Diary of a Drag Queen
Longlisted for the Polari First Book Prize 2020
Life's a drag... Why not be a queen?
'Stories like the one where you shagged a 79-year-old builder and knocked over his sister's ashes while feeding him a Viagra. Or the time you crashed your car because you were giving a hand job in barely moving traffic and took your eye off the car in front. That's the kind of dinner-party ice-breaker I'm talking about.'
Northern, working-class and shagging men three times her age, Crystal writes candidly about her search for 'the one'; sleeping with a VIP in an attempt to become a world famous journalist; getting hired and fired by a well-known fashion magazine; being torn between losing weight and gorging on KFC; and her need for constant sexual satisfaction (and where that takes her).
Charting her day-to-day adventures over the course of a year, we encounter tucks, twists and sucks, heinous overspending and endless nights spent sprinting from problem to problem in a full face of make-up.
This is a place where the previously unspeakable becomes the commendable - a unique portrayal of the queer experience.
(c) 2019, Crystal Rasmussen (P) 2019 Penguin Audio
Crystal
Look up the term ‘Global Phenomenon’ in the dictionary and you will simply find a picture of Crystal's face. She's beautiful. She's a model. She looks like a block of cheap Edam that's been left out in the sun. She's known for always having a cigarette in her mouth, while shouting at people for smoking in her face. She also coined the term ‘money’ and has been living in her overdraft since the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Crystal forms one fifth of DENIM, the drag supergroup, and is adored by fans for her lazy demeanour and her powerful falsetto.
Tom
Tom Rasmussen is a Northerner based in London. When out of drag, they are a regular contributor to the Independent,Dazed & Confused,i-D, LOVE Magazine and Refinery29. Their work has also been featured in Vice, Broadly, Tank and The Gay Times.
In 2018 they were named an LGBT trailblazer by The Dots and one of the voices of now fori-D.
Tom also forms half of the radical queer punk band ACM.