A pair of drag queens. Photo: By Gunnar Ridderstrom on Unsplash.
Heaven sent: Mark Russ has a lesson from the drag show
‘The queens and kings create joyous spaces of inclusion and affirmation.’
I love a drag show. I’ve had a drag queen shower me with glitter in a club, witnessed a bizarre strip tease involving frankfurters and brown sauce, and even splashed around at a drag-hosted pool party. At their best, drag shows give me a taste of heaven. The queens and kings create joyous spaces of inclusion and affirmation in a world hostile to queer life. When I’m in the light of a glitter-ball singing along to Shirley Bassey, I feel a wholeness I wish would last forever. I find it easier to imagine heaven as a gay bar than the usual clouds and harps.
A more traditional image of heaven is a garden. Early Christians decorated their church buildings to resemble an Eden-like Paradise. Mosaics of flowing rivers, lush vegetation and starry skies created a heavenly-earthly space, a vision of creation renewed. To enter this richly decorated building was to enter a different realm. To worship was to participate in the worship of heaven.
Our Quaker ancestors may have preferred plainer worship environments, but they held on to the idea that worship gives us a taste of the heavenly. In the Book of Revelation, George Fox read that silence is a quality of heaven (Rev 8.1). He believed silent worship pointed to a heavenly reality. We might say that sinking down into a waiting, worshipful silence is to join in with the praise of ‘every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea’ (Rev 5.13).
Why doesn’t our worship always feel like this? One reason might be that we sometimes treat worship like a tool. We can think of it as a means to an end, a technique which makes us better people and energises us to take action for worthy causes. I think worship can do these things, but they aren’t worship’s ultimate end. If worship is a participation in heaven, then it can’t have a purpose. Heavenly worship is purpose-less.
God doesn’t need our praise. God doesn’t have an ego to be massaged. That’s why it’s wrong to think of worship in terms of bowing and scraping. If God is the God of the living (Matt 22.32) then worshipping this God means affirming the goodness of life. We live in a broken world, but the work of repair isn’t why we exist. Worship might improve us, but it is first and foremost a recognition that we are ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’. We exist because God loves life, loves us, and worship is a resting in that love.
I taste heaven at a drag show because that’s where I feel fully alive. The reason I yearn to worship God, whether at a gay bar or in a Meeting for Worship, is because I need to stay close to life’s source. I need saving, not from fiery punishment in the afterlife, but from the grip of the hells we’ve created in this world. I’m entangled in systems of sin that threaten to crush my spirit and turn my heart to ice. In worship I tarry with the Spirit of Life. I remember that I’m Love’s creature when the grey world outside tries to convince me otherwise. This is why we can worship in silence. We can sit together without words, without trying to justify our existence, held in Love’s embrace.
Comments
Mark Russ deserves credit for boldly reimagining heaven for the readers of the Friend. Gone are silence, humility, and attentiveness to God. In their place: glitter, frankfurters, and men performing exaggerated caricatures of womanhood. At last, a theology that knows its audience.
The opening paragraph helpfully establishes that femininity is most authentically expressed not by women, but by men parodying its cruellest stereotypes—sexualised, excessive, and safely detached from female reality. This, we are told, is “affirmation”. One can only admire the efficiency with which centuries of women’s experience are reduced to wigs and heels and declared spiritually enlightening.
The closing return to drag completes the miracle. After a brief, distracting interlude on Quaker worship, we are reminded that salvation lies in feeling “fully alive,” preferably while watching womanhood performed as camp entertainment. That some women experience this as misogyny is, of course, a small price to pay for inclusion.
Heaven, it turns out, is not a place where justice and humility reign, but a stage where patriarchy survives by putting on sequins and calling itself liberation.
By Ol Rappaport on 15th January 2026 - 15:59
I love Mark’s vision and warmth. As a woman I have never felt that drag is womanhood performed as camp entertainment. As children we dress up and prance around as we wish before anyone tells us what a man or woman is supposed to be. As a woman I can dress up and cavort as I wish. Why should men be deprived of this? It’s fun. And really rather heavenly!
By Joanna Hills on 15th January 2026 - 17:14
I’ve seen drag that’s misogynistic and also drag that isn’t - that liberates people from socially constrained gender roles. I can understand why it might be freeing. I think people who are worried about the mention of drag performances are so caught up in their anxieties about what drag might be that they miss the point of Mark Russ’s article. I take this to be that worship, however and wherever it takes place, is about finding oneself whole - and that it can and perhaps should include experiences of joyous celebration. These experiences don’t only happen in the Meetinghouse or in moments of quiet contemplation; celebratory worship can also take place in noisy crowds. We all have different paths to the divine and I sometimes worry that the value we rightly place on silence as a way can become a worship of silence which ignores other ways including our own experiences and opportunities to draw close to the divine in our crowded lives.
By kazbel on 17th January 2026 - 11:36
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