First-Person: Caleb McMullen Part 2

FROM GOD-CHILD TO DRAG QUEEN: A Journey of Self-Discovery and Creative Freedom | PART 2

by Caleb McMullen

To this day, I don’t know how or why my parents didn’t kick me out of the house. 

I remember one heated moment in my relationship with my father where I thought the dam would break. I had just come home from my first Pride Parade. I was seventeen, in a ‘relationship’ that consisted of fooling around behind the LCBO in Markham, for lack of a better place. Carmelo. I had met him at The Homo Hop. He was too shy to say hello himself. He sent over his friend. I thought that was endearing at the time. I had put up a photo of Carmelo and I kissing as my desktop screen on the family computer; out and proud for the world to see.

I was making tacos at the time, having just come home from the parade; like a young gay debutant who had just been introduced to the world. My father enters the kitchen and demands that the ‘obscene’ photo of Carmelo and I be removed from the family computer. I was given an ultimatum: I remove the photo or I leave. I just so happened to be dicing tomatoes at the time and I just so happened to throw them at my father, point blank. The tomato guts were still dripping down his glasses when I dashed out of the house. Apparently, at seventeen I already knew how to make an exit.

First-Person: Caleb McMullen (Part 1)

FROM GOD-CHILD TO DRAG QUEEN Part 1 

A Journey of Self-Discovery and Creative Freedom

by Caleb McMullen

It was New Year’s Day 2009. Of course, I had been partying the night before and for whatever reason I was possessed with the need to continue the partying the following day. Windsor, Ontario had two gay destinations: a sad little club whose name changes with every new takeover of management and an equally sad strip club on the other side of town; the wrong side of town. And that’s where I felt so inclined to approach the owner of this fine establishment to set up a very unique opportunity.

For all the nudity that could be found, there was not a drag queen in sight. I am from Toronto and this lacking of stiletto sporting men seemed curious to me, even though I was in a temple dedicated to the beauty of masculinity. However, in my drunken euphoria, I managed to get permission to perform as a drag queen on the stage the following night.

I suppose this story deserves a bit of context. I came out in a flood of colour and lights when I was sixteen. My outing was, of course, disastrous to my born-again Christian parents whose dream of having a youth pastor for a son was dashed to pieces. We were at odds. They believed that my “choice” was of the devil's influence. They believed that I had been confused by the evils of the world, a world that quite frankly worships sex as god supreme. And I, in my rebellion, embraced all extreme forms of my recently claimed homosexual identity. I had to. I was in a transformative time in my life.