«You are born naked, and the rest is drag.» (“You were born naked, the rest is just drag”) said God one day, or RuPaul, television holy mother of drag queens who, since 2009 with her American reality show RuPaul’s Drag Race, has granted high visibility to this art of flamboyant cross-dressing pushed to its professional paroxysm, also giving birth to its little French sister, which was welcomed with great success on France TV Slash last year. That this highlighting can be perceived with optimism, it should not be forgotten that other stories are held, just as powerful and singular, far from the spotlights of this media industry: this is the case of that of Vince, alias Lady Vinsantos, emblematic drag-queen of the New Orleans underground scene to whom the Frenchwoman Coline Albert dedicates her documentary Last Dance.
Thirty years of spangled career on the clock
Vince has never attempted to enter TV contests or belong to anyone except “the woman who kidnapped him and pays his rent” since always, the one he has become: Lady Vinsantos, thirty years of spangled career on the clock. Last Dance follows in the footsteps – embellished with heels – of this drag queen from San Francisco, who settled after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans (real estate prices having plummeted) in order to found her own workshop there , the “New-Orleans Drag Workshop”, where she teaches with tenderness but firmness to young recruits (men and women) how to cross-dress, go on stage, perform and constitute this second skin made of taffeta, powder and attitudes.
Lives affected by the HIV epidemic, homophobia, racism…
Coline Albert films up close the faces and doubts that punctuate the daily life of this queen – strong and at the same time, you will see, quite melodramatic –, going as far as accompanying her and a few former students for her swan song, at Paris, his dream since always. Lives affected by the HIV epidemic, homophobia, misogyny, racism and precariousness emerge. The number embodied by the performer Franky Canga, on the famous Strange Fruit cover of Nina Simone after Billie Holliday (on the lynchings of the black-American community practiced during racial segregation), is a vibrant and difficult example of this: drag is not there to save appearances, but to carry lives.