Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Wig’ On HBO, A Documentary About The History Of Wigstock

Wigstock was such an indelible part of New York’s drag scene in the ’80s and ’90s that millennials who came to New York in the ’00s thought it was still going on. But, for one reason or another, the festival ended in 2001. But last year, Wigstock founder Lady Bunny, along with Neil Patrick Harris and David Burtka, brought it back to a huge response. Wig documents not only that show but how it was created in the first place, way back in 1984. Read on for more…

WIG: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: In 1984, the Pyramid club was one of the best and most popular drag bars in the East Village in New York City. One of the more prominent performers at that club, Lady Bunny, one day decided that he and his friends should wander over to Tompkins Square park after the Pyramid closed at sunrise and put on a show in the band shell, mainly to show people that drag is perfectly suitable during the daylight as it is late at night. Wigstock was born.

The festival, which kept attracting larger and larger audiences, to the point where it moved from Tompkins Square to a professionally-staged show, had its last edition in 2001, about a week before 9/11. Depending on what you hear, the atmosphere in the country toward campy shows like Wigstock changed after the attacks, or simply the audience wasn’t there. There have been smaller versions of Wigstock, and Wigstock-like festivals like Brooklyn’s Bushwig festival. But nothing that had captured the attention of the LGBTQ+ community, and everyone else for that matter.

In 2018, Lady Bunny, along with Neil Patrick Harris and David Burtka, brought back Wigstock as a massive production on a rooftop at South Street Seaport’s Pier 17, hosted by Harris (who also performs as Hedwig, which he played on Broadway in 2014). Most of Lady Bunny’s contemporaries were there, as well as younger drag artists like Bobbie Hondo and folks like Charlene Incarnate, who is trans but definitely a modern drag queen.

The documentary Wig, directed by Chris Moukarbel (Gaga: Five Foot Two), combines modern footage and interviews with home video and archival footage of previous Wigstocks and the East Village drag scene of the ’80s to show how drag has gone from something that was underground and secret for decades to something that’s so bit in pop culture that RuPaul’s Drag Race is one of the most popular shows on basic cable, generating a yearly conference called DragCon.

After the story of Wigstock, the final half hour or so is turned over to a concert video of the 8-hour festival.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: This isn’t the first movie about Wigstock. Wigstock: The Movie came out in 1995, and featured a performance by the then-new-superstar RuPaul (more on Ru in a bit).

Performance Worth Watching: It was hilarious hearing Drag Race alumnus Willam Belli talk about his plan to butt-chug a beer on stage, then actually see him doing it. Also, Charlene Incarnate is an intense performer and her views on what it means to do drag in a world where it’s no longer underground — and how it complements and opposes being transgender — are some of the most interesting parts of the film.

Memorable Dialogue: Lady Bunny tells some friends, “Just found out that RuPaul would not be performing because we could not fit the number of people it takes to make her a gorgeous woman on that rooftop.” He says it with love, but there’s definitely something else behind that quip.

Sex and Skin: It’s drag, for heaven’s sake. It wouldn’t be campy without a lot of bare tushes and other flashes of skin. And Incarnate likes to walk around with her relatively-new boobs out (there’s footage of her taking her first hormone treatment on stage at Bushwig in 2015).

Our Take: Wig is not supposed to be a deep dive into the issues that the LGBTQ+ community faced in the ’80s, when the festival started, versus how many of the community’s battles have turned into victories over the past decade.

These issues are touched on — how could they not be? — with veterans like Lady Bunny and Michael Lynch talking about how millennial gays, drag artists, trans people, etc., sometimes don’t appreciate the shame, secrecy, discrimination, violence, disease and other sacrifices the previous generations had to make in order for things like Drag Race to become mainstream. But it’s not an overriding theme to the film. It is more about how Wigstock was an opportunity for the community to come together and show that the exuberance of performing in drag should be seen in the daylight, not just in a dark club.

The issue of drag’s popularity, thanks mainly to RuPaul and Drag Race, is addressed multiple times throughout the movie, but NPH, talking at home with Burtka and Belli, pretty much sums up how people, even in the LGBTQ+ community, see drag in 2018-19: “I wonder if it’ll still have that pulse of necessity, or will it feel like… Disney?” The performance footage in the last third of the film proved that, especially in a world where there’s a huge pushback on the rights the community has gained in the past decade, there’s still that pulse of necessity, especially when NPH came out as Hedwig.

One person that we wish we would have heard more from? RuPaul. He’s represented in the film via archival footage, and scenes from Drag Race. We hear a small snippet of him talking about the early days at the Pyramid club. But he’s not only missing from the Wigstock ’18 lineup, but we don’t hear about him talking about how he helped bring drag into the mainstream over the past three decades (“Supermodel [You Better Work]” came out in 1992, people!). We wonder if Lady Bunny was secretly a little annoyed with his good friend’s absence, and just covered it up in catty quips. Either way, Ru’s relative absence from the film definitely leaves a big hole which couldn’t really be filled.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Wig is a fun film about how things have changed for drag performers since the early days of Wigstock. Just don’t expect some deep treatise on drag or anything else. But it is a hoot, which is what Lady Bunny intended.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Stream Wig on HBO