Preview of the DEI annual workshop Queening out: Drag as a model and mode of exploration in group studies with Dr. John Stitt and Geoffrey Hervey

by Stacy Nakell

Aaron Bandy, chair of the DEI committee at AGPS, invited Dr. John Stitt and Geoffrey Harvey to Austin to present the DEI workshop this year. He experienced their work in an open session at AGPAConnect 2025 and is thrilled the facilitators agreed to present a similar workshop at AGPS.

"I found the session enormously impactful and very moving. As a middle-aged gay man, seeing the two of them give an academic professional workshop and performance in an academic setting was very impressive, especially since in my 20s, during the rampant and publicly accepted homophobia of the 1990s, doing so would've been virtually impossible. The true pride I felt for these two people that I didn't even know gave me access to a pride I have myself for my own Queerness, that can sometimes get lost in my drive for acceptance. I'm very proud of the opportunity to bring the two of them to Texas, and I hope that members who come to the event on July 19 are as impacted and moved as I was.”

The following interview was edited lightly for clarity and flow:

S: I’m Stacy Nakell. I’m here with Geoffrey Hervey and newly minted Dr. (!) John Stitt, otherwise known as Sinclair and Karli Marx, which we will get to! We’re excited to host you in Austin in July. Not that many people in Austin know of your work and we’d like to give them a taste.

First, how did each of you make the connection between drag and group therapy?

G: We initially made the connection between drag and sexuality. We had submitted a proposal for the APA Division 39 annual conference in 2024. The focus of that spring meeting was on sex and sexuality. Both of us happened to be at George Washington University in DC and because both of us had a history in drag artistry and we happened to be friends and peer mentees we thought we might want to do something unorthodox and funky and really transgressive. That was the initial connection of thinking about how drag as a practice can map onto a lot of psychoanalytic concepts. From there we started to think about drag as a performance, not just singular to the drag artist, the actual performance of drag in which there is a venue and an audience and so many people interplaying in the space.

J: In our first presentation, as we were fleshing it out, the co-chairs of the conference asked if we would be willing do a performance on top of our presentation, which brought into focus a lot of the pieces we’ve thought about in relation to the engagement between the performer and audience, how it is a connection and a group process. We took elements of that and brought it into our presentation for AGPA Connect in 2025, gearing it more to how it helps the individual relate to the group.

S: When you come in July can we expect a dance performance?

J: Maybe one or two!

S: This was your first time presenting at AGPA and on such a unique topic, how was that experience?

J: It was really cool, every time we have the opportunity to go to a professional conference and do something out of the norm, present in drag, have a drag show as part of our presentation, it really opens up this space that for so long has been inaccessible. We go into a space that is super rigid and traditionally academic and do something different with it, we want to camp up the space, ‘queer it up’ which is one of the core pieces of the way we like to engage people in learning these ideas.

G: In terms of camping up the space and queering the space, I think both of those verbs speak to an expansion and a transformation of these academic conference spaces. I don’t want to speak for a lot of people but I’ve been to a couple of these conferences before and they can get pretty dull. I think that is pretty indicative of what it’s like in the ivory tower, especially when it comes to social sciences, critical theory. I think we can get so lost in the theory and the concepts that it can get a little removed. What I found was really cool about us presenting at AGPA Connect is that we were able to have those intellectual pieces that people really seemed to respect and respond to, while they were still having fun, being engaged, being entertained, and while they were tapping into something within themselves, just by our own presence and presentation, that was really touching to me.

S: That was really clear, and developed over the whole session, how you brought us into queering the space and what that might look like. You even made me think outside the box and outside my professional hat of being the observer of the session at the time. We think you have to be buttoned up in a certain way to be respected and you sort of turned that on its head.

S: I did happen to notice that after the session as you walked around the hotel you got a lot of attention!

J: Funny story, we went to the wrong venue and shook up the wrong space, and that’s drag! Everywhere we went in drag, in a club, walking on the street, in a car, people notice you, it’s attention grabbing and that’s part of what we are saying, it’s like, “Look at me, I’m doing something outside of the box here.” There are situations where drag is more expected and we were doing it in a place where it is very unexpected, so that created a lot of interest, a lot of desire to get to talk to us. People asked us questions about who we were, what we were doing there, about our identities. I think it is just so generative, to have people in drag in a space. It starts a conversation. There is no way to not look and talk about it!

G: I don’t know if half of those people would have talked to us had we not been in drag. Part of me wants to think they were just enraptured by our beauty, but also, we stood out, and that made people engage, and when they found out we were presenters, they wanted to know what we were presenting about, which again brought the scholarly elements into it.

J: I think someone even said to us, “Oh, I wish I had known you were going to be doing this in drag!”

G: Isn’t that fascinating, that people would have been more drawn to show up with that visual stimuli as opposed to us just showing up in slacks and a blazer. We are definitely in a conservative slide right now, but in the last 10-15 years the visibility of drag has been uplifted to a point where I think people can recognize at the bare minimum the entertainment value, if not the intellectual aspects, at least to see some gorgeous stunning women.

S: As someone who has been out of the drag show scene for at least 2 decades, it brought back to me this reminder of the joy in drag performance. I wonder if you could talk about what it means to hold onto that joy at the same time as there is this current repression, and some sense of danger around performing drag in the US.

G: Where my mind goes is that drag is a queer art form and is a cornerstone of queer culture. In times of conservatism and in times of repression, queer people are obviously targeted, but the thing about that, is that queer people have always existed and always persisted. I think that’s where the joy is ignited and activated. We do have this age-old refrain of, “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it,” and I think drag is one of the ways in which we’re here and we’re queer and we continue to get used to it. I touched on those entertainment pieces, but there’s also, and we speak to this in our presentation, there’s also a liberatory aspect to the transformative power of drag. I think taking in both the entertainment and the liberation, that’s where the joy is really derived.

J: One of the other things we talk about in our presentation is how drag is a community art form, how it’s a sisterhood. When I think about the goals of repression, what are the things that are being taken away, there is so much resistance in still having queer joy and engaging in these traditional queer art forms that are so powerful and so connecting to the community. Drag has always been on the fringes. There has always been some level of pushback to drag, so it’s kind of so fierce to be able to be like, “You are over there hating on me and I am still having a great time in my wig and my heels, and making money. That’s a powerful statement!

S: So just showing up is a political and liberatory act, “I’m not going to conform just because you want me to.”

G: As someone who was in the audience, you were privy to some of the audience interaction, did you experience any joy?

S: I think you know that I did because I was bubbling over with it by the time I got to hug you both at the end, and, it was on a few different levels. Being able to play with and laugh at my professional role. Because I ended up ‘queering time’ and letting you go a little longer, because we weren’t going to miss out on the dance formamce!

Another part of the joy was reconnecting more with my masculine side, I don’t get as many places to show that or feel that. I love that you asked everyone about their drag name, introducing the idea that, queer or straight, everyone can have a drag name, an alter-ego. I was able to tell you about my drag name, my alter-ego, Flash, when I was an amateur boxer. That was my favorite part of boxing, going through all of the ritual. For you all the ritual and preparing makeup and the hair and what you are wearing, the idea of preparing through a ritual to enter into a different kind of space where anything can happen, I think that is a space where joy can flow.

You also communicated beautifully that this doesn’t just apply to queer people. We all need a little bit of queering, inside of ourselves, inside of our worlds. I want to make that clear that anyone anywhere on the gender continuum is invited and honored wherever they are. For some queer spaces you have to be queer to be in the space, and that makes sense in many cases, but there is something about everybody needing to queer our gender a little bit that is part of what I found so exciting.

J: Thank you for sharing some of your reactions. This is what we love about our presentation, that chance to build these connections, like getting to hear about your drag name and how this relates to other areas in your life. You make such a good point, this is not just for queer people, there is so much value in applying queer theory to everyone’s life, disrupting these systems that we are inculcated into, and we have so much more space than we are given.

S: What are you hoping people will walk away with?

G: Truthfully Stacy, a lot of the things you just described. What you were saying about reflecting on your own sense of self and the various self-states you were able to access through, if not doing drag, hearing and thinking about drag. That’s what we intended, how we purposefully structured our presentation. We were intentional about not just having a strict lecture but to, one, show up in drag as a living, breathing example of what we are speaking to, and also to loop the audience into the same process, to make it immersive and organic for people. Not only to have a more expansive idea of what psychoanalysis and academia can look like but what drag can look like.

S: Will you include an opportunity for us to learn how to apply these drag principles to our own groups?

J: We are going to run a demo group, so hopefully we will get to show some interventions live and in person. We are going to talk about how to use this interactively. The goal of our presentation is to ground us in the theory, what we are thinking happens internally for each person in the group, how this impacts the group as a whole, and then move it into a practical, playful fun space where we can try things out, see what works, see what doesn’t learn new things, just experiment. Which is a lot of what drag is, throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks.

S. Is there anything I haven’t asked that you want to share?

G: We have touched on the fact that times are a bit trepidatious as to visibly queer elements in our country. I hope that John and I and Aaron and the other organizers can cultivate a space in which we can live and talk freely.

J: Now is the time when it is becoming even more important to use our voices and our platforms to keep these conversations going in the face of a lot of repression and political pushback.

Hopefully if you love drag and you show up you have a space where it is fun to learn, if you don’t love drag or you have no experience with drag and you show up, hopefully we make this accessible, so it’s fun to get to know a couple drag queens.

S: Great, we look forward to seeing you in just over a month!