“I Learned How to Be Gay From Drag Queens”

Drag has gone from a purely entertaining form of performance to a space and a vehicle, one that lets society's marginalized groups find something like a home.

Neil and Kris are ordinary office workers in Beijing. Lately they have become a magnet for the press at home and abroad — newspapers, magazines and documentary crews all want them. What draws the attention has nothing to do with their day jobs. It is who they are at night: drag queens.

“I've always wanted to express something, and drag is a good outlet,” Neil says.

“Once you're in drag you become a different self. You say things you'd never say and do things you'd never dare, because you've turned into someone else,” Kris says.

China's Drag Queens: A Niche Within a Niche

Neil was born in Inner Mongolia; Kris is an ethnic Chinese born in Sweden. They met two years ago at a drag show, and both have been doing drag for about the same stretch of time — roughly two years.

Last November, VICE China approached them and followed them from Beijing to Lucca390, the well-known Shanghai LGBT bar, for its annual drag queen contest. The result was a documentary, Self-Made Queen (《自造皇后》).

Self-Made Queen belongs to VICE China's “Young People” series, which producer Liang Wanni says exists to document “the people and places the public overlooks, along with controversial groups and hot topics.”

Self-Made Queen went online on April 9 and has drawn 810,000 views so far.

Neil and Kris say messages came in from viewers all over the country after it aired, far more of them warm than the two had expected. “A lot of the people who wrote in aren't gay, but they told me it changed how they see gay people. There was less snark than I'd imagined. It seems I've accidentally become someone who speaks for the group,” Neil says.

“A niche within a niche” is how some people describe drag queens in China.

Part of the attention on Neil and Kris comes from the fact that drag queens are a rare group. The other part comes from RuPaul's Drag Race, the American reality show that aired in 2009 and made drag popular all over again.

Without that show, plenty of people would still have no idea what a drag queen is.

RuPaul's Drag Race borrows from shows like America's Next Top Model and Project Runway, swapping in drag queens as the contestants. RuPaul, the famous American drag queen, hosts; it is now in its tenth season. The show has shaped every drag queen, Kris and Neil included — both watch it faithfully.

As the ratings climbed, drag returned to mainstream American entertainment, and bars began competing to book its queens.

Two years in drag counts as a thin résumé in the United States. In China it makes you a veteran. Even in Beijing, no more than 10 drag queens perform at any one time; on the worst nights, Neil says, he and Kris were the only two on the bill.

“I think it's too early to talk about drag culture in China. People haven't even fully accepted gay people — how are they going to accept a culture that is niche among gay people?” Neil says.

Places and chances to perform are scarce too. “Before 2009 I never saw a drag queen in Beijing. I'd seen cross-dressing performances, which are also a kind of drag, but still not the Western kind,” Kris says.

Cross-dressing on the Chinese stage does put men in women's clothes, but it leans toward theatrical convention: in the early days women were barred from acting, all the players were men, and men in female roles grew into a form of its own.

In the American sense, drag is built on LGBTQ+ culture and on what it says about gender; those meanings are part of the form itself.

A Riot That Changed What Drag Meant to LGBTQ+ People

In the small hours of June 28, 1969, police raided Stonewall, a well-known American bar, once again and arrested gay patrons at will.

Gay Americans had lived under pressure for years, and the accumulated grievance turned that night into a fight. Someone threw the first brick at the police, setting off the Stonewall riots, the event that changed the gay rights movement and the first time in American history that gay people fought back against government persecution.

Who threw that brick is still disputed. The most common account credits Marsha P. Johnson, a Black drag queen. “She” started the riot.

At pride marches held every year around the world you can still find drag queens in the procession, or speaking at the moments that matter. In the movement they have always held the place of spiritual leaders.

George Chauncey, a history professor at Columbia University, has spent years on gender questions and on the history of LGBTQ+ life and urban development.

His 1995 book Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World describes organized drag performances turning up in American bars in the late 1990s. “Gay people created a culture through which to cultivate a collective identity,” Chauncey explains.

In 2003 Leila Rupp and Verta Taylor also published a study of drag queens, Drag Queens at the 801 Cabaret, which says: “Drag culture has gone from a purely entertaining form of performance to a space and a vehicle, one that lets society's marginalized groups find something like a home. Drag is also a culture that can break through many gender constraints at once.”

For Kris, drag is a performing art that also carries a reading of gender. “We're not just being funny. We really do think women are powerful, so this is our way of saying it.” Doing drag has raised his respect for women, he adds: “I honestly can't imagine walking in high heels all day.”

“Drag is a culture because it has so many rules, so many things you can argue about. It's a whole: not just the makeup and the performance but the personality, the attitude. It's nowhere near as simple as liking women's clothes,” Neil says.

RuPaul has told interviewers that drag is an attempt at a new identity, a way out of the frame of the one you started with.

“That Day's Show Was My Best Work”

Since late 2016, Neil and Kris have performed in drag once a month at Migas, a bar in Beijing's Sanlitun, usually near the end of the month. They are never paid; the shows raise money for the nonprofit Ji'ande Counseling Center. It is also where the two first met.

On December 8, 2017, they came back to Migas.

By then Neil had been a drag queen for almost exactly a year. He first got into drag on December 11, 2016 — dressed up, but did not perform. He was still fumbling with the basics; his breasts were made of wadded paper.

Looking back on his shows, Neil calls December 8 his best work. He wore a handmade silver foil bodysuit and played a sex robot.

The costume came out of “Sexy Robot,” the signature work of the Japanese illustrator Hajime Sorayama. Beyond the surreal, futuristic surface, what matters in it is what it says about the female body and desire — the hallmark of Sorayama's work, and the part that pulls Neil in.

To play a sex robot and bring out the female silhouette, Neil worked in two materials, silver cardboard and clear acrylic. He cut the top to nip in at the waist and flare slightly at the hem, put leggings and silver heels below, coned the bust, and topped it off with a translucent hat.

“I'm always thinking about how to put these things — designers' work — onto Frozen Lolita. Drag burns money, but I'm a handmade drag queen, so it's cheap. I can turn a garbage bag into a dress,” Neil says. His particular talent is making unremarkable material look lavish on stage.

Frozen Lolita is Neil's stage persona: a woman who is sharp and stylish, who keeps everyone at a distance, mysterious and untouchable.

“Most drag queens like to show a woman at her most glamorous. I like sad women — maybe deep down I'm a sad person. When I perform it's as if I'm in a vacuum, as if everything around me has vanished,” Neil says in another documentary, Before the Flowers Bloom (《花开之前》).

Neil keeps a notebook filled with drawings of every kind of woman, the source of Frozen Lolita's looks. “I'm obsessed with Japanese animation — the Barbies, the geishas, the towering heels.” The rest of his imagination, he thinks, comes from the small Inner Mongolian town he grew up in, “that cold place with grass everywhere.” “The way nature makes things is beautiful.”

He lip-syncs Kylie Minogue's Speakerphone to his own choreography, folding a robot's stiff movements into the dance.

The form is usually called lip-syncing, and it lives on precise mouth shapes and on pushing a song's emotion to the extreme. Lip-sync numbers, impersonation and comedy are the staples of a drag show: inventive, over the top, tongue-in-cheek, and clever about fusing elements that clash.

Neil taught himself to dance, in his own bedroom. “When I'm home alone I put music on in the bedroom and imagine I'm on a stage, imagine I'm a diva.”

On stage, playing someone else to the hilt is a feeling Neil cannot let go of. Neither is the crowd pressed around him.

“I love that feeling of something coming off one hundred percent — especially when I've worked out that the audience will scream at a certain beat, and they really do scream. Then I'm happy. Though usually all it takes is doing something outrageous and everyone laughs.”

From Drag Queens, I Learned How to Be Gay

Neil and Kris both taught themselves. Besides studying foreign queens' performances online, they run everything past each other before a show — makeup, costume, music, choreography, every piece of it open to debate.

“A three-minute drag number can take months of preparation and thinking,” Neil says.

Kris was first fired up by RuPaul's Drag Race, but at the time Beijing had almost no drag performances and no way in. Only in 2016, through a friend, did he hear about a chance to perform and start down this road.

Krystal de Canteur is Kris's persona, nothing like Frozen Lolita's cold glamour. She comes across as extravagant and retro.

“She's a rich lady, very glamorous, sexy on occasion. She's always at the private parties only invited guests can attend, eats and drinks nothing but the best, and drinks plenty, so whenever you run into her she's a little woozy,” Kris says. The things Krystal does he would never do himself — flirting with strangers on the street, for one. “The real me wouldn't.”

Last November, when Neil decided to take the sex robot costume to Shanghai for the national drag queen contest, Kris picked a stately gold gown, a translucent scarf across the shoulders, an outsized bouffant wig, and a small basket of flowers in hand.

The night before the contest, Kris joined Neil in Shanghai and they went over the next day's makeup, costumes and numbers. Kris sounded worried: “We do perform in Beijing, but we're not like the Shanghai queens. They perform every week, they have more experience than we do, it's a part-time job for them. We're just playing at it.”

The Beijing circle really is smaller. At this stage, Neil says, “there's basically nothing commercial in Beijing” — meaning venues for drag — “it's still a very small circle. And I'm not doing this purely for fun; even just bringing my gay friends some joy is worth it.”

Kris says their drag queen group chat on WeChat has a hundred-odd people in it, but most of them stopped talking long ago.

Since Self-Made Queen aired, Neil and Kris say a stream of messages has come in from people who want to become drag queens — people who had no idea, before, where in China you could do this kind of performance.

That looked like an opening, a way to make drag known to more people. On April 18, Kris and Neil ran a free drag workshop at the hair salon Kris owns.

The salon was closed for the day, and people kept arriving: men who wanted to become drag queens, ten in all. Apart from Neil and Kris, the other eight were doing drag for the first time.

The lesson was on the foundation of the whole thing, makeup. It ran from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., nine hours straight. RuPaul played in the salon while Kris and Neil talked about their own experience and everyone worked on their faces.

“Drag makeup is free,” Kris told the beginners.

Neil is cheerful whenever he thinks back on that day. “Probably one of my favorite days in the past few years,” he says. It was like girls gathering at someone's home to pick out bags and clothes together; the drag queens had a group of their own now.

Two years in, Neil says the performing has taught him more than styling. “It taught me how to be gay. As a queen, she holds nothing back about herself — that's why everyone loves drag queens.”

Cover image from VICE China