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Thursday, February 03, 2022
The inspirational rise of drag kings: ‘We are smashing down doors left, right and centre!’
Theatre | The Guardian: In an east London pub, the Glory, Adam All is pulling bras out from the pockets of his purple suit as he sings on stage. Cheeky, fun and dapper, he wears a glittery waistcoat over a gold satin shirt, his pink bow tie matching the shade of his rectangular glasses.
3 comments:
Jeremy Pitzer
said...
This is so exciting, we as a society do not have enough Drag Kings around. And if you've seen performers like Landon Cider you know that we are missing out on the absolute best sort of drag. Drag Queens are treasures, but they encompass only around half of the pop culture spectrum, imagine all the characters going to waste because we need an abundance of kings to put together numbers for the likes of icons like Beetlejuice and Jack Sparrow and Gandalf and Mr. Bean and James Bond. Obviously Drag Kings are already doing these things but we NEED NEED NEED this new wave of them to take up the mantle and bring drag kinging further in public view. I hope that the scene grows in queer spaces before it becomes mainstream but I hope that one day soon drag kings are able to make extreme bank in the way that some queens are.
This is so cool. I have seen videos of drag kings before but never nearly as many as I have of drag queens. I love that the drag world is now starting to fill up with more kings. The importance of both cannot be understated. Not just for entertainment, although drag shows are SO much fun, they are also super important to the LGBTQ community. The world needs more drag kings and I am 100% here for the growing number of them. I also love the idea of a drag show with both Kings and Queen. I think the mix of both energies could be so much fun and I would love to see it. I also love the point made in the article that Kings have a harder medium to work with, so to speak. The way that masculinity is seen by many people as a toxic harmful thing makes it so much harder for drag Kings to do what they do. But I love that they take that toxic trait and turn it around into something fun and not harmful. Hats off to the Kings and I can't wait to see more of them in the mainstream.
The article touches on the drastic difference between the popularity of Drag Queens vs. Drag Kings. I find this note particularly interesting, because although Drag as a concept is a regular concept in my life, it is interesting to me that I never really considered the idea of a Drag King. I find this imbalance extremely strange, and although I agree that to an extent it is because of the popularity of shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race, which have encouraged the development of Drag Queens as a culture, I find it strange that this focus has created an attention deficit on the side of Drag Kings. I feel that Drag Kings should be an important feature of modern culture as, in the article, it discusses how these Drag Kings are given the opportunity to discuss more difficult aspects of the masculine agenda. In general, I hope that Drag Kings are given the appropriate spotlight and appreciation in the near future, as I feel that they are equally important to the progression of our 21st century culture as Drag Queens, and yet they receive merely a fraction of the support.
3 comments:
This is so exciting, we as a society do not have enough Drag Kings around. And if you've seen performers like Landon Cider you know that we are missing out on the absolute best sort of drag. Drag Queens are treasures, but they encompass only around half of the pop culture spectrum, imagine all the characters going to waste because we need an abundance of kings to put together numbers for the likes of icons like Beetlejuice and Jack Sparrow and Gandalf and Mr. Bean and James Bond. Obviously Drag Kings are already doing these things but we NEED NEED NEED this new wave of them to take up the mantle and bring drag kinging further in public view. I hope that the scene grows in queer spaces before it becomes mainstream but I hope that one day soon drag kings are able to make extreme bank in the way that some queens are.
This is so cool. I have seen videos of drag kings before but never nearly as many as I have of drag queens. I love that the drag world is now starting to fill up with more kings. The importance of both cannot be understated. Not just for entertainment, although drag shows are SO much fun, they are also super important to the LGBTQ community. The world needs more drag kings and I am 100% here for the growing number of them. I also love the idea of a drag show with both Kings and Queen. I think the mix of both energies could be so much fun and I would love to see it. I also love the point made in the article that Kings have a harder medium to work with, so to speak. The way that masculinity is seen by many people as a toxic harmful thing makes it so much harder for drag Kings to do what they do. But I love that they take that toxic trait and turn it around into something fun and not harmful. Hats off to the Kings and I can't wait to see more of them in the mainstream.
The article touches on the drastic difference between the popularity of Drag Queens vs. Drag Kings. I find this note particularly interesting, because although Drag as a concept is a regular concept in my life, it is interesting to me that I never really considered the idea of a Drag King. I find this imbalance extremely strange, and although I agree that to an extent it is because of the popularity of shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race, which have encouraged the development of Drag Queens as a culture, I find it strange that this focus has created an attention deficit on the side of Drag Kings. I feel that Drag Kings should be an important feature of modern culture as, in the article, it discusses how these Drag Kings are given the opportunity to discuss more difficult aspects of the masculine agenda. In general, I hope that Drag Kings are given the appropriate spotlight and appreciation in the near future, as I feel that they are equally important to the progression of our 21st century culture as Drag Queens, and yet they receive merely a fraction of the support.
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