You can make a fine living in a pair of heels!
Celebrating Pride and Queer Joy in The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert.
A lavender tour bus streaks through the Australian outback, its train of silver Lamé shimmering under the desert sun. On the roof, a woman (or is it a man, or something else entirely?) is enthroned on a giant silver heal. Dressed in from head to toe in a silver sequinned bodysuit and turban, face painted with matching glitter, they lip-sync – giving epic face – to Verdi’s 'Sempre libera’ (Free Forever) with only the wilderness as their audience.
This iconic scene from The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert remains one of the purest expressions of queer joy I have seen on screen in the 29 years since the film’s release.
We head into Pride 2023 under the shadow of increasing and often violent repression against the LGBTQI+ community, with the art of drag and many other divergent expressions of gender, sexuality and queer joy being censored or criminalised and queer people the world over fearing for their safety and their lives. Under such circumstances it feels more important than ever to celebrate the potential for creativity and joy in our communities and so why not ring in the season by paying homage to my queer cinematic awakening: The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert.
The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert is a 1994 comedy hit directed by Steven Elliot. When Tick/Mitzi (Hugo Weaving) gets a call from his ex Marion (Sarah Chadwick) about a drag show in Alice Springs he recruits Adam/Felicia (Guy Pierce) and Bernadette (Terence Stamp) to accompany him across the desert. Adam supplies the bus (Priscilla) and much of the drama, as they make their way across the outback. Far from the safety of their beloved Sydney the three queens must grapple with a flailing engine, the homophobia of white, rural Australia and confront secrets from their past.
That ugly wall of suburbia…
I was the tender age of ten when Priscilla hit the box office and, needless to say, I did not see it at the cinema. It took a couple more years for it to air on British or Irish TV and I stumbled onto it while babysitting unsupervised of a Friday or Saturday night. Though not exactly x-rated, I still had the sense of having stumbled onto something deliciously risqué. I immediately fell in love with Tick, Adam and Bernadette, the music and their outrageous, Oscar-winning, costumes. In replacing Jaws as my principal cinematic obsession, Priscilla marked a queer awakening and a definitive moment of transition from child to teenager.
As a tween growing up in small-town suburbia Priscilla was the first taste I had of anything resembling queer culture. I knew queer people existed (in theory) but I had never (knowingly) met one. Whether I realised it or not, I was desperate for queer kinship and found it with Priscilla.
Though there is nothing particularly neurodivergent about the film, at 12 I could already identify with the outsider status and social rejection the queens experience the deeper they venture into white, rural Australia. Existing as my gender and neuro-confused, unintentionally androgynous, self in small-town, suburban, Ireland was enough to elicit stares and insults on the street and in school. People seemed to be able to spot my divergence from sexual, gender and neurological “normalcy” at ten paces, even though I struggled to identify or understand those processes within myself.
I was lucky never to experience the acts of intimidation or physical violence inflicted on the queens while on the road which, even in 2023, are all too close to real life. Just two weeks ago a 14 year old boy was brutally beaten in an Irish suburban housing estate, not unlike the one I grew up in. His attackers were a homophobic mob of fellow teenagers who felt legitimated to turn their fear and hatred of difference into violence.
I had earned so many labels to mark my difference at home and in school that I eschewed any approximation to any label which might signal even more profound, less socially acceptable, differences. I wanted to be “normal”, to fit it and feel accepted so badly that for too long I shut down any inclination towards divergence except for a few permitted obsessions, like Priscilla, which I mostly kept to myself.
As much as I took comfort in Tick, Adam and Bernadette’s adventures, loved the art of drag and identified with their outsider status, the tale of three middle-aged drag queens crossing the Australian desert did not really provide me with any signposts for how I might live in the world as a queer and neurodivergent teen nor how I could survive small town life until I was old enough to leave.
I escaped suburbia for the Big City at 18 and the even Bigger World at 19, expecting things to get easier away from suburban suffocation. In many ways life did improve but some wounds continued to throb through my 20s and into my early 30s. I became both consciously and unconsciously determined to perform femininity, heterosexuality and neurotypicality as expected to counter the literal alienation I increasingly felt with the world around me. As you might expect, this neither worked nor made me happy. Rather, I lurched from one existential-anxiety fuelled crisis to another until, in my late thirties, I allowed myself to explore and embrace my queerness.
Within six months of coming out to the world I discovered my neurodivergence and began the complicated process of ‘coming Aut.’ If positive images of queerness were less than abundant growing up, Autism was more often than not portrayed as a tragedy that befell families and a condition which must be cured. I began writing AutCasts as a way of understanding myself, coming Aut to the world through the comfort and security of the written word and reclaiming the cinematic heroes and anti-heroes who provided comfort and solace throughout 37 years of denial and social isolation. Foremost among that cast of outcasts, oddballs and misfits, were Tick, Adam and Bernadette.
Bloody drag queens just keep breeding like rabbits!
Australian cinema was having a moment when Priscilla came out. Campy classic Muriel’s Wedding was released the same year and Strictly Ballroom had come out in 1992. It was an instant international success and when it comes to queer cinema of the late 80s and early 90s Priscilla was a breath of fresh air. Being gay is not a tragedy, no one is dying of HIV and abusive family dynamics and rejection are turned into comedy. The characters are not prisoners to painful pasts, rather they have been able to heal and find new meaning and strength from those experiences.
For every offensive joke and shady remark the three queens hurl at each other, they also share profound moments of care and tenderness. They defend and comfort each other, laugh and cry together, play and create art together. The AIDS crisis, violence and lack of acceptance from the outside world around is an ever-present shadow that finds concrete expression in slur painted across Priscilla and the brutal assault on Adam. It’s a fearless Bernadette who saves Adam before the situation escalates further. Consoling him back at their hotel Bernadette says “I’ve learned to fight because I have to.”
Priscilla works because these moments of pain are balanced with the joy of drag, friendship and the possibilities for love and chosen family that transcend sexual and gender binaries. At the end of the day it’s a hero’s journey played out over road-trip where the three queens must mourn, recover their creative spark, reconcile themselves with their pasts, embrace the possibilities for love and fulfil childhood dreams. It’s almost as if it was timed to come out as a celebration of Australia’s decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1994, a year after Ireland finally struck it from the criminal code.
The movie is flawed in a way most 90s movies were: slur words of every shade abound and body shaming is par for the course between the queens. More grievously, however, is the racist portrayal of Bob’s wife Cynthia (Julia Cortez), implied to be a Fillipina sex worker, who is exoticised, objectified and ridiculed. And finally, the impact of white settler colonialism and Australia’s entrenched racism and exclusion of its indigenous population is wholly ignored except for one late-night encounter between the queens and an indigenous community.
More recently, Priscilla has been questioned for its casting of three cis and straight men in the roles of two gay men and a trans woman. Hugo Weaving recently pushed back against this claiming no gay actors wanted the role but, we only have his word to go on. Priscilla, is certainly not the first movie to receive this criticism and likely will not be the last as Hollywood continues to cast straight and cis actors in queer roles. Wherever you stand on this debate, as a seasoned Drag Race fan I can safely say that while the three leads consistently give good face, they are not dancers, with none of the rhythm, grace or panache I would expect from a Dancing Queen. Their fabulous make-up and costumes are all that would have saved their cis-straight asses from immediate elimination in a ‘lip-synch for your life’.
For all it’s flaws, Priscilla remains one of my go-to comfort movies and never fails to make my heart glow nor bring a smile to my face. Its mainstream success likely paved the way for Ru Paul to make his TV debut two years later, spawning a drag franchise that is still bearing fruit. The good thing about living in 2023, however, with unparalleled access to a whole world of streaming is that there are far more movies and TV shows where we can find queer joy!
I’ve learned to fight because I have to…
Pride began as a protest and remains a protest. There may have been a few years where we might have been able to fool ourselves into believing Pride was just a big party, with corporations eager to cash in on the pink dollar, but it seems those days are well and truly over. Every day, the queer community, and trans people in particular, are confronted with new legislative measures aimed at restricting health care, access to public spaces and free expression of our identities and creativity under the pretext of ‘saving the children’ but with the apparent intention of erasing the existence of queer and trans people. 2022 was the most violent year for LGBTQI+ people in Europe in over a decade. Uganda has just passed a law imposing the death penalty for “homosexual conduct.” Attacks against the LGBTQI+ community in the US are now so frequent and widespread there’s no point even trying to list them here but I suggest checking out
for daily developments. Target was pressured into pulling much of its Pride merch from stores. If It feels like we’re under siege, maybe it’s because we are: books are being banned, gender expression – whether or not you are trans – is being codified and drag itself is becoming outlawed.Priscilla exists in a strange time capsule, a rare moment of optimism for the queer community where HIV was no longer a death sentence and had lost much of its stigma, where homosexuality was being decriminalised and marriage beginning to seem like a possibility, where drag queens were coming out of the ballrooms and into the living rooms of regular families around the world for lost little queer kids like me to stumble upon. It was a moment to take a breath, savour the beauty around us, the victories of queer activism and Act-Up, before returning to the trenches to continue battling for our right to exist.