[
The first words out of my luscious-ish pink lips during my TV debut as a drag queen are a date: “November 5, 2005.” It was August 5, 2023, and I was onstage at The Boro Bar & Grill, standing in full drag next to Canada’s Drag Race winner Priyanka. I’d returned to The Boro for the first time in over 15 years as part of an open stage event for HBO’s We’re Here. It’s a scene that just aired on national television, on April 26, 2024. I’m Brett White, a TV critic, and I’m Barb Hardly, a drag queen. I’m also a Tennesseean. These are the fibers of my life, twisted into thread, targeting the eye of a neon purple needle. And after exactly seven years of writing about television, I now have an inkling of what it means to be a thread in a larger narrative, the fabulous tapestry of We’re Here.
The threads connecting me to this moment are long ones. We measure our lives in dates, and November 5, 2005 is one I was never going to forget. It was the date I kissed a guy for the first time, across the street from that very stage at The Boro, in the parking lot of my college’s athletic center. November 5, 2005, I finally came out to myself and immediately drove across the street to The Boro Bar & Grill, the campus watering hole where my three best friends were watching a local band. I came out to them then at the Boro — and there they were at the Boro again on August 5, 2023 enduring the heat and sweat, watching me perform in drag.
I’m a drag queen, but only since June 26, 2022. I’m also a Senior Reporter/Producer for Decider, a job I started on April 24, 2017. And Decider, the outlet that is letting me put a diary entry out as an essay, is also where I’ve come into my own as a gay man. Two weeks after I started here, I wrote about how RuPaul’s Drag Race made me confront my internalized homophobia. Seven years later and I’m now a drag queen with HBO on her incredibly short resume. I’ve also covered We’re Here since it premiered on April 23, 2020. From journalist to participant: an unlikely journey and a (fierce?) conflict of interest that I now have to disclose, glamorously.
Like I told Priyanka using Barb’s Tennessee twang, I came out to my three best friends on November 5, 2005 — in a car in the Boro’s parking lot, at the gas station next door, and in front of the Boro’s dumpster. I celebrated my coming out on the floor of the Boro, sweatily dancing to The Bang Up (or The Apgars, The Young Livers — all my friends had bands). My feet on the same floor — Converse in 2005, white pumps in 2023. My friend Crisi was there. She’d just started dating my friend Jason. They did the cool kid indie rock nod along to the rhythm next to me, as the night turned to November 6. I was in a new relationship. Crisi and Jason were in a new relationship. But whereas my new relationship imploded barely 24 hours later, Crisi and Jason’s thrived.
Crisi died on August 21, 2022, out of nowhere. Crisi, a celebrated math teacher at a school a half hour away from The Boro. The math teacher with the Converse and the kaleidoscope of hair colors, the one whose vintage frames and bold lewks told all the queer kids, “You are safe here, with me.” The first person in line at any Drag Race alum’s Nashville meet and greet, and the first person to buy 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 Velour, and Jaida Essence Hall shake some sense into our hometown. Hell, maybe her husband, my friend, an English teacher and vocal ally, would be doing drag under Jaida’s tutelage, on the very floor where I first saw him and Crisi together.
I wore Crisi’s makeup on August 5, 2023. You can now see it on HBO, amateurishly yet confidently applied to my mug. I wore a dress — a ridiculous, pink, neoprene dress with a Dilophosaurus frill — that I bought on August 26, 2022 while in Murfreesboro for Crisi’s funeral. My three best, oldest friends in seen in crowd shots of the We’re Here episode. Who you can’t see is Crisi, but I felt her there. Doing drag on We’re Here let me feel my friend again. It let me feel unconditional, overwhelming love for the first time in a long time.
Now We’re Here Season 4 is out and proud, but it’s been a month since my dad died. The Barb Hardly onstage at the Boro in August 2023 didn’t know that trip was the last time she’d see her dad alive. I realized while eulogizing my dad on March 30, 2024 that he inspired my drag. The exaggerated twang you hear in that one sentence I say on HBO’s We’re Here? That’s my dad — that’s me talkin’ like my dad, but really it’s me talkin’ like the fictional characters that he loved, a love he passed on to me. It’s Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres and Ernest P. Worrell and Jeff Foxworthy, just as a blonde wearing rhinestones and pink neoprene. March 28, 2024, I returned to Tennessee with my husband for the first time in years — and March 30, I realized that I have family who are capable and eager of unconditional, overwhelming love.
I said one sentence on We’re Here Season 4 premiere — ” November 5, 2005: I kissed my first boy and I came over here immediately after and I came out of the closet to my three best and oldest friends” — and from that sentence, from my appearance, there are threads connecting to everyone important in my life. And I hope that all of our threads, the threads of every queen at that open stage, I hope we all form a lifeline to at least one person in Tennessee who needs to see what happened on August 5, 2023.
I’m Brett White, a.k.a. Barb Hardly. I’m not Maleeka or Bradford or Norm, the three drag children introduced in this episode. I can’t fathom how many threads are attached to their words — but I can appreciate the courage it takes to be on We’re Here just a little bit more. The fibers of my story form this one thread. We’re Here is the needle, and let it stitch us together and pierce whatever is in the way.
