The Stranger

On loving drag, travel, and differences

It was like watching a magic trick, the one where the magician pulls handkerchief after handkerchief out of his sleeve. Only, the handkerchiefs were Taylor Swift songs, and the magician was a Thai drag queen in a crowded bar in Bangkok. 

That was our first true night in the city. My friend Stephen and I had arrived around two in the morning the night before; two in the afternoon in New York. I was pleased with the symmetry of this time difference. I’d made it to the absolute opposite side of the world. 

But no matter how far I go, an antenna will reliably pop out of my skull and guide me to the gays. This has been the case in Madrid, where it took me to Chueca; in Mexico City, where it took me to Zona Rosa; in Houston, where it took me to Montrose, and so on. 

There are nuances. “Oh, we can’t afford to live here anymore,” a handsome stranger told me over rum and cokes in Chueca, for example. “Completely taken over by los heteros. We went elsewhere.”

Sure, sure. And yet it remains the case that mere hours after landing I will reliably absorb, as if through osmosis, knowledge of those delectable unlit corners where strong, shitty drinks are served and local legends are made on drag night and men pass around hungry looks.

This gay gravity is how we ended up at The Stranger Bar on Soi 4 in Silom, Bangkok, where a familiar story is written in a different language—the freaks all flock to one spot. A “soi” is an alley or side street, and the general area of Soi 4 hosts a male strip club called Banana Bar, a smattering of gay clubs, and The Stranger, billed on Google Maps as “house of drag queens.”

The Stranger understands that very little is required to make an effective drag bar. This is likely because it was cofounded by a Drag Race Thailand contestant, Miss M Stranger Fox. It’s a small room with a stage and a bar directly under that stage. 

It’s built not unlike a chapel with everything facing the altar. We worshippers were packed shoulder to shoulder to watch the show, stragglers spilling out through a glittery curtain into the street, angling their necks to catch what they could.

My eyes were bloodshot. My legs were cramped. I was deliriously tired. But I wasn’t going to miss church. 

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Earlier that day, after waking up in Sukhumvit, I had the opportunity to walk around and appreciate just how far away I’d traveled. Winter had become summer overnight. I was surrounded by a language I couldn’t read or understand. The Thai script reminded me of lace or extravagant piping on a fancy cake.

I enjoyed not knowing what the words meant. It allowed me to appreciate the letters more as shapes instead of sentences, to see in the Thai alphabet an ornate palace where “thank you” and “I love you” and “goodbye” all had their own golden rooms.

I drank this sentiment eagerly, wondering if perhaps anyone in the world had looked at English, at the letters I knew so well, and found shapes—an architecture, an energy. Sometimes familiarity keeps you from noticing these things. You tend to forget, in the everyday pulse of it all, that your world, too, has traits and features that would stick out to someone for whom it is alien. 

This is what I find so appealing about travel. In seeing a foreign place, you see yourself, foreign. You see that breakfast has been leading a different sort of life on another continent, that certain savory ingredients have found their way into dessert, that places of worship aspire to different heavens with different faces from the cathedral back home, that nothing about your “normal” is necessarily normal at all. 

A successful voyage abroad involves destruction—something is shattered, or something can never be seen the same way again, because I know it can be done so differently. 

Seeing and hearing the Thai language gave me a renewed appreciation for my own language. It’s the language I know, but to someone out there, it is unknown. To someone out there, it might hold the kind of appreciable magic I saw shedding from Thai like butterfly dust.

Being reminded that English isn’t the standard everywhere made it feel special to me again. There’s nothing quite like coming home from a journey to the other side of the planet and returning to your sidewalk, holding your coffee from the cafe you visit every day, passing the tree you know by its knots, and experiencing it again for the very first time. 

“There” has transformed “here” by merely existing, by having been seen at all. 

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The pleasure of drag, or at least the drag I enjoy, is the pleasure of translation. 

It’s great if a queen has a dazzling aesthetic, but that’s not necessarily what I’m looking for at the bar. What I want from a bar queen is for them to take elements of the familiar—a hit song, a famous singer, an infamous dress—and recontextualize it into something more, something different, something exciting or ridiculous or glamorous, or those things at the same time. 

The drag I like is a giddy corruption of the familiar. I like when a performer shows me the unique peaks and valleys they found in a piece of pop culture I thought I knew. An example would be a recent number by a queen called Meatball in Chicago, wherein she dressed up as U.S. Congressman George Santos and lip synced to “This Is Me.”

Meatball is riffing off multiple sentiments at once. Santos, whose mother did not die in 9/11 and who has never been a volleyball star, is known for lying, and was exposed to have done drag in the past (under the name Kitara Ravache) despite being a Republican. If you weren’t aware, drag queens, along with trans and gender nonconforming people, are the enemies du jour of the Republican Party. 

After a mashup of scandalous headlines flash across the screen, Meatball defiantly saunters on stage, the spitting image of Santos (if Santos were wearing platform heels), to raucous applause. 

Here, Santos is sent up as a camp icon, used as a conduit for sensation. In building him up and knocking him down, we find catharsis. Meatball channels him so that we can participate in destroying him, in mocking and laughing at him as he pulls a cheap wig out of an Amazon bag, all while laughing at the absurdity of our political landscape. 

But it’s not mere condemnation of Santos, is it? There is a sort of upside-down celebration of him here, too. When Meatball strips and reveals Kitara beneath Santos’ suit, one does tend to agree—Santos is a phenomenon. There’s something about his whole deal that might make one say, “iconic.” These dueling sentiments are compelling. It's Michelin star drag.

Most interesting to me, though, is what happens to the song “This Is Me” after the performance. I never saw The Greatest Showman. I always assumed it was too saccharine and gooey for me. I need a little vinegar, a little poison. In this number, Meatloaf provides it. “This Is Me” is meant to be a self-empowerment anthem on living authentically. Pairing it with George Santos adds that necessary crunch. 

I was listening to it in the JFK airport waiting for my flight to Bangkok and giggling to myself. I’d found a way into a thing I never thought I’d be able to access. “This Is Me” had been translated into something I could enjoy, the existence of Meatball’s performance changing my context and relationship to this piece of pop culture. 

That, to me, is the thrill of drag. 

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I wasn’t prepared for the caliber of drag on tap at The Stranger. Many of the queens had competed and placed highly in Drag Race Thailand. One of the queens, for example, did a recreation of Rihanna’s 2023 Super Bowl Halftime Show, complete with baby bump and monochromatic red outfit.

My favorite, though, was the Taylor Swift medley. Gisele Rafael came out with nothing but a blonde bob and a microphone and did what she had to do. It began with “Love Story.” That song choice alone let me know we were in for a ride. 

Swift is an international pop star. There’s nothing unusual about a Thai queen performing one of her songs in a Thai drag bar. But there’s something so American about “Love Story.” It conjures a Dallas suburb, a teen girl with a cluttered Myspace page, a dad wearing golf shorts, a strip mall. I say all that lovingly. 

Hearing it at The Stranger was like running into your friend from high school abroad, the one who still posts song lyrics in her Instagram captions and has been married for six years, except that friend was also doing kicks and flips. When “Love Story” transitioned into “Blank Space,” I was euphoric. 

Am I a Swiftie? Not necessarily, though I did listen to Folklore almost daily in July 2020. Watching Gisele Rafael vamp around the stage to “Style,” though, I briefly became a believer. I agreed. “This is one of the best songs, perhaps ever.”

The medley went on, song after song, and the longer it went, the more I loved it. I never wanted it to end. The sheer length of the performance lent it an indulgent, joyful energy, a veritable bacchanalia of Swiftie excess. 

When it finally concluded with “Shake It Off,” a song, I must confess, I do not particularly like, it nevertheless felt triumphant. I never knew that song could hold such peaks and valleys. 

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In our cultural milieu, there is much emphasis placed on just how different we are from one another, how impossible it is to truly understand each other. In some ways, sure. True enough. 

But no matter how different we are from one another, we at the very least hold context for each other. Indeed, the more different another person is, the more context they hold for us, the more they interrupt and intrude upon our carefully manicured sense of self. 

To experience something dramatically different from what you know is to be reminded there is nothing about you that is innately true. This frightens some people. What we pretend to be an unquestionable truth might seem like an eccentric costume, a silly hat we refuse to leave the house without, to someone holding an entirely different, equally unquestionable truth. 

The mere existence of this other person becomes unnerving, because every person we encounter is a mirror of sorts. It can be scary to look in the mirror and see a stranger. It can disrupt the entire project of yourself, when your foundation is built on the flawed idea of “this is how people should be.” 

What can be done?

Attempts have been made throughout history to erase the stranger, to subjugate and torment them, to try to bring them into alignment with how things must be. But no matter how intense the attempt, it remains based on a violent fiction: There’s one correct way to go about being. 

Travel alone doesn’t fix such a mindset, nor does mere exposure to different cultures and ways of life. People are fully capable of bringing their psychological houses with them and not once opening the door. What’s required is a certain kind of bravery, a willingness to not only look at the stranger, but also recognize yourself in them, to see in those startling differences a gift instead of a threat. 

There’s something sacred about surrendering to the stranger, letting the stranger into your house and allowing them to rearrange the things you thought you knew. This is something bolder than connection. It’s transformation. 

That’s when the magic happens, and that’s how a room full of strangers of different nationalities, speaking different languages and holding different opinions on Taylor Swift were briefly conducted by a drag performer into a more cohesive, singular project. 

She certainly earned her tips that night. 

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