How Pale Blue Moonflower Got Her Name

 

A few people asked me to write about my drag persona, Pale Blue Moonflower, and where she came from.

The name sounds like something I spent a lot of time inventing.

I didn't.

It started with me looking out of a window.

But I should probably go further back.

When I was little, I used to perform a lot with my dad. Not professionally and not at school. We would play at his house, sometimes with his bodyguards or his butler involved too. We acted out things like the story of Chunhyang and different fairy tales.

I played the female roles.

I was a very elegant boy and somehow those roles came naturally to me. I was also very particular about costumes. If we were going to play different people, then obviously we needed to look like those people. At the time I didn't think much about why I needed things to be that exact. Knowing I'm autistic now, some of it makes more sense.

Then school took over and I stopped having enough time for these little performances.

Years later, after my military service, they came back into my life in a completely different form.

I had gone through a breakdown and was still trying to recover. Seunghoon was in the army, my dad was spending more time with me, and I was finally starting to leave the house again. I went to my dad's place often.

Around that time my hair had grown out from the short black military cut and I dyed it blond.

That changed something.

It wasn't that blond hair made me feel like another person exactly. It actually felt more like me. Just a new version of me. I think I needed that separation from the person I had been immediately before.

One day I was going through some of the costumes from when I was younger. My dad saw me doing it and told me he could buy me new ones if I wanted. He sometimes had small game nights with a group of male friends and suggested that I could sing for them.

I thought, why not?

So suddenly there were clothes and wigs again.

I had already watched some documentaries about drag and was curious about it. Since I had spent part of my childhood dressing up to perform female characters, trying it in an adult and modern form didn't feel particularly strange to me. It actually felt like a natural next step.

One combination stood out immediately.

A blond wig and a blue velvet dress.

The dress was short and fitted, but comfortable. I remember looking at myself and thinking it worked. It had a personality already.

Strong. Seductive. Charming.

I didn't want to create something campy. Nothing against camp drag at all; it just wasn't what I saw when I looked at myself.

What I had in my head was closer to a modern princess.

Elegant. Mysterious. Seductive.

A beautiful creature.

Something like a night ghost or a dream.

But she didn't have a name.

One evening I was in my dad's projector room trying the clothes again. I was wearing the blue dress and looking outside. It was already dark.

There were moonflower vines growing in my father's garden. He had white ones, but there was also one unusual pale-blue one that I always thought was especially beautiful. My dad thought it might have been a rare variety or some kind of mutation, although neither of us knows exactly what it was.

I was staring at it through the window and eventually asked my dad what the flower was called.

He told me it was a moonflower. A flower that blooms at night.

That was it.

I loved the moon. I loved the night. I loved that pale blue colour.

Pale Blue Moonflower.

It just sounded right.

Her first audience was my dad and the men at one of those game nights.

I sang Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt, 외로운 가로등 (Lonely Streetlamp) and Wenn ich mir was wünschen dürfte.

My dad was clapping constantly. His friends kept praising me and telling me I should become a singer and that I had to perform for them again. My dad looked extremely proud.

So Pale Blue Moonflower stayed.

She has changed since then, although probably less visually than people might expect. She became more confident, more sexual and bolder. But the basic idea is still the same. Pale blue also stayed her colour. Whatever the outfit, she almost always wears some version of it.

The strange part came much later, when I started learning more about the flower whose name I had borrowed.

The classic night-blooming moonflower, Ipomoea alba, opens in the late afternoon or at night and closes again around dawn. Its large pale flowers are fragrant and are visited by nocturnal moths, including sphinx moths. The individual flowers last only a very short time. They belong to the night and are gone again with the morning.

I didn't know most of that when I chose the name.

And when I read it properly for the first time, I found the similarity slightly unsettling.

Pale Blue Moonflower exists when I become her.

Then she disappears and Wonsik comes back.

There is something different about the way people react to me as her too. Men can find me attractive as Wonsik, obviously. But Pale Blue Moonflower seems to attract them differently. There are more stares. Sometimes they seem less like they're looking at a cute or sexy guy and more like they're trying to work out what they're looking at.

Strangers sometimes mistake me for a woman when they see me dressed as Pale Blue Moonflower, especially if my muscles aren't visible.

Then I speak.

My voice is very deep.

That usually changes the situation again.

Even my boyfriend reacts differently to Pale Blue Moonflower. He finds her very attractive and sometimes asks me to perform privately for him.

So learning that moonflowers open themselves to the night, release their scent into the darkness and attract nocturnal creatures toward them felt almost too appropriate.

Especially because I never planned any of it.

Then there is the blue.

Pale blue has been one of those colours that has followed me for a very long time. It was one of the main colours of my hanbok when I was little, and I loved it long before Pale Blue Moonflower existed.

Blue is also genuinely unusual among flowers. Fewer than ten percent of plant species have blue-pigmented flowers.

The classic night-blooming moonflower, Ipomoea alba, is normally white or greenish-cream rather than blue.

I actually like that. It makes the unusual one in my father's garden feel even stranger to me now.

Pale Blue Moonflower came from a pale-blue flower outside my father's window, a blue velvet dress, blond hair and the night.

I asked my dad what the flower was called.

Moonflower.

And Pale Blue Moonflower just came.