Never before has drag been so popular and visible. No-one can argue that the upsurge in popularity is not largely due the massive success of the TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race. Yes drag has been around for a long, long time, and it’s even been on prime-time television in some form for a while, but Drag Race seems to have captured a young audience – up until recently if you asked the average gender-non-specific person-in-the-street to name a famous British drag act, only the older generation would probably be able to name Danny La Rue or Lily Savage, or depending on the street they might name Drag Queen of Wales: Ceri Dupree . Danny La Rue passed away a while ago, and Paul O’Grady put Lily Savage into a convent, only bringing her out for the occasional panto.
Now thanks partly to RuPaul’s Drag Race, drag culture has made its way into the mainstream. As a result of this popularity, when Drag Race Battle of the Seasons announced the first Welsh tour date last year, the first round of tickets sold out almost immediately and another Cardiff date was added the following night due to demand. That first night last March, the audience was so appreciative the performing queens revealed that they didn’t have an encore and the Cardiff audience was the first to clamour for one. Drag Race Queens and judge Michelle Visage most recently came back to Cardiff’s Tramshed with the Christmas Queens tour. Drag being in the mainstream can also be exemplified by Danny Beard and La Voix – who both regularly perform in Cardiff – appearing on Britain’s Got Talent and Conchita Wurst winning Eurovision.
Drag Race has definitely helped to create an increased interest in drag, with new drag performers, or ‘baby queens’, growing up with the show. Yet people involved in drag seem to be in agreement that Drag Race has a particular downside, now everyone wants to have a go at drag without having what it takes – what the show itself has branded as charisma, uniqueness, nerve and talent (yes, the c-word acronym is intentional); as Rest is Drag says ‘everyone thinks they can be drag queens without realising how much time/money/effort it takes’. Young Cardiff drag queen Lucy Fur says ‘for a lot of people that’s their only experience of drag and they don’t really get queens who are doing stuff that they haven’t seen on drag race. Or they compare queens to Drag Race queens and that’s super annoying’. It’s a sentiment that Polly Amorous matches, saying ‘you can no longer pull together a look without being compared to someone from the show.’
Polly, who last year won Jolene’s Drag Race – a drag competition hosted in Cardiff’s PULSE by Jolene Dover – believes that the general increase in popularity is a good thing as well: ‘it’s brilliant to see so many millennials enlisting the power of drag to express art and do something so empowering’; while Fur believes it draws attention to ‘something amazing that I’m a part of! It’s made a lot of people aware of the kind of crazy more alternative drag that there is out there… people are now starting to realise that you can do really weird looks and out-there performances and it can still be awesome.” Medusa Repulsa is one of those who started drag a result of Drag Race, she says: ‘I feel like shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race has helped to bring drag more into the mainstream, and as someone who started drag as a result of these shows, I’ve noticed it’s attracted more people to the scene, particularly in Cardiff.’
Cardiff has always had drag and Welsh icons like Dame Shirley Bassey have been a gift to drag queens. Minsky’s Showbar has been a mainstay since 1995 and it’s joined by The Golden Cross, The Kings, Wow Bar and PULSE, with Mary’s being the latest addition to that lineup.
Rest is Drag, a blog that started as a college project, and Sickening Events – run by Cardiff based Heidi Wurst – are bringing current drag artists, including popular Drag Race Queens, to these Cardiff venues. Sickening Events gives a shoutout to these venues, saying they’re ‘amazing venues that offer the best in drag, locally, nationally and now with the queens from RuPaul’s Drag Race, we have some amazing talent’.
The general consensus on the Cardiff Drag scene is that it’s still holding onto an ‘old style’ of drag, one that Polly Amorous describes as ‘cabaret style queens singing show-tunes in ball gowns’, though the young queens stress that there’s nothing wrong with this drag, they just belong to a modern, more chart-friendly drag. Misty Monique – a young queen who’s currently a student at the University of South Wales – says that Cardiff is ‘one of the few places that maintains the ‘old school’ style dominance, but again I think the RPDR fans and newer queens are starting to take control a bit!’ While Sickening Events says: ‘We have a variety of queens, we have drag kings, character based drag and also alternative drag. [Unfortunately] the wider [Welsh] public, outside of the LGBT scene, only really associates drag with cabaret or “man in a dress”, which is a pity because we have so much more to offer’.
Another young Welsh queen, Abbie Gavenny, believes that Cardiff can afford to learn from the drag scene in places like Manchester and Leeds. Similarly Rest is Drag say: ‘Other places, like Manchester and London, have some of the most artistic/weird (in a good way) queens I’ve ever seen. They spend so much time looking amazing.’
One particular Manchester queen that has caught this writer’s interest on social media is Cheddar Gorgeous.
Also, further afield, is Australia’s Art Simone – these are just two examples of drag queens that seem to be transcending their drag into incredible pieces of human art.
This is a viewpoint that Cardiff’s Felix Love takes, saying ‘Drag isn’t just “dressing as a girl”, it’s an art form’. She also believes that the increased popularity in drag can only be a good thing for Cardiff’s drag scene: ‘It’s evolved so much over the last few years! It’s much more diverse and a new-wave of younger, more interpretive Queens – who are the future resident Queens of Cardiff – have unleashed themselves. Soon the Cardiff drag scene will be unrecognisable from what it was five years ago, it’s a very exciting time!’
Both Love and Rest is Drag take the view that drag (and Drag Race) can only be a good thing for LGBTQ+ society, with Love saying: ‘the more people there are doing drag and pushing the boundaries of what drag can be is another person fighting against discrimination. [Drag Race] has given everybody the green light to try drag and express themselves freely. It has encouraged a younger generation to experiment with gender boundaries which can only have a positive effect on society!’ While Rest is Drag thinks ‘it allows people to be themselves whether they come out as Trans/Gay/HIV positive, or even want to become Drag Queens’. This also rings true with how Misty Monique got interested in drag: ‘[it’s] my way of expressing myself creatively. I love fashion and modelling, and growing up I always found that females had more freedom in terms of what they could wear – women can wear an array of dresses and fabulous gowns to a formal event but men always were stuck with the typical suit and tie. I wanted to give myself this freedom and drag was the perfect solution.’ That stripping away the line between the genders has such significance at the moment.
All this is without going further into other themes such as gender identity, androgyny, boys wearing makeup (outside of drag) and, on a more serious note, transgender rights/equality. It’s fair to say that Drag Race and wider drag popularity is helping to give such issues further exposure. After all, Drag Race is a show where almost all of the people involved onscreen are gay men.
So what’s behind this upsurge in drag’s popularity?
For me, my interest in drag is somewhat related to my interest in theatre/entertainment history. Although he hadn’t been on television for many years when I was growing up, Danny La Rue speaks to my interest in older forms of entertainment like music hall (incidentally, I wonder how many other fans of drag own a copy of La Rue’s only big-screen outing on DVD – the very dated 1970s cross-dressing farce Our Miss Fred). In the same way, I enjoyed watching repeats of old comedies like The Dick Emery Show, The Two Ronnies or Monty Python – particularly Terry Jones’ female characters. Later on Matt Lucas’ portrayal of Shirley Bassey would become a firm favourite, and Some Like it Hot and The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert are undeniably classic films.
While most of these were not drag queens, more character comedy, these men dressing up as women were still in drag and on mainstream TV, but maybe this is also why drag has been thought of as old fashioned. Conversely mainstream cinema’s three-dimensional portrayals of drag queens have been few and far between. No matter how much of an entertaining film it is, The Birdcage portrays its drag queen as a ‘screaming’ stereotype – a whole decade after Priscilla we got Kinky Boots, now a Broadway and West End award winner.
I hadn’t been to Minsky’s for a couple years by the time I first discovered RPDR and it stoked the flames of my interest in drag. Go to a Drag Race queens’ show and you might be surprised to see so many young women, teens to early 20s. Far be it from me to say why they’ve latched onto Drag Race, maybe it’s simply because the show has taken drag out of the 18+ venues like clubs and bars. It might also be because Drag Race is essentially a reality TV contest, albeit one with a cast of large personalities, and because of the show people now have their own favourite drag queens.
And yet every bubble bursts eventually. Polly Amorous has the last say: ‘Altogether, I love drag and love most queens, however I think this sudden spike is just a phase and only the true followers of drag will both continue to perform and entertain, and support their local queens as apposed to their “Alaskas”, “Katyas” and “Adores”‘.
words CHRIS WILLIAMS