On Monday night at The George, despite the sub-zero temperatures outside, a crowd has gathered to engage in a weekly ritual. Friends catch up, barmen pour pints and people pile into the venue until the low hum of conversation reaches an excited buzz. Just before midnight, the pumping pop music cuts and the stage lights up. Phil T Gorgeous, Dublin’s only regularly performing drag king, descends the tackily adorned staircase onto the stage, accompanied by drag queen, Bunny.
The night progresses in game show format, with contestants sacrificially offered up by their friends and goaded on stage with the promise of prizes and free booze. Gorgeous, with his hair slicked back, sideburns and beard dons a suit with flashy leather detailing. He plays the part of cheesy game show host well, firing quips at the contestants and Bunny. When it’s Gorgeous’ time to perform, he lip syncs along to Valerie by The Zutons, a popular choice that has the crowd singing along by the first chorus. Gorgeous commands the stage and navigates it with ease. The performance is a stripped down number without much choreography or gags, but the feel-good factor of the song combined with Gorgeous’ easy confidence make it enjoyable nonetheless. This performance is the pinnacle of Dublin’s drag king scene, and this is probably the only time a drag king will grace the stage this week. Watching Gorgeous perform you’d wonder why in a scene saturated with drag queen nights, there aren’t more women willing to don a flashy outfit and facial hair and perform to an adoring audience.
“To those familiar with queer theory, it serves to emphasise the fact that all gender is performance, that it is a thing we act out and that can be mapped onto a body using conscious action. To the radically minded, it may be overtly political – a vehicle to get feminist or queer messages across”
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While drag kinging features less prominently on the queer scene and in wider culture than its glamorous queen counterpart, kinging has its own long and radical history. British music hall stars such as Hetty King rose to fame as male impersonators from the late 19th century on. Meanwhile Gladys Bentley, a black, lesbian, cross-dressing performer was highly influential during the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and 1930s. Drag kinging had a resurgence of popularity in the 1990s, especially in queer hubs like San Francisco. Since then, kings have largely performed in troupes – groups that perform and often travel together. This is in contrast to drag queens who largely perform solo. Of course, there are plenty of kings who also prefer to perform alone. A number of large events are hosted in North America to foster the developing international drag king community. These include the International Drag King Extravaganza, a travelling conference which is currently on hiatus, and the San Francisco Drag King Contest which is entering its 21st year.
In Ireland, the popularity of drag kinging peaked in the early 2000s, when a drag king troupe called The Shamcocks formed during the Dublin Lesbian Arts Festival in 2003. In 2004, Chicago-based drag troupe The Windy City Blenders performed here as part of an “exchange program”, and The Shamcocks travelled to Chicago later that year to take part in the International Drag King Extravaganza. The Windy City Blenders have performed in Dublin a number of times since their first trip. They last performed here in 2014 at an event named Mustachioed that was touted as “the first Irish drag king festival”. However, The Shamcocks disbanded long before Mustachioed came about and despite hopes for the event to run as an annual drag king festival, it was not repeated in 2015. The organiser could not be contacted to inquire about future festivals.
Justin Casey-Cumms is a drag king who performed in Dublin at the same time as The Shamcocks and explains that his character is “fun and bumbly” and “a goofy gay bear”. He sees the decline in the popularity of the scene from a practical viewpoint – the kings involved simply grew up and had less time to perform. Although there are people interested in kingery in Dublin now, the absence of a permanent scene makes it hard to get started. Enda Danite, an up-and-coming king in Dublin, sees the issue as one of representation and a lack of role models: “I guess there’s a lot of examples of drag queens and so maybe a lot of the baby queens have better guidance for how to do it and what that can look like. It’s kind of hard, if you don’t see that many drag kings, to know what that might look like and what that might do”. Danite got a start in the drag scene when on a J1 in San Francisco after happening upon the bi-weekly show of a troupe called the Rebel Kings of Oakland in The White Horse, one of America’s oldest gay bars. Seeing the troupe perform gave Danite the inspiration to start building his own character: “It was when I saw those drag kings in the East Bay that I was like ‘oh my god that’s great, I want to do something like that’. You know, my own style, but something like that.” Due to the welcoming nature of the troupe, who encouraged new performers to get involved at every show, Danite performed with them a couple of weeks after first seeing the show. There is a culture of tipping performers in North America, so he earned over $40 in tips and the kings were kind enough to split the earnings from the door entry charge with him. He performed a “spoken word, William Shatner style version of Rocketman” and “the crowd just loved it”. He notes that drag king humour is quite different to drag queen humour, and features a lot of “very nerdy blokes”.
“I guess there’s a lot of examples of drag queens and so maybe a lot of the baby queens have better guidance for how to do it and what that can look like. It’s kind of hard, if you don’t see that many drag kings, to know what that might look like and what that might do”
The large drag king scene in San Francisco and other parts of America didn’t come about by chance but was nurtured by the community-building efforts of a handful of performers in the early 1990s. In 1994, a group of performers, unhappy with the lack of a drag king community in San Francisco, started the San Francisco Drag King Contest as a way to encourage more people to get involved. Fudgie Frottage, who hosted the first Drag King Contest and now runs the show, explains that there was only one drag king on the San Francisco scene at the time. This was Leigh Crow who gained fame for her Elvis impersonation, performing under the name of Elvis Herselvis. These early efforts to encourage newcomers and expand the community have worked, with the Drag King Contest doing “bigger and better shows with bigger and better audiences year on year”, according to Frottage. He explains that it’s now much more of a mixed crowd coming to the show, whereas it would have originally been an exclusively lesbian audience: “This past contest, it was the most mixed audience I’ve ever had. It was nice to see some of the tech bros in the audience just checking out what drag kings are about.” However, Frottage explains that increasing living costs in San Francisco have presented new challenges to community building, as many queer women are pushed out of the city by soaring house prices and the pool of potential and active drag kings decreases. A decade of emigration may have had the same effect on the drag king scene here, with a large portion of young queer people moving away – the potential next generation of Dublin’s drag kings.
Other community-focussed events organised by American kings have had a big impact on the global drag king scene. The International Drag King Extravaganza started in 1999 as a forum for drag kings and other gender-bending performers to come together and discuss issues relevant to the community, share skills and perform. Unlike the San Francisco Drag King Contest, the extravaganza was intentionally non-competitive in nature and instead simply allowed performers to showcase their work. While the extravaganza is currently on hiatus, many drag kings hope for it to be brought back as an annual event. Casey-Cumms describes travelling to Vancouver to participate in the event in 2007 as a fantastic experience where he met incredibly talented performers and saw some “profound” performances, such as a number called Bread. This was performed by the Tuscon-based troupe Boys R Us, a class critique set to Bjork’s “Earth Intruders” that saw the troupe act out the production of bread and the obnoxious dissatisfaction of a rich man in a restaurant eating the finished product. Casey-Cumms said the most skilled performers of the extravaganza could “really take the idea of drag and make you think about what that means”.
When thinking about what drag kinging really means, it’s hard to come up with a concrete answer. To those familiar with queer theory, it serves to emphasise the fact that all gender is performance, that it is a thing we act out and that can be mapped onto a body using conscious action. To the radically minded, it may be overtly political – a vehicle to get feminist or queer messages across. However, to the performers I spoke to, it seemed to more immediately be about entertaining an audience. Danite says “making people laugh” is his favourite thing about drag, while Frottage chooses “putting smiles on people’s faces”. Casey-Cumms describes a favourite moment of his that encapsulates why he loves performing: “There’s a photo where basically, it was at the end of a number and people had their hands out. Like over there [in Canada], they tip. They might give you a dollar or whatever, and they just had their hands out just [wanting] to high five and there’s a picture of me just high fiving loads of people and I just love that.”
The performers also expressed a love for the freedom that drag allows. Fiona Institute began performing as a drag king and now performs as a blend between a drag king and queen and explains that drag has been an uplifting experience for them: “It gives me the confidence to do things that I can’t do outside of drag”. The comic nature of being dragged up allows for a freedom of expression not experienced elsewhere: “It’s almost like a shield. You put on all this makeup and your clothes and it’s like a mask and armor that protects you from other people’s thoughts of you because you know you look ridiculous. Once you know that, it makes it so much easier to make fun of yourself, and if you can make fun of yourself, you can do anything.”
“It’s almost like a shield. You put on all this makeup and your clothes and it’s like a mask and armor that protects you from other people’s thoughts of you because you know you look ridiculous. Once you know that, it makes it so much easier to make fun of yourself, and if you can make fun of yourself, you can do anything.”
Not only does drag give a freedom in performance and expression on stage, it also acts as a way to explore issues of gender identity and expression affecting a performer’s everyday life. Institute explains that performing as a drag king allowed them to explore their transness: “I started doing drag as a drag king before I came out as trans, so it was kind of an excuse for me to basically dress up as a boy and it gave me an excuse to explore my whole masculine side.” After coming out as a trans man, drag equally gave them the opportunity to reconnect with feminine expression: “It gave me the chance to do all the things I liked about femininity after having come out as trans, like I love painting my nails and I love doing makeup, but I’m not gonna be taken seriously as a man if I do all those things regularly, unfortunately.” Danite also sees the opportunity for drag kinging to act as an exploration of gender identity: “A lot of people that get into drag kingery would find themselves and realise that they’re trans men or genderqueer, and I think that there’s definitely scope for that.” In Danite’s own experience, performing as a drag king has been a good way to explore his gender expression. He says: “Once you’ve gone to that extreme [in drag], you can navigate between the poles more easily. In my everyday presentation, I’ve gotten a lot kind of butcher or more androgynous and that was something I probably would have been very self-conscious about beforehand.”
As our societal ideas of binary gender continue to be questioned and perhaps even undermined, it may also be the case that a mixture of king and queen culture will encourage people of all genders to engage with drag. Frottage thinks a reason why drag queens are more popular is because of their larger-than-life costumes. “Makeup is one of the things that makes drag queens more approached for televisions shows, because they’re bigger, their makeup is bigger and their hair is louder”. Of course, with enough creativity, charismatic and ludicrous masculine personas can be created. In a single drag show, Danite dressed as both “a beatnik from the 70s” that loved to dance interpretively and a “17th century prince dandy”. However the theatrical glamour of drag queen makeup has its own pull – many women choose to perform as “faux queens” and don drag queen looks to perform. Frottage started out performing as a faux queen himself. Institute perfectly describes the fun and freedom of the blending of king and queen which can itself say much about gender and binaries: “There’s nothing more empowering I’ve done in my life than wear strappy heels over hairy feet, and wear lipstick over an unshaved chin and just strut around as if I owned the place, watching everyone look at me like ‘who the fuck is this’ and then convincing them by the end of a three-and-a-half minute song to like me.” Frottage sees a more mixed style of performance as the possible future of drag, saying “we’re overdue for an androgynous resurgence” and admiring the work of drag king Spikey Van Dykey who works theatrical makeup looks into his performances.
With the success of community-minded initiatives in growing the drag king community in North America, such an effort may be needed to kick-start the scene closer to home. Casey-Cumms believes that there are opportunities out there currently for baby kings to get gigs. His first performance was at drag queen Veda Beaux Reve’s Space N Veda show at The George. He simply asked her if he could perform and she said yes. According to Casey-Cumms, “the key is not being afraid to ask and have a bit of confidence in what you’re doing”. However, the existence of mentors and a community to encourage creativity and provide a safe space to try new things and get constructive criticism is useful for the honing of any craft. Danite believes “there’s definitely a lot of hunger” and that “people want more drag kings”, but that in order to convince people to get up and perform, talent needs to be “sought out and nurtured”. Casey-Cumms describes the community of drag kings in North America as one of companionship: “There’s a great kind of brotherly love type thing, kings have it, and queens have it to a degree, but kings have a great mentality for it.” Seeing that kind of brotherly love fostered on Irish soil and a new generation of drag kings take to the stage would certainly enliven Dublin’s drag scene.
