"The United Queendom" for Wizz Air Magazine
Liverpool-based drag queen The Vivienne recently won the first UK edition of RuPaul’s Drag Race, putting a renewed spotlight on the art form that’s thrived in the city for decades. We sent Florence Derrick to find out how up-and-coming performers are diversifying the scene
WORDS BY FLORENCE DERRICK
PORTRAITS BY JAN KLOS
originally appeared on WiZZ
Choriza May switches on the TV and gasps theatrically, teetering in her stilettos. It’s a news report on the UK’s vote to withdraw from the European Union. She flicks through the channels in wide-eyed, gaping-mouthed shock, before turning to her audience of several hundred spectators and smoothing down her royal-blue, velvet dress. Gazing out from beneath heavy false lashes and a brunette beehive that looks straight from a Pedro Almodóvar movie, she launches into a lip sync to Jennifer Hudon’s stirring Dreamgirls ballad. “There’s no way I’m living without you,” she implores. “I’m staying, and you’re gonna love me.” The crowd jumps to its feet and erupts into applause.
This is drag queen Choriza’s winning performance at Liverpool’s first Big Drag Pageant – a contest for 16 queens and kings that started in Brighton and launched in the northern city last November. It’s the latest event to spotlight an art form that’s long thrived in the port city responsible for beloved drag queen Lily Savage, as well as the gender-twisting Dead or Alive singer Pete Burns. There’s a diverse range of performers and outfits on show at the pageant: beards and hairy legs are paired with pleather miniskirts and frumpy leotards, in a raucous, lightly political mishmash that feels distinctly northern English.
Recently, Liverpool was put firmly back on the drag map thanks to local prodigy The Vivienne, the winning queen of RuPaul’s Drag Race UK in November. It was the first British edition of the Emmy Award-winning American show that’s seen 11 seasons so far – but the less-polished BBC version was peppered with crude slang and rough-and-ready Margaret Thatcher impressions. “We’re all common as muck,” third-placed queen Baga Chipz told Digital Spy. “[US queens] are all quite pageant-y and we're like, ‘I want a ciggie and a kebab’.”
Though her polished appearance is in line with US Drag Race tropes, The Vivienne’s raucous personality is more typical of the down-to-earth comedy queens that Liverpool’s known for in its many cabaret clubs: The Lisbon, Kitty’s Show Bar and Superstar Boudoir. These fit into a wider scene in a city that claims to have an LGBTQ+ population equivalent to San Francisco’s, and has a roster of gay clubs in its Stanley Street quarter to match. You’ll catch resident queens on any given night at OMG, Heaven and G-Bar, all nightclubs a couple of minutes’ walk from each other.
Choriza May on stage, Kitty's Showbar, Liverpool, December 2019
But a few decades ago, Liverpool’s drag clubs were hidden from plain sight, although the portside setting brought in punters. “In the 60s and 70s, seafarers arriving in Liverpool would use polari as a language to get by without straight people knowing what they were talking about,” says Kitty Litter, the drag queen owner of the rainbow-painted Kitty’s Show Bar. “When I started performing in the 80s, queens looked more like your auntie or your mother than a superstar. Even now my whole costume can go in a carrier bag and no one will be any the wiser.” With tattooed, hairy legs poking out from a dinner lady-style tabard and purple, scrawled-on eyebrows, Kitty’s the northern-English antithesis of the preened, American queen pedalled by US icon RuPaul.
According to Kitty, the popularity of drag performance took a nosedive in between the 80s and today as tastes and social acceptance shifted. “Years ago, everyone wanted to be Lily Savage,” she says. “But then all of a sudden we had Graham Norton and Alan Carr – camp comics that didn’t have to be in a frock. Drag went down because camp male comics became more accepted.” Today, however, there’s clearly a renewed appetite for Kitty’s outrageous, gender-shifting persona. She performs at least three nights a week at her eponymous show bar, often to celebrities like (most recently) Little Mix.
For local queens, it’s the RuPaul’s Drag Race phenomenon – along with the emergence of social media – that brought drag back to Liverpool, in all its forms. “With the internet, there’s such a big platform,” says Choriza, who’s originally from Valencia, Spain and now lives in Newcastle, where she first performed at the 2019 Drag Idol competition, and won. “If you perform in a bar, 50 people might see you, but post a video on Instagram and thousands will see it all over the world. It’s become such a window into drag. And then drag race has obviously helped.”
Even though The Vivienne was only crowned Drag Race UK champion a month previously, Choriza can already see its impact on the northern drag scene. “It’s making everyone step up their game,” she says. “Everyone who’s been comfortably doing drag for years is now thinking, this is a job that can make me a superstar. Local queens are getting so much better, so much quicker. It’s helping smaller scenes, like Liverpool’s, say hi! We are fierce too.” Kitty agrees that drag queens have never been household names in Liverpool before. “Drag Race has put drag on the doorstep,” she says. “Now, if you went to a working men’s club and mentioned The Vivienne or RuPaul, everyone would know who they are.”
Pretentious Dross during transformation, Kiitty's Showbar, Liverpool, December 2019
Kitty and Choriza worry, however, that the preened, photo-ready version of drag promoted by RuPaul risks pigeonholing performers even as it makes the scene more accessible. Certain local promoters are setting out to address that. “Drag Race has done a lot for drag as a venture, but it does suggest that queens have to sit within this very defined box,” claims Pretentious Dross, a performer and producer at queer cabaret night Eat Me + Preach, in Liverpool’s central Baltic Triangle. “They’re predominantly white male. There are so many people outside of the gender boxes – and the tradition comes from there, so let’s celebrate it.”
Dross draws from her PhD in performance art to blend drag with experimental live entertainment, mixing 80s horror movie tropes with new romantic fashion. “When you go back to the origin of the word, ‘queer’ means oddness, something that doesn’t fit with the norm,” says Dross. “Eat Me + Preach provides a radical, queer platform for artists with accessibility issues, who are fighting against ableism, who are gender non-binary or trans – people who don’t generally get a gig in traditional drag venues and who don’t fit in the Drag Race box.”
The emergence of the Big Drag Pageant, while less radical than the Eat Me cabaret nights (Dross has been known to do a Silence of the Lambs-themed act, where she rubs lotion on chicken skin and then wipes it on her face) shows another side to Liverpool’s diversifying drag scene, which is increasingly no longer confined to LGBTQ+ spaces. Freelance events producer and drag promoter Tom Barrie – who recently started performing in drag under the name Dame Fanny de Faux – was tasked with organising the pageant following the successful, family-friendly drag brunch he held during Liverpool Pride with his fledgling, drag entertainment company Tuck Shop.
Pretentious Dross, Kiitty's Showbar, Liverpool, December 2019
“I wanted Tuck Shop to be all-inclusive,” he says. “Until now, drag has normally been the domain of a nightclub or late-night TV. The response to our afternoon drag brunch from the younger audience was amazing. Some people view the drag scene as quite a frivolous thing – a couple of boys who just want to put on makeup and dresses, but it’s far from that. It’s a proper art form and it has the power to help younger people discuss issues of gender identity.”
Liverpool’s drag scene is on an upward trajectory. New cabaret venue On Point opened in December, run by local queen Miss Tiara, while Kitty’s Show Bar will be adding on a hotel in time for Pride in July. It’s a microcosm of the growing popularity of drag performance across the UK: Europe’s largest drag convention Drag World launched in London in 2017, while the first Drag Fest UK festival hits London and Manchester this summer. But for Choriza, events like the Big Drag Pageant are rather a microcosm of Liverpudlian spirit.
“Liverpool has one of the most inclusive scenes I’ve ever seen,” she says. “It’s embraced here that everyone is different. And the history of live and comedy acts here means that they are all-round entertainers, with singing and comedy, the full package. That makes them powerful.”
Barrie and Dross’s diversifying initiatives can only add to that power. “When you play with gender, you’ve crossed a cultural boundary that means you can get away with almost anything,” says Dross. “But for an art form that is already so subversive, we should still be doing more for inclusivity.”
Detail, Kiitty's Showbar, Liverpool, December 2019