When I started doing drag Myspace was THE social media brand. Everyone had a Myspace. I knew right off the bat that if I was going to have any sort of a legitimate drag career I’d need to have a separate page for both my drag and mundane personalities. From the get go I knew I didn’t necessarily want all my drag peeps up in my personal business. Now, in the world of Facebook, my feelings haven’t changed. I have two Facebook pages: my personal, non-drag page, and Freddy’s page. I have very few drag people on my personal page, and I like it that way.
When you go into a job interview, you don’t go in saying, “Oh my god, this bitch the other night got all up in my grill and I smacked that ho down and told her to stay the fuck away from my man! Nasty ass broke-down ho bag.” You also don’t (or at least I hope not) fill out a job application that looks like this:… Note: I just sat here for 10 minutes trying to come up with a couple of grammatically incorrect sentences and I just couldn’t do it. But I think you know the ones I mean. The ones that have no punctuation, that look like their keyboard has no vowels, and that use slang that requires an interpreter. These are the types of statuses that will get you hidden from my news feed or, in some cases, deleted.
I don’t care if you’re a show director, promoter, drag queen, drag king, male entertainer, photographer, whatever… If you use Facebook as a form of self-promotion use common sense when it comes to what you post on it. If you were a show director who came across your profile, what would their first impression of you be? Would they see you as someone eloquent and well-spoken? Professional? Or would they see you as a trash-talking, drama-starting hood rat? Someone who speaks in slang and foul language? What you post in public forums like Facebook and Twitter can speak volumes about who you are as a person and a professional. Granted, we’re all human. We all have those days where things just don’t go the way we want. We all have those people who rub us the wrong way. And it all affects us. But how we choose to deal with it in public, where everyone can see, is what defines us as a professional.
Everyone has their opinions, professional and personal, about people in the drag world. But the second you let your verbal or written diarrhea spill over into a place where everyone can see it, you only hurt yourself and your reputation; not the person you’re bitching about. Remember that drag is a job, just like any other job. Yes, we work in bars, but we still need to be professional. Bar owners, promoters, show directors, other entertainers are all potential employers.
Remember that the next time you decide to call that skanky-ass-ho out on your status.