What we’ve got here is the whole beautiful fucked up contradiction laid out at ankle level. Those heels, man. They’re not asking permission, they’re not apologizing, they’re just there in the frame like some kind of manifesto written in sequins and fuck you platform architecture.
This is what happens when the theater of identity stops being theater and becomes flesh, becomes sweat, becomes the concrete reality of walking down Mission Street with the sun beating down and every step a small act of defiance against the tyranny of normal. Those shoes aren’t costume. They’re not drag in the sense of something you put on and take off. They’re the uniform of someone who woke up and decided that comfort was the coward’s bargain, that blending in was a kind of death.
And there’s something raw about catching them at street level, at the exact altitude where the performance meets the pavement. Not the face, not the costume from the waist up, just the foundation, the literal and metaphorical support system for moving through the world as an act of resistance. Or celebration. Or both, because why the hell should it have to be one or the other?
Carnival gives people permission to be what they already are, just louder. But these queens, they don’t need carnival. Carnival needs them. They’re the ones who understand that every day is a kind of carnival if you’re willing to strap on six inches of glitter and structural engineering and claim your square footage of street like it’s a stage at the Fillmore.