The first words that come out of my luscious pink lips during my television debut as a drag queen are a date: “November 5, 2005.” It was August 5, 2023 and I was on stage at The Boro Bar & Grill, standing next to Canada’s Endurance Race winner Priyanka. I returned to The Boro for the first time in over 15 years as part of an open stage event for HBO. They were here. It’s a scene that just aired on national television on April 26, 2024. I’m Brett White, a television critic, and I’m barb barely, a drag queen. I’m also from Tennessee. These are the fibers of my life, twisted into thread, pointing at the eye of a neon purple needle. And after exactly seven years writing about television, I now have a sense of what it means to be a thread in a larger narrative, the fabulous tapestry of They were here.
The threads that connect me to this moment are long. We measure our lives in dates and November 5, 2005 is one I will never forget. It was the date I kissed a boy for the first time, across the street from that same stage at The Boro, in the parking lot of my university’s sports center. On November 5, 2005, I finally regained consciousness and immediately walked across the street to The Boro Bar & Grill, the campus bar where my three best friends were seeing a local band. So I told them at the Boro, and there they were again at the Boro on August 5, 2023, enduring the heat and sweat, watching me perform dressed as a woman.
I’m a drag queen, but only since June 26, 2022. I’m also a senior reporter/producer for Jugo Mobile, a job I started on April 24, 2017. And Jugo Mobile, the outlet that allows me to write a diary entry. as an essay, it is also where I have become a gay man. Two weeks after starting here, I wrote about how RuPaul’s Drag Race It made me confront my internalized homophobia. Seven years later, I’m now a drag queen with HBO on her incredibly short resume. I have also covered They were here since its premiere on April 23, 2020. From journalist to participant: an improbable journey and a (fierce?) conflict of interest that now it is my turn to reveal, with glamour.
As I told Priyanka using Barb’s Tennessee accent, I told my three best friends on November 5, 2005: in a car in the Boro parking lot, at the gas station next door, and in front of the Boro dumpster. Boron. I celebrated my coming out on the Boro floor, sweatily dancing to The Bang Up (or The Apgars, The Young Livers; all my friends had bands). My feet on the same ground —Converse in 2005, white pumps in 2023. There was my friend Crisi. She had just started dating my friend Jason. They made cool kids indie rock nod to the beat alongside me, as the night turned to November 6th. I was in a new relationship. Crisi and Jason were in a new relationship. But while my new relationship imploded just 24 hours later, Crisi and Jason’s thrived.
Crisi died on August 21, 2022, out of nowhere. Crisi, a famous mathematics teacher at a school half an hour from El Boro. The math teacher with the Converse and the kaleidoscope of hair colors, the one whose vintage frames and bold details told all the queer kids, “You’re safe.” herewith me.” The first person in line at any endurance race alum meet and greet in Nashville, and the first person to purchase merchandise when her friend decided to start doing drag on June 26, 2022. If August 5, 2023 had been August 5, 2022, Crisi would have been at the Boro watching Priyanka, Sasha. Velor and Jaida Essence Hall give some meaning to our hometown. Hell, maybe her husband, my friend, English teacher, and vocal ally, would be doing drag under Jaida’s tutelage, on the same floor where I saw him and Crisi together for the first time.
I used Crisi’s makeup on August 5, 2023. Now you can see it on HBO, applied amateurishly but confidently on my mug. She was wearing a dress, a ridiculous pink neoprene dress with dilophosaurus steering wheel: which I purchased on August 26, 2022 while in Murfreesboro for Crisi’s funeral. My three best and oldest friends appear in photographs of the crowd at the They were here episode. The one who cannot be seen is Crisi, but I felt her there. doing drag They were here Let me feel my friend again. It allowed me to feel overwhelming, unconditional love for the first time in a long time.
Now They were here Season 4 is out and I’m proud, but it’s been a month since my dad died. The Barb She barely took the Boro stage in August 2023 and didn’t know that that trip would be the last time she would see her father alive. While praising my father on March 30, 2024, I realized that he inspired my drag. The exaggerated tone you hear in that phrase I say on HBO They were here? That’s my dad, that’s me speaking like my dad, but in reality it’s me speaking like the fictional characters he loved, a love that he passed on to me. He is Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres and Ernest P. Worrell and Jeff Foxworthy, as a blonde in rhinestones and pink neoprene. On March 28, 2024, I returned to Tennessee with my husband for the first time in years, and on March 30, I realized that I have a family capable and willing of overwhelming, unconditional love.
I said a phrase in They were here Season 4 premiere — “November 5, 2005: I kissed my first boy and came here right after and came out to my three best and oldest friends” — and from that sentence, from my appearance, there are threads connecting to all the important people in my life. And I hope that all of our threads, the threads of each queen on that open stage, I hope that we all form a lifeline for at least one person in Tennessee who needs to see what happened on August 5, 2023.
I’m Brett White, also known as Barb Hardly. I’m not Maleeka, Bradford or Norm, the three drag kids featured in this episode. I can’t imagine how many threads are attached to his words, but I can appreciate the courage it takes to stand in They were here Just a little more. The fibers of my story form this single thread. They were here It is the needle, and that it sews us and pierces whatever is in the way.
