Appalachian Studies Association Conference in March 2017.
Here’s the promotional material he gave me to share with potential sponsors.
Miss Ilene Over is a sassy (and single) gal born in Appalachia – a true mountain Queer. The illegitimate love child of Carol Burnett and Leslie Jordan, she was raised in West Virginia and graduated in 1999 with a Master’s Degree in Sociology. Ilene has been doing drag since 1989.
One of the organizers of the first Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered Pride event in West Virginia, she has been active in the fight for LGBT equality and civil rights for twenty-five years on the local, state, and national level.
In 2014, Ilene decided to create a show, Rainbow in the Mountains: Growing Up Gay and Fabulous in Appalachia. The show drew upon her experiences growing up gay in Appalachia and as a Sociology professor. The result was a show that premiered at the Appalachian Studies Association Annual Conference at Marshall University in Huntington, WV that year. The show was a hit – standing room only.
After some fine tuning the next few years, Ilene created her new show: Gay and Fabulous in Appalachia: Confessions of An Appalachian Drag Queen. Ilene shares some of her personal stories and analysis as a sociologist. She brings her own style of storytelling, comedy, and education to her audience. Really, how many sociology professors can look this fabulous, be this funny, and give good lecture?
Currently, Ilene resides in Huntington, WV where she teaches sociology and is working on her long-awaited memoir.
Okey’s October 2015 show at VT was a classic. He stayed with John and me in Pulaski, and I went into my usual Southern-hospitality mode, pouring lots of wine, whipping up bucatini with Amatriciana sauce for dinner and baking buttermilk biscuits for breakfast. His show was scheduled in Shanks Hall, the English Department building, so we’d planned for him to change in my office. As we approached Shanks, me lugging a big trunk full of outfits and other drag paraphernalia and him carrying his wild umber wig on a mannequin head, a woman left the building.
“That’s an odd thing to be carrying,” she said, nodding at the bodiless, bewigged head as she passed.
“Not if you’re a drag queen,” Okey said, without missing a beat. I didn’t quite keep a straight face but did resist the urge to slap my knee and guffaw.
In my office, I got to witness the complex hour-long preparations that transformed a three-hundred-something-pound man into a drag queen: stage makeup, powder, the big wig, the caftan, the flashy costume jewelry.
“I’m so sorry. I’m getting powder all over your desk and floor,” Okey said, patting his cheeks.
“Hell, I don’t care. This is fascinating. But soooo much trouble.”
“You’re telling me. That’s why I don’t do this anymore unless people pay me. Would you hand me my breasteses, Mr. Mann?”
I picked up the big bags he indicated, shook them, and passed them to him. “What’s in here? Cat litter?”
“Ah, one of the most arcane secrets of drag: it’s bird seed,” he said, strapping said breasteses on before slipping into a golden caftan.
“Now the hairrrssss.” He combed out the umber wig and secured it to his head. Next he rummaged in the trunk and pulled out a transparent plastic case of fake fingernails. “And now…the claws! If you’ll help me. I can do one hand, but once those nails are on, I can’t do the other.”
“Do you mean I’ll be able to add ‘drag technician’ to my CV? Sure.”
Okey showed me how to apply a tiny bit of glue, center the nail, press it down, and hold it in place till the glue dried. When we were done, he was indeed beclawed, with long, blood-red nails.
“‘Nature red in tooth and claw,’” I said, quoting Tennyson.
“Exactly. Didn’t Shakespeare have a line about…”
“‘Could I come near your beauty with my nails?’”
“Right. Well, Butch, if you see any of those hateful colleagues of yours in the audience tonight, point ‘em out to me and I’ll claw ‘em a comeuppance.”
When you invite a writer or performer to campus, you can pour as much energy and money into publicity as you’d like, but you still don’t know whether or not you’ll have a decent audience. But the fliers I’d posted and the emails I’d sent worked. To my relief, 370-380 Shanks Hall was standing-room only. Ilene Over was a huge hit. In fact, you can watch that performance on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3xzXOhwBOU.
Miss Ilene was as frank and bold in her show as I try to be in my publications. She talked about reconciling mountain and gay identities, all the names she’d been called over the years—sissy, queer, fag, cocksucker, pervert—the wedding dress she tried to wear during grade-school dress-up, and her passionate love of Wonder Woman. Reminiscing about her coming-out days in college, she brought down the house with the priceless statement, “I wanted cock. I craved it, I wanted it, I needed it, and I went and got it,” which I’m sure has never been announced in a Virginia Tech classroom in the entire history of that institution. I wanted to yell, “Testify, sister!” but thought better of it.
*
In April 2016, we enjoyed that memorable trip along the Ohio to Hillbilly Hot Dogs. The next day, we had lunch at a Huntington institution, Jim’s Steak and Spaghetti House, with my Marshall hostess, the aforementioned Allison Carey, who’s composing a much-needed book about LGBTQ writing in Appalachia. In a crowded corner of the restaurant, we three battened on pasta, meat sauce, and garlic bread while Okey loudly held forth with many an off-color tale.
Years later, Allison was to confide in me, “I don’t think I’ve heard anyone use the word ‘dick’ that many times in any one conversation. The really notable thing to me was the juxtaposition of dick-dick-dick within the context of Jim's Steak & Spaghetti—I recall that from our table, we could see the table where President Kennedy once sat, and the photo of Kennedy sitting in that booth, and we were surrounded by those waitresses in their crisp white dresses. And Okey's talking volubly about dicks!”
What could I do but smile? Okey never gave a shit about who overheard what or what people thought. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone so fearless.
*
In September 2016, my father died at age 95. The only silver lining to that was that he didn’t live to see Trump elected, a horror that definitely would have killed him. In November 2016, Okey drove to Hinton for the memorial service my sister had organized. I walked with him from our Hinton house to the service, held in the old McCreery Hotel. It was the distance of one block. Okey had to pause to catch his breath about every ten steps.
“Mr. Mann,” he panted, “I’m tired of shuffling around like an old woman with all this extra weight. I’ve got work to do, trouble to stir up, and books to write. I’m turning my life around. I talked to the doctors: I’m getting my stomach stapled next month. And I’m starting that West Virginia Wesleyan MFA program in January.”
That’s what happened. The next time he came to Hinton, in January 2017, he’d lost fifty pounds. He’d joined a gym, he explained, and was burning up fat on a treadmill. He’d brought along a box of protein shakes to serve as breakfast and lunch, and I made sure that the dinners I made were all low-fat and low-carb, though he did allow himself during our chatty cocktail hour(s) one glass of the sweet wine he savored —Moscato or Sangria. The next time I saw him, in February, he’d lost another twenty-five pounds. His diabetes had receded, and his breathing was much better, though at night he still used a CPAP machine. When Miss Ilene performed at the 2017 ASA Conference in March, the room was packed, and she was lively, lip-syncing, dancing, moving around, though at one point she nearly lost her pink-furred bedroom slipper, saying, “Lordamercy, I almost threw a shoe.”
And Okey was writing. He flourished in that low-residency MFA program, making many friends and impressing many people, both with his boisterous, friendly presence and his fine fiction and creative nonfiction. He did share a few sharp words with me about certain instructors who assigned an egregious amount of reading material and certain egotistical and/or neurotic visiting writers. “Honey,” he said of a vaunted male essayist, “she’s a cunt.” Of a vaunted male poet, “She’s ashamed to be where she’s from. What a sad mess. And homely as a bedbug, bless her heart.”
Okey had started a podcast on iTunes too. He interviewed authors Martin Hyatt, J. B. Stilwell, and me. His greatest coup was interviewing someone really famous: Del Shores, the writer and director of one of our favorite films, Sordid Lives. Okey also posted a hysterical mock commercial, complete with manic banjo music, on YouTube.
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Okey was in even better shape when he came down to Hinton in October 2017 for our annual tradition, moseying through the street fair during Railroad Days, a festival my hometown’s hosted for over fifty years. There was a cacophonous children’s choir we both scowled at and hordes of out-of-town visitors. As I recall, Okey limited himself to a bowl of brown beans, a dish just about every West Virginian loves, while I threw myself at my usual trio of fattening pleasures: a hot dog with everything, a pulled-pork barbeque sandwich, and a country ham, egg, and cheese sandwich, followed by an unsuccessful search for decent fried apple pies.
On the stroll back to the house, our attentions were absorbed by a hot young guy escorting his girlfriend. The combo of beard, buzz cut, tight T-shirt, broad shoulders, small waist, and a great butt beneath cargo pants had us both horned up.
“Mr. Mann, will you look at that? I’m verklempt. I might swoon right here.”
“Mmmmmmmm, yes. I’d tie that to a chair. Talk about the perfect slave-boy.”
“And holding a girl’s hand, of course. What a tragic waste. Where is my next husband? What is he waiting for? When will he come?”
“Jesus fucking Christ, whatta rump. I’d eat that ass for a good hour.” Back at the house, I buried my face into one of the season’s last pink roses.
*
In 2017, Okey started to get published. First was “Dave,” an essay about an old friend who’d died of AIDS. It appeared in Unbroken Circle: Stories of Cultural Diversity in the South, edited by Julia Watts and Larry Smith, an anthology in which I’d placed an essay of my own, “Big Queer Convocations,” about our Hinton weekends. Later came “Dancing in the Dirt,” an essay in Electric Dirt, an LGBTQ Appalachian journal edited by an acquaintance of his.
Along with Julia Watts, and thanks to Allison Carey, we read together from Unbroken Circle at Marshall University in January 2018. One of the settings in my vampire novel, Insatiable, is a gay bar in Columbus, Ohio, called Club Diversity, so in March 2018, Okey and I read together there too, to a room full of enthusiastic lesbians Cindy and her housemate Felon had encouraged to attend. Plus Julia and I were co-editing, for WVU Press, LGBTQ Fiction and Poetry from Appalachia, and we eagerly accepted Okey’s “Come to Jesus Meeting,” a segment of his novel-in-progress. By June 2018, during another visit to Hinton, he told me that he’d just about finished both the gay werewolf novel and the drag-queen romance, books that my publisher, Steve Berman of Lethe Press, was interested in obtaining.
*
There’s a local produce stand down the hill from me, the kind of place you’ll never find in a highfalutin town like Blacksburg but which is common in little country towns like Hinton or Pulaski. On July 17th, 2018, I discovered, to my gastronomic excitement, fresh crowder peas there. The next morning, I shelled them. I had them simmering on the stove with a dollop of obligatory bacon grease when the phone rang.
It was Susan, a friend of Okey’s in Huntington. She called to tell me that he’d died the night before, apparently of a massive heart attack. “He called 911 and told them he was having trouble breathing, but by the time they got there, he was gone. They couldn’t resuscitate him.” At some point soon, she explained, she and other friends of his would organize a memorial service, and she hoped I’d be able to attend.
Stunned, I hung up. Stunned, I stirred the crowder peas. I knew I’d just entered a grim new era of my life. Older family members of mine had died, and much-cherished pets, but never before a friend. Who’s next? I thought. This attrition, this diminishment will continue, one by one, until it’s my turn to go.
In times of grief, I go numb and get efficient. I headed up to John’s office and told him. I emailed Cindy. I called my sister. I called my publisher, who suggested that I write an essay about Okey. My focus was far too shattered to write anything yet, so I read, The Viking Spirit by Daniel McCoy and Secret City by Julia Watts. I cooked a lot over the next week: Trisha Yearwood’s vegetable pie, the Two Fat Ladies’ summer pudding with tomato and fresh basil, white asparagus au gratin, Caprese salad. When you cook, process distracts you. When you cook, you’re nourishing life.
The memorial service was scheduled for Sunday, July 29th, in B’Nai Sholom Temple in Huntington. The setting of a Jewish synagogue wasn’t a complete surprise. The last time I’d seen Okey, he’d told me about accompanying a Jewish friend to a service there and being very impressed with the rabbi. He’d met with her several times afterwards to discuss the Jewish faith. You bastard, I’d thought, if you convert to Judaism, I’m going to be pissed. You’re my only pagan friend.
I drove up to St. Albans, West Virginia, early that Sunday of the service. Debbie, an old forestry friend from my undergrad days at WVU, lives up the Coal River with her wife, Billie, and they’d offered to put me up for the night, since St. Albans is only about fifty minutes from Huntington. Billie, an embodiment of Appalachian hospitality if there ever was one, had prepared a huge, complex salad for lunch, plus a plethora of fruit. Afterwards, we relaxed and caught up, and I got to know Molly, their beagle, and Jay, their animated schnauzer. He took to me in a big way, lounging with his head in my lap, sensing, Billie suggested, my emotional fragility.
Then it was time to get ready for the service. In their guest room, I tugged on dress clothes, something most country boys passionately resent, including me. “In July, for fuck’s sake,” I grumbled, buttoning the too-snug pants. “Ugh. Stuffing sausage into sausage casing. Miss Ilene would probably prefer me in denim overalls.” But my Virginia-bred mother had raised me to be a Southern gentleman, and a gentleman wears dress pants, dress shirt, and blazer to a funeral, though I did forego a detestable tie.
The Huntington synagogue was beautiful, full of light, with a high ceiling and stained glass. I’d never been in a Jewish temple before, other than a few unconsecrated ones in Prague that served as museums or memorials to Holocaust victims. I found it difficult to chat with the few folks who recognized me—social interactions with people I don’t know well are a strain even in my most emotionally stable times—though I did get to meet a handful of Okey’s friends I’d heard about. Susan, the friend who’d called me with the news, was passing out a limited number of Wonder Woman armbands and, wet-eyed, I claimed and wore one, then took a seat at the end of a pew, as far away from everyone else as possible. I had no desire for strangers to witness my grief.
Most memorial services I’ve attended have, to be blunt, griped my ass. They’re sentimental and full of clichés, or worse, turn into attempts by the Christian minister to convert the audience. That kind of service makes me snarl and bristle like a wolf. But the service for Okey was perfect. His friend and former classics professor, Charles Lloyd, played masterfully haunting piano beforehand, and the rabbi was understated, concise, dignified, warm, and elegant. She gave a short interpretation of a Bible passage, one in which God says to a complaining Moses, “You have so much.” That hit me hard. For a while now, it’s been clear to me that I focus far too much on what’s lost or what’s missing than on all I have. That kind of ingratitude surely offends the gods.
Three of Okey’s close friends, possessing self-control I never would have had in such circumstances, gave short tributes to him. When one mentioned Wonder Woman, how Okey’s courage matched his favorite heroine’s, I got shaky. When she mentioned the scene in the 2017 film where Wonder Woman strides under heavy fire across No Man’s Land, I was wrecked entirely. It took a lifelong dedication to the ideals of male stoicism not to sob.
The rabbi took the podium again, long enough to mention Okey’s passionate commitment to social and political change. She exhorted us to follow in his footsteps, to keep creating, writing, and fighting. The service ended with the singing of the Christian hymn, “Amazing Grace,” and the chanting of the Jewish Mourner’s Kaddish.
When folks rose and began to file down to the basement for a reception, I fled. Outside, I pulled off my blazer, unbuttoned my shirt, climbed into my truck, and, windows down, took the long way back to St. Albans, along Route 60, breathing in twilit July, passing wooded hills and small towns, thankful for having had the friends I’ve had, thankful for being in West Virginia.
That evening, I had little appetite, so Billie fixed me up a simple plate of fruit and made me a peculiar cocktail, Fireball whiskey with sour mix, which tasted just right. Debbie started a fine blaze in their back-yard firepit, and the three of us sat outside with their dogs in the dark, feeding wood to the fire, drinking, telling stories, and watching the full moon rise. I woke the next morning to a gift from Thor—a sweet summer thunderstorm—and a gift from Cernunnos—frightened of the thunder, their beagle had climbed up onto my bed to cuddle with me. Billie made a huge country breakfast of biscuits, organic sausage, fried potatoes, scrambled eggs, and fruit. They sent me home with garden-fresh tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, leftover biscuits, and a little jar of moonshine. God damn, I love the Mountain State, I thought, driving home. The gods send what consolations they can.
A few weeks later, an odd thing happened. John brought in the mail with a confused look on his face. He handed me an envelope, one with images of dancing woodland fairies and a Harvey Milk stamp. It was from Okey. The postmark was “02 AUG 2018,” but he’d died July 18th. How it was mailed after his death I don’t know. Inside was a card from Tree-Free Greetings, with another elaborate forest fairy on the cover. Inside that was a handwritten note.
Jeff and John,
Just a note to tell you how much I value your friendship and how much I appreciate your encouragement and support! See you soon. Okey aka Ilene Over
*
The aftermaths of loss are always sorrowful. Sometimes they’re also bitter.
A few weeks after Okey’s death, the editors at WVU Press told me that we’d have to remove his contribution to LGBTQ Fiction and Poetry from Appalachia. He’d signed a contract, but his death made that contract void. Because he’d died intestate, his estate’s controlled by his parents. In the last months of his life, he’d made some peace with them, but as of this writing, I have no idea if they’ll allow his manuscripts ever to be published. I’m dubious, considering the many stories he told me of how embarrassed they were by his homosexuality and his drag. To think that he worked so hard and so long on those bold, brave, and provocative books only to have them consigned to oblivion…it’s an intolerable thought. It makes me want to horsewhip someone.
I have a few things left of his generosity, gifts he gave me over the years. In Hinton, watercolor paintings of Pan and the Green Man, a bolline for inscribing candles and gathering herbs, and a leather-bound journal with a metal pentagram on the cover. In Pulaski, a miniature erect cock made of crystal, resting on the bookshelf in the guest room. An Odin’s raven necklace I sometimes wear. Most amazing of all, a necklace made of beads and bear claws, its woven pendent adorned with a bear-paw design, still fainted scented with the smoke that Okey’s Shoshone friend used to consecrate it in Idaho.
In October 2018, I gave a reading at Empire Books and News in Huntington, an event that Okey had set up. Several friends of his were in the small audience, so I read a scene from Insatiable in which Ilene Over appears. To my pleasure, they said they could hear Okey’s voice in the character. I was glad to have done his colorful self justice. It was the first time I’d been in Huntington without him to hang out with. His ashes are buried on his family’s property back in Wayne County, beneath a newly planted tree. I might get there one of these days, though I might not, if such a visit involves interacting with his parents. I was in the mood to honor the dead, though, so the next day I visited Spring Hill Cemetery to see the memorial to the members of the Marshall football team who’d died in that awful 1970 plane crash when I was still a child.
After that, I drove up to Columbus to spend a few days with Cindy and Felon. We enjoyed lots of good talk by Felon’s fireplace, a long walk in the woods at High Banks, tasty tacos at an unpretentious Mexican joint and great country-fried steak at Tee Jaye’s Country Place, a blue-collar restaurant no academic snob would be caught dead in. After battening on a lunch of pirogies and cucumber salad at North Market, I chatted with a beautiful, hipster-bearded, plump-rumped boy at the spice store there, a guy I know Okey would have salivated over as much as I did. When I headed back to Pulaski, I took the slower route down the Ohio River once I got to West Virginia. In Lesage, belly growling, I stopped at Hillbilly Hot Dogs. I was just another bearded mountain man in a pickup truck, ready for lunch and trapped in time.
When I’d last been to that roadside dive, I’d been there with Okey. I sat beneath the same box elder trees, but they weren’t lush with spring’s green-gold. Instead, their leaves were browning and dry with autumn. I had a “West Virginia dog”—chili, mustard, onions, and slaw—watched the broad Ohio roll by, and thought of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “Mr. Flood’s Party.” In that poem, a drunk old man with a jug of liquor looks down on a town in the moonlight, melancholy with the knowledge that he’s outlived all his friends. Here’s how the poem ends: “There was not much that was ahead of him, / And there was nothing in the town below— / Where strangers would have shut the many doors / That many friends had opened long ago.”
Well.
Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain” ends with this: “If you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it.” This is true. The Viking ethos I admire is all about courage, honor, and dignity in the face of fate, loss, and death, even in the grim face of Ragnarök. Having known someone who personified toughness and courage—a ferocious drag queen—the least I can do is emulate Okey’s mountaineer-queer orneriness and endure. I’ll play “Goodbye, My Friend” on nights when I’m drunk and nostalgic. I’ll watch RuPaul’s Drag Race to get my drag fix and root for the big girls. I’ll get briny-eyed when I rewatch Wonder Woman or see the upcoming Wonder Woman 1984, a film Okey was very much looking forward to.
At the same time that I’ll do my best to celebrate all that’s left, I’ll face the facts. The things I love are passing from the earth, and there’s no way to slow or stay them. I’m not like the Irish Dagda, with a club that kills with one end and resurrects with the other. But I can do this. I can write. I can honor and I can commemorate, again and again and again, until I myself disappear.
__________
Jeff Mann has published five books of poetry, Bones Washed with Wine, On the Tongue, Ash, A Romantic Mann, and Rebels; two collections of essays, Edge and Binding the God; a book of poetry and memoir, Loving Mountains, Loving Men; six novels, Fog, Purgatory, Cub, Salvation, Country, and Insatiable; and three volumes of short fiction, A History of Barbed Wire, Desire and Devour, and Consent. With Julia Watts, he co-edited LGBTQ Fiction and Poetry from Appalachia. The winner of two Lambda Literary Awards and four National Leather Association International literary awards, he teaches creative writing at Virginia Tech.