"Queens are fooled more often than they admit," observes the narrator solemnly. 4 As powerful as the street queen's promise of turning a man's body into a woman's might be, that brush with the divine is always haunted by the threat of its reversal in a cruel world of trans misogyny. Destiny's depression makes her a tragic figure one destined, perhaps, to fall into hell instead of ruling the gay world as its queen.
Maybe. But then again, maybe not. The peculiar dilemma of trans womanhood-having two bodies-keeps the story ambiguous. And Miss Destiny wields that ambiguity better than any. She suddenly shifts the scale of her speech. She tells them that sometimes, "when Im very high" and sitting at one of the bars, "I imagine that an angel suddenly appears." This angel has come to signal Judgment Day in the gay world. "And the angel says, 'All right, boys and girls, this is it, the world is ending, and Heaven and Hell will be to spend eternity just as you are now, in the same place among the same people— Forever!"* This, Destiny knows, is a very dangerous gamble, for the gay life has been a miserable one for them all, exiled and discarded as the deviants of America. But the risk of the angel's game is highest for her. If she stays for eternity in Pershing Square, she will never resolve the dilemma of her two bodies. She will never succeed in her quest for transubstantiation. Since a young age, her fate has been to transcend the mortal world, become angelic herself by becoming a beautiful, real woman. She can't become real if she is forced to live in the limbo of her life as a street queen. Heaven the angel's announcement is not. Though it is a kind of hell, it is perhaps better read as purgatory, where trans misogyny and poverty would rule her existence. Forever.
Knowing this, Destiny tries to run away from the angel. "But I cant run fast enough for the evil angel, he sees me and stops me and Im Caught." The reign of the queen has played out its fate as a Shakespearean tragedy. Because realness isn't really under her sovereignty but belongs to the judgment of an evil world, there will be no escape for Miss Destiny.
Miss Destiny's tragedy is a seductive parable for what really happened to street queens. As Esther Newton observed and Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson experienced firsthand, the gay world really did betray its queens in the wake of Stonewall.
It was first and foremost a political betrayal, selling out the queens for a new gender normative version of gay. But given the divine importance of the street queen's two bodies, it was also a spiritual betrayal. Miss Destiny's fate was seemingly written in advance, leaving the narrator of City of Night to watch on helplessly as the evil angel's prophecy came to pass. He could do no more than offer her the image of Desdemona in solidarity. Yet the better reference would be Shakespeare's Richard II, which tells the story of the king falling into the depths of human corruption precisely because he has a man's body attached to his divine body, making him vulnerable to being deposed. Miss Destiny seems to suffer the same fate, replaced by the masculine gay men on the horizon. So, too, for Sylvia and Marsha, kicked out of the gay movement for which they had put their lives on the line. The problem with tragedy, however, is that it lets the real culprits off the hook by casting the queen's fall from grace as foretold by the fates. The evil angel is a symbol of judgment,
but in truth he is merely the mouthpiece for the severe oppression that street queens face, including from their gay subjects.
What is holding back Miss Destiny from being real, from being happy and living as a woman, isn't divine judgment; it is the mundane world she lives in. Indeed, I9 50s America treats her as unreal and undeserving of anything other than a criminal existence in the underworld. That she has made of that situa tion a life worthy of the title Queen testifies to her tenacious magic. But, in the end, the street queen cannot transubstantiate without a world that believes in magic. She may know herself to be real, but if no one around her believes it-and if men keep beating her, the police keep arresting her, and the medical establishment keeps hormones out of reach—her exalted femininity won't matter. The art of appearance, the work of the queen, cannot be made real without concrete political struggle. If her gay subjects abandon her to the judgment of a cruel world, even the queen cannot rise above their sin.
Tragedy, that very Christian narrative of the predestined fall from grace, creates a difficult narrative situation. After all, tragedy can only be remedied by redemption, as when Christ, who bore the cross of the human world of sin, comes again.
And indeed, the idealization of street queens today has that messianic quality to it. If only we celebrate Saint Sylvia and Saint Marsha properly, the second coming of the trans women of color of Stonewall will redeem us all. Our politics will be saved by invoking trans women of color and acting in their name. We will rescue them from their betrayal in the 1970s by idealizing them.
Or so it seems.