‘America Is Queer’ and Drag Icon Taylor Mac Is Preaching the Gospel
As the clock struck noon on Saturday, October 8th, 2016, Taylor Mac walked on to the stage of St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. The band of almost two-dozen musicians and backup singers led by musical director Matt Ray were already there, waiting for him. His outfit consisted of a tower of colorful ribbons cascading down his head, a petticoat with a peacock-like tail resembling a fireworks display, and a glittery jersey with a 13 — the number of American colonies in 1776 — on the front. He looked fabulous.
And other than the occasional bathroom break, costume change and/or field trip into the crowd of 650 people brave enough to buy tickets to this marathon of songs and love and pain and healing, the award-winning performance artist would not fully leave that stage until noon on Sunday, October 9th, at which point the hoarse-voiced Mac, sitting alone on a stool and strumming one last number on a ukulele as the audience sang along, took a final bow. He and Ray had been developing and workshopping something called the 24-Decade History of Popular Music, in which Mac discussed, dished, and interpreted 246 songs that spanned the entire existence of the U.S.A. from its birth to the present. An hour and a new look was devoted to each decade. There had been segmented versions that ran anywhere from four to six hours. Now Mac was attempting to stage the project en toto for one day-to-night-to-day only.
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Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music, a new documentary that dropped on HBO this week, revisits that landmark epic of cultural dissection and drag-cabaret history lessons, as well as giving those who didn’t witness this theatrical event firsthand a chance to bask in its gorgeous, ragged glory. Part concert film and part de facto contextualizing of Mac’s magnum opus, this look back at the show from renowned filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (The Times of Harvey Milk, Paragraph 175, The Celluloid Closet) distills the whole performance into a delirious two hours, also including new interviews from Mac and collaborators like costume designer Machine Dazzle and makeup artist Anastasia Durasova — both of whom reconstruct Mac’s jaw-dropping looks for an onscreen fashion shoot. It’s the definitive chronicle of one long, exhilarating, enlightening, totally exhausting 24 hours.
Sitting down for breakfast the morning before the movie’s premiere at the Tribeca Festival earlier this month, Mac, Epstein and Friedman opened up about why they wanted to bring this show to a larger audience, how they managed to retain the magic of being in the room where it all happened, and why America was, is, and always will be queer.
Neither of you had seen the full 24-hour version — or any of the six-to-eight-hour performances — of Taylor’s show before you signed on, right?
Rob Epstein: No. We were both big fans of his work, for sure — I think we first saw [Mac’s play] The Lily’s Revenge in 2011 in San Francisco.
Jeffrey Friedman: We’d read about the 24-hour project, of course. But we weren’t at the St. Ann’s performance — which we considered to be an advantage.
Why?
Epstein: From our perspective, it was a benefit not to have seen the live show, because then we’re just dealing with what’s on the screen. We’re just interpreting what has to work as a movie.
How did the discussion about a documentary start, then? Because someone had already captured the show for posterity back in 2016.
Taylor Mac: [Director/cinematographer] Ellen Kuras had come in with five cameras to film the performance itself. We’d never done the whole thing from start to finish before. There wasn’t any rehearsal; there was no way to rehearse it, really. She was just doing it, because she managed to rally a lot of very nice people with no money at the last second. Later, we shot the four six-hour shows in Los Angeles, with a little more preparation. But I didn’t really want there to be a lot of cameras when we did the 24-hour version, because I felt like: we were only doing it once, and we were so focused on putting on the show that getting it on film was like this side project. Thank god for Ellen and L.A. We had the footage, but no one was really thinking about a documentary after that.
Epstein: And than at some point in 2020, right around the beginning of lockdown, we got a call from Taylor and several of the show’s producers saying they wanted to do a film. So we just started looking at everything they had.
Mac: Like, everything.
Friedman: All of the footage from all of the cameras.
Having not seen the show, what was your first impression as you started to pore through all that footage?
Epstein: That it could actually work as a concert film. You know, “OK, we can do some kind of distilled version of this live show and it’s still going hold an audience.” And then we had to figure out what form might that take…
Friedman: The big challenge was the fact that Taylor is creating a whole interactive and immersive environment. To us, the idea of capturing the feeling of that in a film… they’re completely different mediums. The spirit of the theater piece is a lot of what makes it so magical. So that’s something we always kept in mind — all three of us wanted a filmgoing audience to have the experience of what it was like to be in that theater.
Mac: Which is a tricky thing, yeah. I feel like the conversation that kept trickling in through the entire process was, how do we not make the audience feel like we’re saying to them, “Shoulda been there!” [Laughs]
What was the process of deciding what numbers stayed in, what would get left out, what worked better with an overall narrative and Taylor’s vision of the stage show?
Friedman: Once we got financing when HBO came on, the three of us got together and watched the whole show, and just talked about each piece of it as we watched it. So I think we got a sense of what we felt was really important, what we had to include. And then it was just a matter of finding the pieces of the show that would be the strongest in terms of performance. We tried to find the way that the songs illuminated history — Taylor does that in a lot of different ways throughout the show, so we wanted to find samples for each of those ways.
Mac: My feeling was that a lot of the palate-cleanser stuff that I’d built into the show for a stage audience wouldn’t be as effective on film. Especially if we’re trying to squish it into two hours, you know, and so a lot of that stuff didn’t feel like it worked on film, or needed to be there.
Epstein: What do you think were some of the examples of that?
Mac: Well, one really great example in the film is we talk about “Coal Black Rose,” which is one of the very first minstrel songs… it’s about sailors gang-raping a slave and I have the audience listen to it blindfolded. There are some pretty intense, dramatic things that happen around that song and how it’s presented. And in the stage show, there’s another 45 minutes that go by before we get to “The ABC Song,” which… it’s all connected, one is connected to the other and the film just naturally made that jump. But in that durational experience, you want to give people the time to just calm down from what they just went through — which was listening to a minstrel song about rape while blindfolded! [Laughs]
So there were little filler songs in the show, things that were just there to lighten the mood in order to get to the larger point later. But in the film, you don’t need the break. You can just cut right to it. Which on stage, it would feel too jarring — for my tastes, anyway. [Laughs] And then the extra stuff we shot, the photo shoot and interview materials, I think helps the palette cleanse in a way that works better for the film. You’re able to kind of step outside of the work, and then enter back into it in a way that, on stage…
Let me put it this way: It was a little bit about wearing everybody down over 24 hours. You don’t really want to wear people down in a two-hour film. It’s a different agenda. I love the fact that with a 24-hour stage show, part of the point is exhausting the audience! You’re tearing them down and building them back up again — building ourselves back together, really. A film isn’t trying to do that. Nor should it.
Friedman: But we still had to represent the durational-experience part of the film…
Epstein: …and the falling apart part of it too.
How involved were you, Taylor, in what was in and what was out?
Mac: There were a couple things I advocated for, but I definitely wanted it to be their thing. It’s their art about my art.
Friedman: During that little retreat with the three of us together, we were immersing ourselves in the show, watching different segments, having conversations, and collectively deciding, “We don’t even need to consider this number, maybe it’s better to consider this one…” It probably reduced our starting point by 20%. Taylor said to us from the beginning, “This is your film. And I trust you.” [To Taylor] Thank you.
Mac: You’re welcome! I mean, the strategy worked!
Freidman: But his feedback was incredible and invaluable. His role was more a reactive one, in that, at various points, we would present different cuts, and Taylor would give us feedback on the cut.
Epstein: Sometimes Taylor’s notes were about filling in a gap… if, say, we were missing something about his intention, or the intention of a number like the “Coal Black Rose” bit he mentioned earlier. Well, there were two notes specifically on that scene: I had showed it to [1619 Project author] Nikole Hannah-Jones, and — I don’t know if I ever told you this, Taylor — she said, “You know, well, the audience is largely… I see a lot of white people in that crowd. I’d like to know what their response was.”
Mac: Which is a little bit of a shame, because that wasn’t always the case. It wasn’t the case with the audience in San Francisco, you know? But yes, it’s a good question to ask.
Epstein: And you also came back to us and said, “Well, you know, this entire decade plays out with people blindfolded.” It wasn’t just that one song. So we’d missed that whole conceit.
Friedman: We’d put that sequence together without establishing that the audience was blindfolded. Because we thought the song itself was so strong.
Rob: We didn’t want to interrupt the power of the performance. But in doing that, we missed the whole other layer Taylor put in there. So those were the kind of conversations we had, which helped us recalibrate.
The interpretation you do of Ted Nugent’s “Snakeskin Cowboy,” in which you take a really homophobic song and have people find a same-sex partner and slow dance to it, is a great example of something that translates well from the show to the screen.
Mac: I mean, I never get tired of seeing that sequence. Watching something incredibly homophobic turn into something that’s actually healing to people — it’s like, we done good! [Laughs] It’s still very moving to me. I think part of the whole purpose of the show is in that little number, right there. It’s taking all this history we have on our backs, coming to terms with the fact that we don’t know what to do with it — some of it is wonderful, some of it is horrible — and saying, “How can we make this of use to us in this current moment?” That’s really what the stage show does. Remember, when we did the 24-hour version of the stage show, this was 2016. Like, a month before the election.
Epstein: And the fact that the film is coming out now, in the moment that it’s coming out… I mean, we couldn’t have predicted that it’d be coming out right as all these issues are being discussed and debated again. But it’s a time capsule and it’s timeless. It really does just come back to Taylor’s generous, humanistic spirit that I find is so infectious. That’s what makes it evergreen.
Friedman: There’s something about the way Taylor is able to take very difficult problems in history, deal with them, make us think about them. And at the same time, make us feel hopeful and feel good about what we’re doing. You never feel like you’re being scolded, you know.
So when you put together the sequel…
Mac: Much more scolding next time, yes. [Laughs]
Friedman: I mean, it’s an inclusive piece of work. It’s the community-building that’s happening among hundreds of people in the same space and in real time, in an interactive sense. That’s one of the things that theater can do that other art forms can’t.
Mac: Theater has always been an interactive art form. The Greeks who saw those ancient plays for the first time — they were participating. Audiences weren’t passive spectators. There was lots of singing and dancing between performers and audiences all the way up until, essentially, the 19th century — and even in some places in the 19th century, they were still doing it. So when everyone’s like, Oh, that participation of your show, you’re like: This is the oldest form of theater there is. The ritual aspect has been there since Day One.
I’m glad you brought up the word “ritual,” because you’ve often used it to describe what you’re trying to do on stage…
Mac: “A Radical Fairy Realness Ritual.”
Right! Which requires a sense of interactivity. And while the great thing about concert films from Woodstock to The Last Waltz is that they record an event so generations can see what happened, a big part of that ritual aspect gets lost. How do you balance that when you’re translating a work like this to the screen? What’s the benefit besides simply documenting it?
Epstein: The benefit is you can add context in addition to just the concert presentation. That’s a big reason why we did the photo shoot and the interviews. They were a great place to provide context for, say, the meaning of a specific number or the intention or the backstory of including it. You know, in terms of the concert-film aspect, our totem when we were starting out was Stop Making Sense, and that’s a film that never breaks out of its form. But from the get-go, we knew we would get break out with the Taylor and Machine interviews.
Mac: You know, I had 24 hours to give the audience the context for what they were watching. And then within that, there’s a lot of repetition, because you’re trying to get the ideas to sink in. In a movie, you can do it in one clip. We needed some way to truncate six hours of context into something easily understood. For me, it’s all about an invitation: How are you inviting the audience over and over and over and over again, and every moment? That’s what those sequences do for me.
To be able to show the construction of those outfits, how much thought went into them, and see you put something so tailored to the songs you’re singing — that’s one of the things film can do that the stage show couldn’t.
Mac: I felt like it was an authentic choice, because we’d wanted to do a photoshoot of these outfits anyway, to document them. It wasn’t, “Well, we need backstage material, get dressed…”
Epstein: Another thing you can’t do in a stage show is go in for a close-up. Here, you get to see Taylor’s performance and you get to see his face, whereas even if you’re sitting in row F in the theater, there’s still a little distance. Not to mention that Taylor’s productions are like three-ring circuses. There’s always so much going on and the audience is constantly discovering things. In some ways, with the camera we’re saying, Hey, look over here. Look what’s going on.
And likewise, with the costumes, you know, Machine Dazzle creates these amazing costumes that if you see them from 20 feet away, the silhouette of the costume communicates the period that they came from. But when you go in for a close-up and see what they’re made out of, you know that he’s constructing it from found objects based on things that were invented in the period that the costume was worn, whether it’s toilet paper rolls or 3-D glasses.
Mac: It’s interesting because the audience will be watching me from a distance wearing those outfits. And then in every hour of the show, I would break the fourth wall or go out into the crowd, and people would get a very up-close experience of the costume for about five seconds. And then I’d go to the other side of the room, and other people would get it for five seconds, and then they see it from a distance again. So that’s essentially what the film is doing: In some ways I’ve broken the fourth wall, and I’m right there with you.
And the whole idea of losing one musician an hour — in the stage show, it’s a gradual thing. Sometimes we’d tell the audience someone was going, sometimes we wouldn’t. They thought it was a gimmick. And then, when we get to the AIDS era near the end of the show, we sort of reveal the metaphor behind the idea. But in the film, you feel that loss right away, because we’re losing people on that stage in rapid succession. You’re seeing all of these beautiful musicians essentially dying in a much, much shorter period of time. You really feel the loss.
Can you talk a little bit about putting that last shot together? It’s an incredibly powerful sequence.
Epstein: I mean, it’s all there. We were just trying to capture the magic of that moment… Somebody we were working on the film with had asked us — this was maybe month two or three of editing the footage — “How are you going to end this?” And I remember saying, you know, the show itself has this beautiful, transcendent ending. We just have to make that work.
Mac: You have that little part of the interview in there, where I’m talking about taking center stage and it being time to leave… it’s very smartly done. The setup is all there. Again, it’s that invitation to the audience, so that when you finally see me up there, all alone and my voice is shot, the viewer is left going, Oh. That’s the reaction that scene needs to have.
Rob and Jeffrey, you’ve been historians as much as documentarians, and your work has chronicled what has happened to a community over decades. How do you feel this project ties in to your earlier work?
Epstein: I mean, we gravitate to stories that haven’t been told and that need to be told. And we feel this is one of them. It takes a long time to make a film, so we also have to feel that we have the passion and the drive to fulfill that need — that there’s an imperative to keep going. And when we got the call for this, it was immediately: Yes. We want to commit our lives to this for the next however many years it takes to make happen, because that’s what you really have to do. We knew it would be worth it.
Friedman: I also feel that what Rob and I do with our films, and what Taylor’s doing… while they’re very different media, thematically and even in terms of subject matter, there’s a lot in common. So I felt very in sync with Taylor’s project. You’re right about the historians part, in that we’re very interested in history. And we’re very interested in telling that history from a new perspective.
Mac: [to Rob and Jeffrey] I don’t think the 24-Decade stage show would have been consistent if I hadn’t seen your work. I learned a lot from just watching their films. I was a young person coming of age during the AIDS epidemic and rampant homophobia, so that alone… and no one mentions this, but there is always a sense of parade in your documentaries, and my show is a parade in a lot of ways. It’s a rally and a gathering, and there’s a sense of a gathering in most of your films. I really think so. So, you know, when I heard they were interested. I was, yeah. Yes. Do it. We just had to have the official Zoom, but I was already going, OK, yes, you may definitely make a movie of my show. Thank you so much. And thank you both so much for everything.
Epstein: I think we’re all interested in community in some level. I think that’s a lot. That’s certainly what Taylor’s work is about. It’s what our work is about, too.
It’s such a critical show. But it’s very celebratory as well, and that comes across in the doc. Quite a lot.
Mac: Yeah, I like getting together with people and trying to figure shit out. It’s way more fun than just everyone hating on each other from a distance. [Laughs]
One of the things I really appreciate about the film is that in it, it captured the anti-capitalist in me. We don’t really talk about it, but it captures our aesthetic, which is very much not about trying to win capitalism. And that idea feels authentically queer to me in that way. Even though it’s on this platform of HBO now, it feels like the platform is elevating that experience to a whole different audience, as opposed to flattening it out. I’m curious to see how the world responds to that. Because I think people get a lot of access to queerness as winning capitalism, but they don’t get a lot of experience of the day-to-day culture out of that context.
I really like being part of the lineage of resistance. And not to frame it all as resistance, but you know, the political agenda is filled with homophobia and transphobia and all these other phobias, but almost not real. I mean, it is real, because there are consequences, but they don’t really care as much as they’re pretending they care. So it’s a very strange time and… what I love about it is: Look, America is queer. Like, that’s what the film is saying. America is queer. I’m not trying to prove that it’s something other than what it is. It just is, and always has been. That’s the central metaphor of the piece.
So I think that idea, in some ways… that idea is more moving than what’s happening politically right as the film comes out. What we have learned about history is that that Mark Twain quote is 100% correct: “History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.” This is what’s happening. When George W. Bush was trying to get elected, it was all about anti-gay-marriage messaging. Now it’s all anti-trans messaging and let’s-ban-drag-shows — it’s just all more of the same thing. It’s not necessarily repeating but it’s certainly rhyming. We do these big history shows even though we know these things keep recycling over and over again. But we still inch our way a little bit closer, a little bit closer. We keep showing up to do the work because we can’t afford not to. These things don’t stop. But neither do we.
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