Jameco’s Drag Debut
Jameco’s voice is difficult to understand at first, but his smile is inviting. Communicating with Jameco requires patience because his disability distorts his speech; in order to get to know him, acquaintances must quickly become comfortable with not always being able to understand what he wants to say. On April 13, 2015, though, Jameco would have the opportunity to speak to an entire community, one of openness and pride, in a way that would make his voice sound clear — performing in a drag show with an entirely new identity, one more authentic to his true self.
Corey, 40, Jameco’s Citizen Advocate and friend of two years, felt nervous about what people might think of Jameco during his performance. He is a 27-year-old gay man with Cerebral Palsy: the picture of intersectionality. Would people be cruel, interpreting his song as a joke? Despite Corey’s doubts, the bar was packed, drag queens lined the wall, and it was time for Jameco to take the stage and embrace his dream.
He chose to perform one of his favorite songs from 2014, “That Way” by Shakira. Throughout the heartfelt ballad, dozens of spectators approached the stage, dropping dollar bills into tin buckets, both to applaud Jameco’s performance and to raise money for the Boybutante AIDS Foundation. The entire room of competing queens, members of the LGBTQ community and friends proudly accepted and connected with Jameco. All Athenians in the bar, straight and queer alike, nodded, grateful for a community of acceptance in a part of the country known for its intolerance.
At the end of his song, the room of a few hundred viewers rose, Corey began to cry and the audience experienced a moment of joy and pride for Jameco. Strangers became supporters in the realization of Jameco’s dream.
Jameco’s performance was one of the last milestone moments he and Corey will share before Corey moves to Canada in the fall. Corey has not only been Jameco’s Citizen Advocate, but also his connection to the gay community for the past two years. Together they have gone on beach vacations, found the best Chinese takeout in town, adjusted to Corey’s husband moving to Maryland and settled Jameco into his own apartment.
The pair met after Corey moved back to Athens to teach qualitative research at the university. Sitting in a meeting of LGBTQ university faculty members, Corey listened to the director of a local nonprofit called Citizen Advocacy, which helps socially-isolated community members develop active lives by pairing them with mentors. Nicole, the organization’s coordinator, came to speak to the faculty in hopes of finding a match for Jameco. By bringing together developmentally disabled adults with supportive friends, Citizen Advocacy fosters lifelong relationships between pairs like Corey and Jameco, bringing those experiencing disability out of exclusion and into empowerment.
After first meeting Nicole, Corey sat down with her over lunch to talk about Jameco. At the staff meeting, Nicole suggested that a straight woman become his advocate, which Corey interpreted as heteronormative thinking, supporting the stereotype of gay men being unable to maintain platonic relationships with other gay men. The coordinators at Citizen Advocacy feared that if his advocate was another gay man, then Jameco would fall in love with him.
“I was thinking of challenging her assumptions about heterosexual privilege.”
But on the first day they met, Jameco sang in his home to the coordinators and Corey. Jameco has always felt most like himself within his world of music. Because of his match with a mentor that could understand his sexual identity, Jameco would quickly feel like himself within his friendship with Corey too.
When the pair started preparing for Jameco’s drag performance, Corey had just undergone surgery to heal his meniscus. He’d torn the cartilage while dancing at the first gay wedding he’d ever attended. Like many friends do, Corey and Jameco sat on the couch in Corey’s suburban home, checking their phones and laptops side-by-side, obsessing over the dancing sharks in Katy Perry’s 2015 Super Bowl halftime show.
“That’s what normal friends do; they just hang out at each other’s house, they watch TV, they eat dinner. They just hang out.”
For two years they have spent time together about once a week. Three other days each week, Jameco goes to Hope Haven, a sort of day-care for adults with disabilities where participants go on field trips and do menial tasks for pennies a day. Corey has his reservations about Hope Haven, wishing that the organization would do a better job of integrating the adults into the broader community, but both he and Jameco must settle for the services made available by Hope Haven. Without it, Jameco would spend nearly all of his days at home alone.
Jameco lives in his own apartment at a government housing complex on the east side of town. Each day when he leaves the house, he must carefully lock both deadbolts on his door. This process sometimes takes up to five minutes, with Jameco’s right hand often acting as a hindrance — its motor skills impaired.
But on a rainy afternoon in the middle of April, Jameco extended his hand to Yasmine, his “drag mother” for his premiere as Florence the Machine, while Yasmine painted his nails electric blue. That night, Jameco sang as Florence the Machine with Yasmine Alexander, one of the drag community’s most well-known queens. Together they embodied the powerful women of their individual drag identities and the female musician whose ballad brought them together on stage.
Jameco sat patiently in the worn leather desk chair in Yasmine’s apartment, his smile never stopping for a break. The transformation from Jameco to Florence lasted about three hours, starting with foundation and ending in fabulous false eye lashes, so heavy that they were an exercise for his eyelids. Through this transformation, Jameco’s hindering hand became an aid to the flamboyant attitude essential to his first drag performance.
“I’m committed to trying to make the dreams that I can make come true for him, and that seem reasonable, a reality.”
Corey and Jameco’s relationship will also undergo a transformation soon as Corey prepares to move fourteen hours north to Canada. Despite the inevitable strains of a long-distance friendship, Corey acknowledges that “Jameco is now a central part of my life.”
Even with Corey’s fears for Jameco’s life without a close and consistent mentor, he says, “I’ve come to believe that the universe provides for us in times of need. Maybe with just my presence in Jameco’s life, his social isolation will go away.”
When Corey first met Jameco, his life was marked by a sense of emptiness. Corey was academically accomplished, he was with the love of his life. He was making change in the lives of the LGBTQ community through his work and personal advocacy, but these successes were not enough.
Corey’s and Jameco’s friendship took what Corey thought he knew about privilege, marginalization and social justice and transformed it into an everyday reality. Their friendship brought both Corey and Jameco to a place where they could know themselves better through each other.
“We will be friends forever and that’s what I have to remember. That’s what I always come back to. If we remove the disability, what would that look like? What would that mean? How would I behave? I try to behave that same way with Jameco as I would with anyone else.
This will be a cultivated friendship that exists across a continental divide.”
