Perfume Genius' Mike Hadreas wore bright red lipstick for their network television debut last week on "Late Show With David Letterman". Clad in a blindingly white power suit, heels, and a shiny black harness over bare skin where you might expect a tie, Hadreas sang "Queen".
We shouldn’t call Perfume Genius's "Letterman" performance "brave", because we'd never accuse a straight dude of bravery just for dressing up the way he wants. Insisting on your gender transgressions in a world that wants to stamp them out of you isn't in itself "brave"; it's necessary and exhausting. It takes a lot of muscle. It takes stamina to stand under hot TV lights in perfect red lips and sing through clothes that aren't drag, aren't a costume, aren't supposed to be funny. And it takes a real streak of mischief to sing the words "no family is safe when I sashay" into the homes of families across America, and then sway like a motherfucker while your boyfriend hammers out a keyboard solo.
What I'm saying is: You don't need to assimilate. You don't need to insist on an unremarkable masculinity just to be allowed to exist in culture as a queer person. You don't need to soothe heteropatriarchy's fraying ends. You don't need to ask for permission.
You can show up to your first network TV appearance in a BDSM harness and killer red nails because you've just made a perfect album about the ways your body keeps betraying you. You can sing about how you feel disgusting and diseased all the time but fuck it -- you're claiming that word "queen" anyway because you're here and your hair looks amazing. You can hit those high notes and bare your nervousness and that's okay, that's part of it, that's always been written into the song. It's not a gay lib anthem; it never was. It's a song about queer paradox—those infinite paradoxes that can coil inside a body.
You can stand next to David Letterman as he ekes out a few wooden syllables, not sure what to think. You can shake his hand and step back and look out at the cameras, look at the people who are watching you from far, far away, because this never was for him.