How to Become Famous: A Decade of Drug Madness in BrooklynBy Nicole Pasulka
Nicole Pasluca’s “How You Get Famous” opened in 2011 and has scenes of two teenage queens racing to get on the subway as they embark on their first night with a drug in Manhattan. Aja and Esai, ages 17 and 14, are Black and Latin people, “two Brooklyn teenagers seeking attention, cash, and adventure in the big cities.” The essay stumbles in gold shoes. Aja bought him for a few dollars he got by reading the tarot card. Their mission is to enter gay bars, appear in drug shows and win prizes despite being a minor. It’s not spoilers to say that they have gone to the club and have been successful in joining the club. And although he couldn’t win the contest that night, Aja started to open the door and made a strong impression that he would participate in “RuPaul’s Drag Race” twice, giving it a name or throwing it away, and finally appeared. did. AjaLaBeija, a wrapper that is no longer identified as a drug performer.
Aja’s Journey is one of many stories in “How You Get Famous”. Based on about 100 interviews and years of reporting, Pasulka is a narrator, not a character here. This distance provides space for documenting the drastic problems facing drugs, such as significant divisions of generations and classes. The book is novelly told by a third person and traces the various origins and career trails of several drag queens that shaped the Brooklyn scene from 2010 to the end of 2019: Merry Cherry, Williamsburg Hostess. , Drag Impresario daily hire job working in a boring company; Thorgy Thor, a high-concept queen trained in classical piano and violin. Veruca la’Piranha, self-proclaimed “the first drag queen to play Lady Gaga’s song”. As the essay dubbed him, the untitled Queen, or “Picasso comes back to life,” the artist Matthew Deleon’s drug alter ego. Pasulka introduces readers to experimental drug collectives such as Switch’n Play and backSpace. The Ohio queen dreams of a precise dance that competes and eventually collaborates with the West Village pier queen, who learned from the legend of the trendy ballroom. The resulting book is interesting, inspirational, clumsy, and even enlightening.
The performer at the heart of “How You Get Famous” became famous in the neighborhood abandoned by gentrification and at the same time promoted the art of drugs. Their struggle and success defined the drug scene, where becoming a legend is a career move. There are still ballrooms and piers where performances are held for the community, but the drug scene where Aja and Essay departed as a kid was a show business at a gay bar where cash performances were possible. did. It leads to much bigger things.
For the Queen, who has been Pasulka for over a decade, celebrities are the key to everything from business success to social mobility to gender-verified health care. As Pasulka outlines in the author’s memo at the beginning of the book, the situation of the queer people in the United States has generally improved over the years, but especially in current politics, to LGBTQ civil rights in the United States. There is no stable access yet. Climate where these rights have been attacked in multiple states and may be at risk from the conservative Supreme Court. Drug performer celebrities are now the way to personality and the position that your government or family may protect you when they don’t. So, “How You Get Famous” isn’t just about Brooklyn’s niche nightclub scene, it’s about America today.
Alexander Chi is the author of the novel “Queen of the Night” and the essay collection “How to Write an Autobiographical Novel”.
How to Become Famous: 10 Years of Drug Madness in Brooklyn by Nicole Pasluca | Illustrated | 319pp. Simon & Schuster | $ 27.99