Yet as the participants in the Behind the Zip forum put it, further marginalisation has come from many drag queens, the male owners of gay venues and some of their patrons. Because how dare we make fun of men, right?” The stories were about how marginalised drag-king performers have been: not just in mainstream popular entertainment, but in drag-queen and gay male-dominated venues.Īs drag king Manzer noted in an interview with SBS’ Joseph Earp back in 2019, provides context: “I think that the popular conception of drag queens, in their heightened, exaggerated femmeness, is a lot easier for the non-queer world to swallow than a woman playing up an exaggerated portrayal of a man. In 2019, cultural researcher Kerryn Drysdale chronicled what they called ‘the rise and fall of a lesbian social scene’ in Sydney in the first decade of the millennium.Īt the Behind the Zip Q&A forum on Saturday, plenty of stories were told which illuminated why drag-king performance struggled to gain a firm footing even as drag-queen performance gathered an unstoppable momentum. Much of the exhibition charts the development of an Australian drag-king scene in the first decade of the millennium due to the gutsy determination of pioneers such as Di-Vinyl, Galexy and Bumpy Favell, the former the founder of the DKSY drag king competition in Sydney in 1999, and the latter the co-founder of the weekly Club King Victoria night in Melbourne that ran between 20. The walls were covered with a multitude of photographs and memorabilia sourced by Sexy Galexy and other long-time performers in Australian drag king scenes. The performances served as a sequinned-cum-pheromone-laced accompaniment to the exhibition Behind the Zip, on the Australian history of drag kings, currently showing at Chrissie Cotter Gallery in Sydney’s Inner West.Ī crowd packed the gallery at the opening last Thursday night, treated to performances by Rock Hard and Sexy Galexy. I think nearly everyone in the front rows blacked out for a moment and then came to their senses and wondered what had just happened). ( Swing’s Instagram profile describes them as ‘Dandy – Romantic – Suave – Smooth – Charming’, which doesn’t quite capture their potency. Later on, there was Sydney’s Mister Monster and the incomparable Jayvante Swing, the R’n’B/soul crooner who slayed the room with a wave of sex-god charisma. The other performers included Queensland’s Tricky Boombang and Victoria’s Lance De Boyle, Jerome, Motherfucka MC and Scon Bott, the latter dressed in ACDC denim cutoff jacket and 1980s mullet. The host was Sexy Galexy, a disco-meets-Liberacesque Glamourboi whose bulgingly skin-tight gold trousers and bespangled jackets stretched across his muscled-tending-to-paunchy torso gleamed brighter than the firmament. The stage in the basement of the Imperial Erskineville was overtaken by eight legendary Australian drag kings on Saturday night.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |