Episode 12: Kevin Cook/Poison Waters

Gender Reveal

Tuck Woodstock

Lgbtq, Documentary, Queer, Personal Journals, Gender, Nonbinary, Society & Culture, Genderqueer, Transgender, Trans

4.8 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 19 March 2018

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this week’s episode, Tuck speaks with Kevin Cook (he/him), better known as the glamorous Poison Waters (she/her). One of Portland’s most beloved event hosts, Poison is a co-host at the legendary Darcelle XV Showplace. Topics include:

Distinguishing between trans women and (male) drag queens.
Joining the drag scene as a gay black man in the late 1980s.
Living as one person with two identities, two presentations, and two sets of pronouns.
Watching LGBTQ visibility and acceptance evolve over the last three decades.

Read more about our This Week in Gender topic here.

Questions/feedback/feelings? Hit us up at [email protected] or on Twitter. You can also submit questions anonymously here.

We are grateful for donations at patreon.com/gender or PayPal or Cash App. If you donate $7 or more, we'll send you a surprise.

Logo: Ira M. Leigh
Music: Breakmaster Cylinder
Sponsors: Babe Wax! Donate to WaxFund, please!

Transcript

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0:00.0	Oh, Welcome to Genderville
0:15.8	Genderville, a podcast where we ask intrusive personal questions and hopefully get a
0:20.3	little bit closer to understanding what the hell gender is. I'm your host and resident
0:25.2	gender detective Molly Woodstock. This week on the show I am so excited to share my interview with my friend Kevin
0:37.6	Kevin is better known as Portland's second most famous drag queen poison waters.
0:42.4	Portland's most famous drag queen, Poison Waters. Portland's most famous drag queen is
0:45.0	Darsal and I want to tell you about her for just a sec. Walter Cole was born in
0:49.7	Portland in 1930. Around 1967 he began performing as Darsal and soon after that he opened the Darsal
0:57.2	showplace. Darsel still performed several times a week and is in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's oldest drag queen performer at around age 86.
1:07.0	Darsel at showplace is widely considered to be the longest running drag review in the United States.
1:13.6	Poison has been performing at Darsells for years and years and years and years, and
1:17.4	she's a very close friend of Darsall, and it's really just an integral part of the
1:21.2	whole Darscel community.
1:23.2	We don't get to talk about any of that in the interview because there was honestly
1:26.0	so much else to talk about, but I just thought it was an important and fun thing to know.
1:29.9	So I wanted to throw that in the beginning.
1:32.2	And one more note about the interview,
1:33.5	which is that while we were recording,
1:35.6	someone decided to do loud yard work
1:38.0	outside my window, which is not ideal.
1:40.6	I didn't love it.
1:41.8	But I didn't really have any way of stopping it, and the interview was going really well, so I just sort of kept going.
	...

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