Photography by Elizabeth Jochum
A crowd gathers beneath the Damoclean stiletto hanging above the dance floor at Attitudes nightclub in The Grove. Among those in attendance: a cluster of women dressed in American Eagle Outfitters, drag queens in platform shoes, indie-festival rats, sorority girls, and an old vampire in a three-piece suit who hovers near the women’s restroom. They wear plaid, argyle, leather, trench coats, V-neck T-shirts, and St. Louis Blues jerseys. Some stand in groups, while others appear to have come alone.
The club is hosting its weekly Show Us Some Attitude Variety Night, but the crowd isn’t here to scope out new talent. It’s here to see Paris Versace Amor.
The mirrored room goes dark as speakers blare the opening synth drone of Beyoncé’s “I Care.” From the darkness comes a flash of red wig, not unlike a flame. Blue spotlights suddenly rise, throwing light on fishnet legs. A strange sense of shock falls over the audience as Paris thrashes to the beat’s syncopated claps. She appears to be in great agony, tortured, inconsolable.
The world of the stage is breached only when a transfixed audience member drifts stageside. One lanky, drunken kid, who’s been swaying and twisting all evening, like a willow in the breeze, puts a $1 bill in his mouth and finds his way to the base of center stage. Paris ignores him for a full 30 seconds, leaving him to nearly trip over his own feet. She finally reaches down and pulls the wet bill from his teeth, then gives him a light shove backward, sending him slowly tumbling back into darkness.
*****
What can be said about Paris that hasn’t already been said about Mozart, Flaubert, or El Greco—besides, perhaps, that she is less camp? Her story is the narrative we attach to every great artist: the troubled early years, the discovery of art, the apprenticeship, the defiant risk, the ensuing success. Hers is a winking twist on the classic underdog story.
Paris didn’t have a childhood. Her life began in medias res as Pierre Smith. She grew up under Cinderellic duress, tirelessly carrying out chores for her grandfather, who worked as a property manager and chef in East St. Louis, Illinois, during the early ’90s. “Man work,” she clarifies, describing the backbreaking labor. “I’m talking about helping him build houses.”
She’s of two minds about her grandfather, who lashed out at his employees but fawned over Pierre, who in turn clung to him, taking care of him until his death two years ago. She pauses when considering her grandfather’s legacy. “He was a real mean man, real aggressive,” she says. “But he treated me like royalty.”
There wasn’t much for a kid to do in East St. Louis. For Pierre, there were only dance workshops at the Katherine Dunham Centers for Arts and Humanities, which prolonged the time until he had to face his grandfather. The hours stacked up: “It was like dance dance dance dance dance.”
Salvation came at age 15, when a drag-inclined friend named LaMont (who performed as Sharissa Sanchez Steele) brought Pierre to Faces on Fourth Street, the now-defunct Collinsville Avenue party mecca that for 30 years drew all manner of self-professed outcasts to the East Side. At that point, Sharissa was the only person who could relate to Pierre, then a gawky, theater-loving, pansexual boy. She offered Pierre the simplest and truest of truisms: Nothing shuts up haters like success.
“When you get onstage, you kill it,” she told him. “Then, they can’t say nothing else.”
*****
Several weeks after the show at Attitudes, a half-dozen happy-hour pa-trons—mostly white men in their forties—sit in the Grey Fox Pub, a dusty bar and cabaret in Tower Grove South. They’re glued to Steel Magnolias, quoting Sally Field and making their voices high and Southern. They’re killing time, waiting for Paris.
There’s something ghostly, ungraspable about her. We played phone tag for weeks before settling on a time to meet, her typically fast responses always slowing just as I’d propose a time and place. Yet she appears to reveal it all for her audience. She’s scantily clad onstage and hyperconfessional online. (On Facebook, she begins one day by posting a picture in the park with her fiancée, Shannan. That afternoon, Paris writes an update, citing “that moment when you feel like you’re floatin and never comin down.” That night, she notes that life is “so f—king bittersweet.” Less than an hour later, she writes, “How dare you take my kindness for weakness!? Thee who built the empire can also tare [sic] it down! Enjoy it all now baby, cause your royalty days are over. I’m nice so I’ll bleed you dry slowly for surely.”)
I join Paris in her dressing room above the bar at the Grey Fox. The room is either shabbily glamorous or glamorously shabby. As I sit down, a poster peels off the wall. Another poster profiles various types of marijuana. A round mirror looms over a desk of foundation, eyeliner, lipstick, and nail polish. Whatever Paris is channeling onstage has let her alone for the time being; she is blasé as she applies a chestnut-toned foundation and explains her outfits.
“I don’t wear pads like all the other drag queens do,” she says.
*****
Pierre walked his first amateur drag contest at age 17. His brief apprenticeship began and ended that Wednesday, when he placed first. His lanky body and dance experience gave him a technical edge, and a nascent charisma began to emerge. A week later, he walked the same contest and won again. This carried on for weeks, until Wednesdays became synonymous with victory.
He so embarrassed his competitors that Siren, who co-founded GlitterBomb Productions and resembles Amy Winehouse in neon, had to intervene. “Bitch, you can’t do this amateur contest no more,” she said. “I’ll give you a booking.”
Pierre began walking various balls as per the strict rules of conventional drag. Traditionally, a ball will feature competitors walking in any number of regulated categories, some emphasizing dancing and voguing. Others are geared toward passing as a number of “types”: student, executive, etc. Pierre took to walking and winning in the categories of Drag Realness (for convincingly portraying a woman) and Drag Performance (for dancing and voguing as a woman).
Soon, Khahnflict House, a preexisting confederacy of walkers, adopted him. An improvised family of sorts, the house provided personal and artistic stability with the comforting hierarchical relationships of “parents” and “children.” It was around this time, under the tutelage of “an old, old drag king” who liked the je ne sais quoi of his name, that Pierre became Paris.
Her middle name came from another performer, the only true artistic mentor Paris ever had. Krista Versace was an old-school queen from the high-camp tradition—big hair, eye makeup, heavy pageantry—who wanted one thing: to show off her body. She wore increasingly revealing outfits that eschewed the long, glittery dresses of fellow house members. The decision made waves, but it was a change that Paris could support. “When she did that, I was like, ‘Wow,’” Paris says. “‘I’m gonna be myself.’”
Being oneself can be a complicated concept in the drag arena, where mimicry is part and parcel of the game. To be oneself is to close the gap between on- and offstage personas. Today, Paris has no interest in the passing motifs of formal categories like Drag Realness. Onstage, she wants you to know exactly who she is.
Who she is, however, is a slippery matter, a persona cultivated in reaction to precisely who she isn’t.
*****
Paris frequently invokes an unattributed they. “Here in St. Louis, it’s really hard trying to make it with a special talent that you feel like you have—they don’t want to accept it.” “They so close-minded.” “They always want you to kiss they ass, throw them royalty.” More often than not, Paris has a specific group in mind: other drag queens—specifically, traditional ball-walking drag queens of the high-camp variety, the very queens who rejected Paris when she started to break away.
By 2011, she’d had enough. Paris chafed against drag’s most basic tenet: impersonation. She wanted to discard the character, show skin, paint her natural nails, make her own costumes. She wanted to live as a male named Paris Amor who danced each week in skirts and wigs as Paris Amor.
It seems to be Paris’ very Parisness—her distaste for imitation—that keeps audiences coming back. What she expresses is not the dramatized woe of a character but a very real fragility. Onstage, she becomes pain incarnate, imbuing the Rihanna and Beyoncé tracks she favors with a singular suffering that defies empathy and can only be observed from a distance. How can anyone in the ineffectual position of club-going audience member understand a pain expressed so viscerally? We come to The Grove with the shallow goal of being entertained. Then there’s Paris, commanding the room, reminding us that she suffers for her art. She gives us what we can’t admit we want on a Saturday night: an emotional experience.
Today, Paris is mother of the House of Amor, a crew she built herself, lending emotional support, professional advice, and her name to a network of like-minded creative outcasts. The group hosts a weekly newcomer show at the Grey Fox. Paris performs in drag every other Thursday, every other Friday, every other Saturday, and every Sunday, crossing the Mississippi River on her way to and from every show. During the day, she choreographs and teaches dance with the Afriky Lolo West African dance company in East St. Louis. The rest of the time, she’s planning shows, sewing outfits, booking appearances for her “children.” There is no such thing as leisure time.
The routine is taking its toll. She says she feels “like an old man, for real.” She thinks 30 would be a good age to retire from drag shows.
*****
In late February, Paris turned 26. To mark the occasion, the Grey Fox hosted a drag show. But at 9:30 p.m., the designated showtime, Paris was nowhere to be seen. And at 10 p.m., when the event kicked off, only a few barflies hung around.
Where was everybody?
In the backroom cabaret, Paris had performed to a familiar Rihanna track for drag friends Mikayla Monet and ButterScotch, as well as DJ Scooby, a drag bandleader. Of the other nine people in the audience, roughly half were fellow performers on the night’s bill.
Paris didn’t seem to care. It was her birthday, after all, and it was still early.
