Of Monsters and Magic

Notes from the Strip Club on Chappell Roan and Scary Aesthetics

I heard you like magic
I've got a wand and a rabbit

—Chappell Roan, "Red Wine Supernova"

From the high-top tables between the bar and stage seating, I take a beat to scan the room. Towering over six feet tall in nude patent Pleaser boots, I roll amber perfume onto my wrists, neck, and pronounced sternum. Between a protruding breastbone exaggerating my cleavage, and the curve of my rotational scoliosis sticking my butt out for me, my stripper gait is on point—the silver lining, I joke, to my skeleton’s phantom pain. The inoffensive yet strong scent of musk gives me a headache in confined spaces; so perfume is my last step, after carefully applying the same shade of matte red lipstick I’ve been wearing for two decades.

In my rush to clock in I realize I walked right past the daytime DJ, Taylor, who is hanging out after his shift. Unlike my previous club—not to mention my last academic job, which I might describe as a dumpster fire hellscape on a good day—people like being here. The least aggressively heterosexual man I’ve ever met at a strip club, Taylor smiles his warm, endearingly goofy smile when I greet him with a hug. He seems to genuinely care about me, something I don’t take for granted.

I also realize I blew by two dancers who, during my last shift, invited me to hustle with them. At this club, showgirls (as we’re called in California) often work in teams. They are both tall, slender, white, and in their early twenties, fitting the type most favored at the club: the OC Barbie. They have Britney Spears abs, long straight hair, petite noses, big eyes, and pouty lips. The night I met them they flanked a man who had just requested a thousand dollars in ones from the bartender, the brunette on one side, the blonde on the other. When he lunged at me as I walked past and started rambling, I suggested all three of us get a dance. The rest is history. I was flattered to complete the Charlie’s Angels lineup, as another dancer described us: I’m the redhead, albeit offbeat, older, and heavily tattooed.

My midlife crisis color change—from my tried and true bluish black to a fiery ginger my hairdresser randomly suggested—sure is paying off, I think, hoping I hadn’t accidentally snubbed them in my daily race against the clock. As I’m debating whether to go say hi or approach a man who just took a seat at the bar, I get called to the stage. At the DJ booth I apply Dry Hands, clapping my palms together, then up and down my inner thighs, while selecting my songs. Portishead is not the “vibe,” I am told, so I choose the most upbeat songs I know by the Weeknd and Two Feet.

Swaying to the intro of “I Feel Like I’m Drowning,” I suggestively wipe down the pole, take a few steps to toss the rag toward the edge of the stage, and saunter back to perform one of my favorite tricks. I am practiced in air walking with slow, elongated lines, while showing off upper body strength as two bracketed arms sustain the body’s parallel position to the pole. From here, I improvise, forcing myself to stare seductively into the crowd, locking eyes with customers while calculating, always calculating, my next move.

***

I sit with a couple near the stage that tipped me generously—the large stack of ones neatly resting on their table an unambiguous signal that they are here to spend money. Within minutes the perfectly manicured woman tells me she is 44 and that she and her boyfriend are getting divorced from her boyfriend’s wife, who has developed a coke problem. Then she flashes her pierced nipples on ultra high round implants. She occasionally stuffs ones into my sequined white bikini top as we’re talking. Later, in the restroom, she will show me, unprompted, her clitoral hood piercing. Something about strip clubs inspires women to get all Girls Gone Wild in front of dancers. “Nice!” I will respond, nonplussed. Solidarity in nudity, I guess.

The next dancer goes on stage. Her abdomen looks like a musculoskeletal system diagram in a a med school textbook. She turns around to reveal the most unnatural looking Brazilian butt lift I have ever seen, but I try to remain neutral as the woman bemoans how BBLs look super fake on thin frames.

“I try not to judge,” I say. I am judging.

“I don’t believe that! Everyone judges, it’s how we survive!” She’s not wrong. I attempt to interject that I try not to judge plastic surgery, specifically, considering the sea of silicone we’re in, platitudes like “live and let live” and “your body, your choice” on deck. But she has been waiting for this moment, and she’s speaking a little too loud, and now cave people are involved, so I let her play Darwin.

The dancer who inspired this woman’s TED Talk approaches our table, introducing herself to the couple but not acknowledging me. She avoids eye contact like you would if you ran into your ex in a 7-Eleven aisle, bright pink Pepto Bismol in hand. She strategically turns her seat to face the couple as though I weren’t even there.

Now I am tempted to share my unsolicited opinions on butt augmentation, that to me it looks like someone suctioned two giant toilet plungers to her buttocks and yanked away, leaving a circular outline on the circumference of each cheek. Super rude, I know, but I’m seething. Dancer courtesy dictates that if you are going to sit with another dancer, who has quite literally been spending her time courting a customer, you not only acknowledge her presence, you ask her permission. I want to tell her off but instead get up abruptly without saying goodbye.

I make a beeline for a nearby table, relieved, as my gaydar rarely comes in handy here. The group looks way younger than me, but not so young I could be their mom. Eyes dazed, they laugh and banter in slow motion while laboriously sipping tequila pineapples through little black straws. Half of them wear sunglasses, making their cannabis consumption pretty obvious if it wasn’t already. I sit down, learn their names, and assess with whom I’m going to flirt—the birthday girl, of course. She is pretty, bashful, and sweet, with wispy lashes and an intricate black and grey floral tattoo wrapping around her shoulder. Almost immediately after I sit down, the DJ announces the most popular dance deal: six songs for $100 in VIP, which offers the illusion of privacy with the space partitioned into separate booths, black upholstery partially illuminated by red lights.

“Anyone interested in the Costco special?” I nod toward the giant TV screens behind the stage, flashing $100 for six dances, as opposed to the usual four. People love a deal, and I know this because I personally refuse to buy anything at full price. I remember my Gigi taking me discount shopping when I was a kid. She taught me the art of couponing and of inspecting items for flaws, running my eyes along the seams of a shirt or scanning housewares at Tuesday Morning for scratches. My father, who grew up the youngest of four in Little Rock, Arkansas, liked to remind my sister and me that we were lucky to have any food on our plates—satiation a privilege the absence of which marked his childhood, marked him. Baked beans with chopped up vegetarian hot dogs and a bit of Texas smoke might as well have been caviar. But following in my father’s footsteps, I stopped eating meat when I was eight years old, so I wouldn’t know.

The most red-eyed lesbian keeps slapping her thigh at my Costco special joke while the birthday girl decides sure, why not. We stand up, strutting past the stage hand in hand. Soon after a more masc queer in the group, Alex, follows suit.

Once we all return to the table, Alex leans toward me and whispers, “I don’t think that dancer is actually a lesbian. She told me so but kept bouncing on me like I have a dick.”

“Well,” I conspire, “there’s one foolproof way to know if she is: was her knee all up in your crotch?” I make exaggerated circular motions with my leg. We cackle. Then they ask if a dancer named Honey works at the club. I am asking them to describe her when a gorgeous dancer with big lips and bigger boobs starts slowly shaking her ass in diagonal motions on stage.

“Oh wait, that might be her… but she had little paw print tattoos…”

“Like Eve?”

“Who?” I wave my hand, dismissing the pop culture reference that blows my cover as part of their peer group. Alex continues studying the dancer. “Uh… nope, not her.”

Alex pauses, opens their mouth to speak, stops again, then confesses in a hushed tone, “You know, with all the surgeries, sometimes it’s hard to tell people apart.”

***

The night before, a very drunk, very rich man leaning on another less drunk, less rich man spotted me between dances and exclaimed to his human arm rest, “Wow! She’s like… scary hot.” I had spent my evening going back and forth from a bottle service section to the main dance room, entertaining a large group of Swedish businessmen. They mostly spoke Swedish, but from how they kept gesticulating I could discern their fondness for breasts. I told them as much, joining the conversation to weigh in on the unfolding boob situation.

“Are you into girls?” the man I sat next to asked, amid all the tit talk.

“Yes.”

“Do you have to masturbate when you get home?”

“Yes.” Like I’m telling him I shovel down whatever’s in my fridge, shower off man stench, and get stoned, not in that order.

“Satisfier?”

“What the hell, how did you know?” I ask, truly flabbergasted.

“You must be careful,” he warns in his very serious Swedish accent, “there are reports in Sweden about how they cause nerve damage.”

“Is this the kind of stuff on your evening news?” There is an unfolding clit situation now, too.

***

I tell a man slumped over in a chair at a low-top table with two animated friends that another customer called me “scary hot.” He replies, deadpan, “Cool. I only date women who I think might stab me.”

I sit on the chair backwards, my butt to my feet, intentionally showing off my lats. “Good for punching,” he comments, bored, unimpressed. I thank my lucky stars for my pronounced sternum, because my flirting game is questionable. Once, at a college orientation mixer, a dude ghosted me in the flesh, mid-conversation, by slowly backing away to physically remove his body from my eyesight. I thought it was badass that once during a lacrosse game I unknowingly splattered blood over the entire defense’s white uniforms. But the guy, apparently, did not. It wasn’t my fault I had been too busy scoring a goal to notice the player guarding me had busted my knuckle open.

Bored guy’s friend gestures wildly at her cell phone screen on display.

“Your ex is coming here, NOW!”

I politely excuse myself.

***

I spot a guy wearing an expensive watch and large purple-tinted hipster glasses. “They’re prescription,” he feels compelled to tell me as I sit down.

“Mine too,” I shake his hand, introduce myself. I’m not wearing glasses and he doesn’t want a dance, but the show must go on. He offers me $100. I accept. We talk. He orders drinks. He comments on the bartender’s ass, feels the need to follow it with “her face is just okay.” I punch his shoulder, hard. I am reminded of a time in Virginia I punched a customer’s shoulder so hard that his chair rolled away from the table with force.

“Ruuuuude! And not true! You better not say that about her or anyone, including me!” I sound like a teenager, but I don’t care. He shrugs, unfazed, examining my face. “No, you’re beautiful.” He says this as if it’s an objective fact and he is the arbiter of all facts.

“I don’t know if you’re going to take this as a compliment, but I think you look like Lady Gaga. I think she’s beautiful, very striking.” He sort of waves his fingers in front of my face as if he were salting a pot of water.

“Something about the facial structure.” Then his eyes wander to the ace of pentacles tarot card tattoo below my right collarbone. Naturally, he asks if I worship the devil.

“Hell no! I have enough problems as is, I don’t have time to be messing with the devil.”

The bartender, the one who is beautiful inside and out and all over, overhears my joke, and giggles. “This is why I love you,” she says. I love her, too.

***

Weirdly, purple glasses guy is not the first person to tell me I look like Lady Gaga, but I didn’t tell him that. Once a tailor who ruined my favorite pair of grandpa flannel pants told me the same thing. I wanted the waist to be taken in to sit above my belly button but she somehow gave me severe camel toe. If anything was going to damage my clit, it was this pair of pants, but I appreciate the clitoral concern of the Swedes. So I sold the pants, kept the compliment. It reminded me of how my first serious girlfriend called me her Lady Gaga.

When we started dating in 2011, my girlfriend’s best friend, I was told, saw my picture and said, “she looks like trouble.” I was in my black skinny tie era—gazing into the camera through hipster LA gay fringe—feeling very queer, a little androgynous.

Soon after, we drove up the Pacific Coast Highway in my periwinkle blue ‘96 Pontiac Sunfire, blasting the queer soundtrack we fell in love to—pop hits by Madonna and Rihanna and Lady Gaga.¹ This music—while a departure from my usual depressive lesbians with instruments—elicits nostalgia for the days of dirty dancing until I could taste salt on my lips, on her lips, thigh to thigh drenched like dolphins. The nights of making out in the middle of the street outside the gay bar I got gayer at, Wildcat Lounge, which we called the Shitty Kitty. In other words, the time in my life when queerness contained the utopian potentialities about which José Esteban Muñoz famously wrote, a hopeful affective rebuttal to the anti-relational turn of queer studies, exemplified by theorists like Lee Edelman and Leo Bersani, the kind of white men, I imagine, who reminded lesbians that their presence at the gay bar was to remain peripheral, despite so many of our own closing down.²

We sang along until our voices sounded scratchy, all the way to San Francisco, where we were met with homophobia in the Mission District of all places. But we still danced that night, feeling the vibration of heavy bass in our chests, her white collared shirt stained with my red lipstick. The man who belligerently chased us, screaming, needed to know, “Who has the dick?” He wouldn’t have understood we both did.

In the immortal words of my DJ friend: “Why are men. That’s the whole sentence.”³

***

One of the psychological difficulties of stripping is having to assess your appearance through the male gaze. Instagram models are the bellwether, or one of those generically hot bikini-clad women advertising beer on faded posters you see displayed in dusty convenience stores on road trips. At least in the bizarre world of this industry, I have been called niche hot, which is a nice way of saying that people either think I’m very ugly, or—if I’m lucky—very beautiful. What I lack in confidence I make up for in boldness.

When my ex-boyfriend implied I wasn’t pretty enough to be a stripper, one part of me believed him, and another wanted to prove him wrong. It was only after his mounting resentment exploded into an ultimatum that I stopped blaming myself for his passive-aggressive disdain, his withholding of affection. I was the target of his anger, but now I understood the source wasn’t me as a person but how I chose to support myself after eight painstaking years on the job market trying to leave a dysfunctional department that had become an unimaginably hostile work environment. Privately, and not unrelated to those eight failed years, I was absolutely terrified I wouldn’t make it as a stripper, that I would be laughed at, that it would do irreversible damage to my self-esteem. But I shook my stubborn ass on that stage anyway. I was unsure about the hand I was dealt but I bet on myself. Only in retrospect can I see that choice as a turning point, an escape route from a life that made me feel small.

Still, I have to remind myself, more often than I’d like to admit, that I have never aspired to conventional beauty by club standards. Take, for instance, the Kardashian look of Jessica Vestal on Love is Blind Season Six. I haven’t closed any airways, and frankly, I don’t give a flying fuck about the Kardashians. Outside of this industry, I wouldn’t think to measure my appearance by that yardstick. But one too many men turn you down for a Disney princess on a day you’re worried about making quota, and you start wondering why you preferred Maleficent. I need an amulet for those days. So “scary hot” is my new favorite customer comment, which I take as a compliment despite—no, because of—the trepidation in his voice. It reminds me of my nickname in high school, Violent Femme. I like the implied threat. An edge of danger.

***

A little over a year ago, I went to a gay bar in Richmond with my work wife who would abandon me months later in Los Angeles. I missed the warning signs, all evident that evening. First of all, without asking how I felt about being a third wheel, she invited her boyfriend to our girl’s night out at the gay bar. Worse yet, he is the kind of dude who proclaims to be feminist before getting a little too drunk and bragging about the size of his dick. The kind of dude who speaks over your experiences of sexual harassment to bemoan how aggressive gay men are in the restaurant industry. Last but not least, my then wifey mocked the music, hating on how us gays love a throwback. She prefers EDM. She also prefers penises, she told me one night, after we fucked, after we moved across the country together, moved in together. Our incompatibility was there all along. It was in the music.

***

The soundscapes and aesthetics of two maximalist spaces punctuating my desires, gay bars and strip clubs, shape my experience of Chappell Roan. For example, "Red Wine Supernova" celebrates the intoxicating effects of desire despite its risks of heartbreak, juxtaposing the latter with cheeky references to leaving the gay bar with a new lover. She switches tenses between verse and chorus, enmeshing the time of infatuation and the inevitable deflation of dashed hopes. The pre-chorus opines the oversights that enable this intoxication: “I just wanna get to know ya/ Guess I didn't quite think it through… Fell in love with the thought of you/ Now I'm choked up, face down, burnt out.” Samesies.

But true to my lesbian folk leanings, I first encountered Chappell Roan’s music via her less electronic NPR Tiny Desk Concert. Stripped down and accompanied by a badass queer band of sexy nonbinary and femme musicians, her vocals soar with palpable emotion. Her sound recalls Kate Bush in terms of her mystical vibrato and bright timbre, her bold leaps of register, and instrumentally, in the 80s scream and synth synced with the club tempo. Her artistry incorporates the best of pop superstars, from the rock opera phenomenon of Lady Gaga, the Mother Monster herself, to the brat era ballads of Olivia Rodrigo. Roan’s punchy mix belt reminds me a little of Rodrigo’s melodic yell in the all too relatable “love is embarrassing.” The sounds not only of teen angst but also of adult anger.

Academic articles will no doubt be written on Roan’s yodel, that punctuating crescendo into a break, her tender falsetto, what it means to this unapologetically apocalyptic epoch. But what makes her so incredibly special, in a jarring day and age where social media spotlights talented toddlers singing with the vocal range of Mariah Carey, while nepo babies grace sold-out stadiums, is that she pays homage to the icons before her while leaning into what makes her singularly and irreducibly her.

Her songs physically transport me to pre-pandemic dancing at the gay bar where Missy Elliott’s “Work It” and Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own” are on constant rotation. Where the heat emanating from your dance partner mixed with the cool condensation on your watered down whiskey registers a pleasure brimming with new possibilities. That “I think I’m in love again” shiver. For me that is the experience of listening to Chappell Roan’s debut album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, as an event.

In the enchanting texture, in the vocal flips with a hint of nasality, in the deep resonant mixed voice belting, there is a gravity and grit that underlies every word of her lyrical delivery. Who doesn’t love the breathy voice of a hot girl, predictable and pretty. But I’ll take the big brassy sound of Chappell Roan—sultry and sad and sarcastic—over that any day. Pretty and hot and righteously pissed off. And decidedly not pretty, too.

Her stage presence and drag persona is a little bit gothic, and a little bit rock 'n roll. In the nods to burlesque and the working-class femme aesthetics of her youth, she also exudes stripper vibes. On her style inspiration, she tells Jimmy Fallon:

“My stylist, Genesis Webb and I, we pull from drag, we pull from horror movies, we pull from burlesque, we pull from theater… I love looking pretty and scary… or like pretty and tacky, or just not pretty, I love that too.”

Chappell Roan is the artist’s drag persona, and her aesthetic, like her sound, sparkle with a playfully sardonic sincerity, down to the bedazzled flip phone. Yet, some folks have rehashed essentialist notions of gender in debating a tired question that would make the Judy B fan club of the ‘90s cringe: Can a woman be a drag queen? Not to put too fine a point on it but for cis men to gatekeep whether women and femmes can do drag risks reinforcing binary ideas about gender that are both misogynistic and transphobic. Meanwhile, she honors—not erases—the radical histories of drag and actively gives local queens a platform at her shows. At its best, drag disrupts rather than doubles down on gender norms.

Unruly women and drag queens have a long history of association, of course. When Lady Gaga skyrocketed to stardom, straight people conflated performance with identity to speculate on her gender, apparently in question, asking whether she was just adored by drag queens the world over, or perhaps one herself. The uncanny valley of heterosexual desire, the intrusion of a metaphysical monster, the horror of a hotness that is pretty and scary and not pretty, too—leading the confused straights to throw up their hands, plummeting into the raging depths of existential despair.

You don’t have to read Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction to know that elites prize high art above popular cultural production, often caricatured as manufactured drivel for the masses, devoid of substance. Chappell Roan not only embraces the aesthetic judgments such classed distinctions exclude—the tacky, the gaudy, the feral—of them she makes magic. Of course, these judgments are racialized and sexualized as well as classed. The modern liberal subject coheres in contrast to the production of an Other outside the bounds of civilization: the so-called savage, the less than human, the nonperson, the sexual deviant who threatens the nation’s reproduction of itself.

That is to say, what some embrace others have thrust upon them. Even as a relatively clueless teenager living in Salt Lake City, it never sat right with me that Mel B, the only Black woman in the Spice Girls, was nicknamed Scary Spice. I didn’t know as much as I do now about the long durée of colonialism but the racism of that moniker was not lost on me.

While writing this piece I had to stop myself from going down a daylong Spice Girls research rabbit hole, but what I gathered from a cursory internet search is this: unsurprisingly, women of color have critiqued her for bearing the name given its undeniable connection to racist stereotypes, from colonialist logics to policing Black women’s affect. Indeed, the sidestepping is strange. At the same time, Mel B has spoken out against both structural racism and the interpersonal racism she experienced as the tokenized Black woman in this iconic girl group. Please indulge me in pure speculation given my avoidance of the aforementioned rabbit hole, but what if, perhaps—even though the stakes for her were and are high—Scary Spice welcomed the moniker as a foundational refusal to see herself through the spiritual void of the white gaze and the respectability politics it demands?

In bringing up Mel B, I do not wish to analogize what are intersecting and thus irreducible identity categories, but to point out, possibly, a shared orientation to power. Chappell Roan spurns an assimilationist politic, made manifest when she turned down an invitation to perform at the White House. At the 2024 Gov Ball in New York City, she appeared in Lady Liberty drag, spelling out its meaning: "That means freedom in trans rights, that means freedom in women's rights... and it especially means freedom for all oppressed people in occupied territories." Don’t be misled by the Vintage Americana visual references, either, which I would argue are a nod to her Midwest working-class upbringing rather than an uncritical display of patriotism. She even pissed off the single-issue gay contingent, who supports the administration’s homonationalism and remains unclear on why she would turn down poor little old Biden despite massive protests that have swept the nation.⁴

To be sure, these pop artists certainly benefit in different ways and degrees from normative beauty standards. While I am obviously not a pop icon, I recognize that I do, too. And I don’t mean to suggest they or anyone is above falling prey to the insecurities those standards can exact on a person, especially when existing in the public eye and being subjected to its unsolicited, often cruel scrutiny. Everyone deserves the space to be messy, feel insecure, make mistakes, and embody contradictions. I’m not interested in redefining and, in so doing, reifying normative beauty standards. And in the strip club there is no escaping them. But, like many artists before her—from Cindy Sherman to the writers examined in Darieck Scott’s Extravagant Abjection—Chappell Roan embraces the abject, the excluded, the detritus of modernity. Empire’s ghosts strike back.

What I’m describing is not so much an appearance as an attitude—a hostility to the social warrant to “tame it down,” as the saying goes. It’s no coincidence that etymologically to tame means ‘to civilize’ but also ‘to break the spirit of.’ My point here is that scary aesthetics offer a bulwark against bullshit beauty standards and the structural violences they serve, an alternate route and relationship to ourselves in spite of them. This is the threat of Chappell Roan, like Gaga before her: she beautifully models a high femme identity not constructed for the male gaze. A fierce femmeness and gorgeous girliness that can be soft as well as hard, that titillates and terrifies straight white middle-class Christian America and its homonationalist allies.

Chappell Roan’s music is an anthem for and of monsters and magic, for all us witches and bitches and sluts and queers, brimming with unruly desires and intense affects; a disruptive presence amid an unlivable present. In the music I hear an incantation for queer longing, for leaning into possibility. I for one needed a reminder that both outside and inside the strip club—dripping with rhinestones and pink latex, funneling my awkward body into the narrow bottleneck of men’s desire—there is a Violent Femme in me, and she is a little scary, and I wouldn’t want her any other way.

***

1. More on this soundtrack next week.

2. See Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia, Edelman’s No Future, and Bersani’s Is the Rectum a Grave?

3. I’m writing another piece on divorce memoirs and heteropessimism, but suffice to say we are not at the point of putting patriarchy in scare quotes. There is an important distinction, which I feel is being missed in some of the discourse, between individual experiences, interpersonal relational complexity, and institutional structures upholding intersecting forms of oppression. Note how the person making the joke about men is, in this case, a man. Personalizing a critique of power misses the point.

4. See Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages.