It’s just past 11pm on a warm Wednesday night at Sircuit bar in Smith Street Collingwood, in Melbourne’s inner north. The venue is filling up with an assorted crowd of predominantly punky and boyish-looking people of all genders. There’s no shortage of fauxhawks, baseball caps and mullets in the room.
Holi Dae Knight, introducing the drag king show tonight called SlayBoy, has just taken to the stage in a green sequined dress, hot pink hair and a full moustache and bushy beard performing Cher’s Believe. It’s the last night of a three week season of SlayBoy and the crowd is here to see drag kings. The first performers are Justin Sider and Johnny Cocksville doing a version of Right Said Fred’s I’m Too Sexy – they strut wildly on stage simulating raunchiness but it’s all in good fun.
Randy Roy takes to the stage about midnight in a homemade blue Nineteen Eighty-Four-inspired boiler suit embroidered with eyeballs and beautiful fine-lined blue and red makeup on top of a white face mask and flowing ponytails performing to Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb that then morphs midtrack into Dream Police by Cheap Trick as Roy crawls and gyrates between heavy metal hair flicking and air-guitar solos.
Welcome to the world of drag kings – a movement that has a strong history in Melbourne but is now experiencing something of a DIY renaissance in Melbourne and Sydney underground bars and clubs, including a regular Sydney monthly Genesis night hosted by Magnus Opium, and regular drag king nights at the Fox hotel, UBQ and Cafe Gummo in Melbourne.
Roy says he got into drag via cosplay – after cosplaying a lot of men he realised that he especially enjoyed the transformation aspect. “Even before that, going to an all girls school meant that sometimes girls would be playing boys in drama and dance classes, and I was always the boy. And for some reason I enjoyed it a lot too – which I later realised was perhaps an early sign that I was transgender.”
Roy says the current wave of drag kings shows are mostly produced and hosted in a DIY fashion by the performers themselves.
“Are there more shows being produced and hosted by drag kings at the moment? Absolutely,” he says.
“But on the flip side, there’s less of a king presence integrated into the rest of the community, more of a divide when we used to have drag kings appear more often on lineups alongside queens.”
The term “drag king” was first cited in print in 1972 in the bookThe Queens’ Vernacular – a Gay Lexiconby Bruce Rodgers but early records of women dressing as men for performative purposes go back as far as the 7th century Tang dynasty in China, where the practice of female-men characters (orkunsheng) was common for stage performances.
In the west there are many notable performers such as British singer Vesta Tilley who performed between 1869 and 1920 as a male impersonator and the notable Stormé DeLarverie who performed in male drag throughout the 1950s and 60s and was credited as the original spark that ignited the stonewall riots in New York in June 1969.
According to Australian drag king pioneer Sexy Galexy, the local drag king scene took off in the 1990s with Sydney pioneers like Divinyl, who created DKSY (Drag King Sydney at Arq nightclub) before establishing Kingki Kingdom and Moist in the early 2000s, after she had performed for many years in Perth throughout the 1990s.
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“Back when I started out, there was no social media or mobile phones, we connected by going out and being part of our community,” Sexy Galexy says.
“The clubs, bars, and streets were alive with underground drag and creative energy, with plenty of venues to perform at. Drag kings were rare, especially ones doing glam drag like I was as far as I knew, I was the first. Women would dress up too, slipping on moustaches, becoming suave, sexy kings for the night, and with no cameras around, the scene felt private, raw, and wildly experimental.”
But it was in Melbourne that the strongest drag king scene emerged – with KingVictoria, Melbourne’s popular drag king club that ran for 11 years between 2000 and 2011, claiming to be the longest-running weekly drag king club in the world. The club hosted more than 500 distinct cabaret events, featuring thousands of lesbian, trans, non-binary and queer artists, with both local and international performers.
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According to Bumpy Favell, cofounder of King Victoria, it was while running a female-centred queer night called Club Core at Salon Kittyin Melbourne that they had a lightbulb moment realising their masc and trans identifying friends had nowhere to perform, so they incorporated a drag king competition into Salon Kitty.
“The first heat of the drag king competition at Salon Kitty was packed. It had a 150 venue capacity and over 500 people lining up outside the door.”
After the success of these competitions, Favell established the weekly King Victoria nights at the Star Hotel in Collingwood. “Anyone who wanted to be a drag king could have at least one go. People would come to the technical run through looking shy and drab and as soon as they got their moustache on they were strutting – defiant, proud, funny and sexy.”
Although encouraged to see the more underground, DIY resurgence of drag kings today, Favell has also noticed some differences in the way drag kings present themselves now.
“The main thing I’ve noticed is many drag kings now do a lot heavier drag queen style makeup. They don’t necessarily pack or bind like we religiously did. I think around 2000 when we started, lesbians and queer/trans people felt very separate from the dominant world, and we used to make fun of everything, create ridiculous stories about male tropes and heroes.”
Roy says it is up to the wider queer community to make more space for drag kings in their venue programming.
“Queer venues and events often make statements about community and diversity, but at the end of the day the performers being spotlighted are what speaks the loudest.”
Author and historian Art Simone, who has recently published the bookDrag Queens Down Under, says that despite the ongoing presence of drag kings on the fringes of queer culture, they remain relatively marginalised.
“With mainstream shows such as Drag Race still refusing to spotlight kings, they are forced to remain in the shadows of their big-wigged counterparts and keep knocking down the doors of opportunity.”