“My drag tries to play with the working-class masculinity I grew up around and also how that’s weaponised by the political right. Rimmerson sets out to dissect British culture at its worst – a journey in national identity, but with the drag artist touch. I specifically wanted to dress as Tommy Robinson to create something that was firstly playful and stupid to bring joy to a horrible experience, but secondly to show queer resistance to fascism.” “For me, doing drag was partially about wanting to play with that kind of masculinity. I did some media work around it and got hit with quite a lot of death and rape threats from angry keyboard fascists,” says the drag king Tommy Rimmerson, who grew up in a small town in the Midlands. “In 2019, I was part of a protest where we created a giant cartoon character of Donald Trump to fly in London and show him he wasn’t welcome on his visit to the UK. Drag helped me rediscover and embrace my masculine side.” As someone with Black heritage, I was always viewed in a more masculine manner than my white peers. “I went to an overwhelmingly white girls’ school in the countryside where the homophobia was overt and unapologetic. With a background in mental health social work, delving into drag at the age of 24 was always going to be a world reserved for out of hours. But it still felt thrilling to morph into him,” says Jangles, who spent years dreaming about the freedoms that London could offer while growing up in Norfolk.Īs with most drag kings, he says that it’s near impossible to make his artistry a full-time career. “The first iteration of Beau was an awkward, almost grubby-looking fellow. Paak and Stonewall icon Stormé DeLarverie, drag king Beau Jangles is modelling his persona on the cis men who inspire him and the civil rights activists who have paved the way. Pulling inspiration from the worlds of Cab Calloway, Anderson. Recently, he exposed the inappropriate behaviour of “entitled women who touch drag kings during boozy brunches”. While Silver’s success has come a long way in just a few years, it’s his commitment to making the scene fairer and safer that shines through.
We’ve built a really beautiful community of people who follow and support us.” “I host and curate Lèse Majesté, an all-drag king cabaret that centres trans and non-binary people. Now he’s part of the beating heart of the capital’s drag king scene. In 2017, Silver attended Man Up!, a drag competition at The Glory pub in east London and a year later, his journey began as part of a Queerlesque course with Rubyyy Jones. Having grown up in Malaga, Spain, his first forays into drag didn’t come until his early thirties, when he started to carve his own path through his nuanced depictions of personalities like Freddie Mercury, Elton John and Village People. ‘Drag kings I really feel are pushing forward to bring more awareness to the female-bodied and female-identified side of the scene, which is so often marginalized,’ states All.“Getting into drag was part revelation and part liberation for my own queer and trans identity,” says London-based Prinx Silver. ‘The world does treat you differently based on what you’re perceived as,’ Phallic states. Why do we have to label stuff?’ Female marginalization ‘What is femininity? Why are those things that we label objects, with people, with colors. He’s given me a voice and strength in my regular life that I didn’t have before,’ says Phallic. ‘Zayn, my character, has been manspreading into my life. ‘Drag definitely helped my confidence,’ All says. ‘There’s something about standing in the middle of a stage in front of hundreds of people and just being like, “yes, I am here, I am worth something, you’re going to pay attention to me right now,”’ Phallic explains. ‘It’s also about expressing parts of myself that I had to hide otherwise.’ ‘It’s about expression as much as it is about breaking down gender stereotypes,’ All says. And there’s things that I would do on stage that I would never do in my woman life.’ Freedom of expression ‘As a person who walks around and gets seen as a woman, I have all of my hang ups that I have from living in a patriarchal society. ‘I found all these different sides to myself that I didn’t sort of know existed,’ Phallic says.
‘It was a huge turning point because it was so liberating.’ ‘The first time I officially put a suit on with the mind to dress in drag, I just turned 18,’ recalls drag king Adam All. Phallic was inspired to pursue drag after seeing a drag king show. ‘I first did drag about ten months ago,’ says drag king Zayn Phallic. In this video by Stylist, two women explain why they became drag kings as they transform using makeup. Drag queens are a huge part of LGBTI culture-look no further than GSN’s own extensive coverage of RuPaul’s Drag Race.īut drag kings also exist.