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IN TOUCH – Drag Queens and Kings

TX:Ìý 18.01.2022Ìý 2040-2100

PRESENTER:Ìý ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý PETER WHITE

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PRODUCER:Ìý ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý BETH HEMMINGS

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White

Good evening.Ìý Rather like sports, there are few artforms visually impaired people haven’t got involved with and drag, currently enjoying something of a mainstream boom, is no exception.Ìý The term drag is thought to be an acronym of ‘dressed resembling a girl’.Ìý It’s thought the term dates back to the 16th and early 17th centuries, during Shakespearean times when male theatre actors would also play the female roles because women weren’t allowed on the stage.Ìý A drag queen called Princess Seraphina, whose real name was John Cooper, is reckoned to be the first recognisable drag queen in English history, dating back to 1732.

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Okay, history lesson over but, as you can tell, drag has been around for a long time.Ìý Today, it reaches far beyond just drag queens – there are drag kings, club kids, performers exploring androgyny, celebrity impersonations, the list goes on.Ìý Admittedly, I didn’t understand what many of these terms meant, so, I went to learn more from some visually impaired drag performers.Ìý I’ve been talking to Jake Sawyers, aka drag queen Venetia Blind – get it?Ìý But first, to Amelia Lander-Cavallo who has a drag king persona called Tito Bone.

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They began by explaining to me a bit more about the types of drag performers that flourish today.

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Lander-Cavallo

Probably a lot of people have an awareness of things like RuPaul’s Drag Race, which is on ±«Óãtv and will probably have a decent idea, even if they don’t know that they’ve encountered it, of what a drag queen is.Ìý But I think a lot of people assume that drag tends to mean a cisgendered man dressing up as a woman.Ìý And it can mean that but it can also mean a lot of other things.Ìý Drag in its more kind of broad definition is a performance of gender.Ìý Anybody of any gender identity can be a drag performer of any gender identity.Ìý So, by that I mean you can have cisgendered women be drag queens, you can have cisgendered men be drag kings, you can have people who have drag that they wouldn’t define as any one type of gender and might be kind of more androgynous or might be just a really big mash up of all of it.Ìý And I think that the UK drag scene, once you go just a little bit underneath what’s known on the mainstream, kind of avenues of finding it and what you end up finding on TV, we have a really just like – a plethora of that type of drag.Ìý We have a huge drag queen and drag king scene in the UK.Ìý You can get drag performers like me who like to sing and be funny, you can get drag performers who are contemporary dancers or ballet dancers and do these big beautiful emotionally kind of moving performances.Ìý You can get puppeteers and clowns, you can get like – it’s kind of everywhere.

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White

So, what I was going to ask you is what does drag enable you to do?Ìý I mean what can you do with that that you can’t do with other performance?

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Lander-Cavallo

That’s a very subjective question, so I would never dare answer that for other drag performers.Ìý I have a character that’s a drag king.Ìý So, what I can tell you – it’s done for me.Ìý On a personal level, it’s helped me figure out ways to situate myself in my own gender identity.Ìý Drag is one of those places where I could go – well, what am I uncomfortable with and what am I comfortable with.Ìý It gives you an ability to find skills and things that maybe you’re actually quite good at that you didn’t know.Ìý So, as soon as I put myself in a more masculine presenting space and I could come at it with what I sort of was interpreting as the confidence of male privilege, I found out that I was really funny.Ìý And now that I’m really comfortable as my drag king persona – Tito Bone – I’m like yeah, I can do stand-up, that’s fine, I just do it as Tito.

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White

So, would I be right to say that it enables you to play games with gender to some extent?

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Lander-Cavallo

Yeah.Ìý Yeah, I mean that’s definitely one way to put it and it’s also enabled me to celebrate my gender queerness.Ìý There’s a lot of different flavours of non-binary and I’m one of those people that will some days feel quite masculine and some days feel quite feminine and some days feel like neither and some days feel like both.Ìý And I can do all that as Tito in a way that feels much more liberating and also much more comfortable than I can as Amelia.

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White

But as you said, it’s on ±«Óãtv television now, it’s not that long ago that a lot of it was underground.

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Lander-Cavallo

Yeah, and I would say there’s still a lot of it that is underground.Ìý If anybody listening is an active fan of things like Drag Race, I mean it’s not presented super accessibly, as far as I know, there’s no audio description for it, which is unendingly frustrating.Ìý But if that’s what you’re mainly consuming it is worth you doing some research because that is one teeny tiny sliver of it and it is, without getting too into it, it has a lot of problems.Ìý There are a lot of issues with who gets to be on those types of platforms and why.Ìý There’s a whole kind of internal politics around it, that is not to say don’t watch the show but it is worth knowing that drag is much bigger, much fuller and much richer than that particular show.

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White

Right.Ìý Let’s talk a bit more about what you do specifically.Ìý I mean you are one of the founders of Quiplash, which is an organisation, as it says on your website, it brings together the creative arts and queer disabled people.Ìý Give us a sort of overview of what Quiplash do and the sort of thing that it gives you the freedom to do.

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Lander-Cavallo

Quiplash is – I mean right now we’re calling ourself a project, we are in the midst of setting up as a proper business and we’re going to set up as a social enterprise of some sort.Ìý Our goal was to and is to make space and take up space for queer and disabled people.Ìý I run this with my wife, who’s named Al Lander-Cavallo, we both are situated in the disabled and neurodiverse umbrellas and found that we couldn’t find any spaces that would cater for all sides of us.Ìý So, if we’d go to a queer night, it wasn’t accessible for either of us and if we’d go to disability led stuff, we’d have to mask bits of our queerness.Ìý We could keep waiting for people to make space for us or we can just do it ourselves.Ìý And so, we started in 2019 with a show called Unsightly Drag and we got myself and, I think, seven other blind and visually impaired queer people together, paired them up with a couple of prominent drag performers on the London drag scene and a couple of access consultants and there was a sort of trade.Ìý So, the sighted drag performers learned how to work with blind and visually impaired people and embed things like audio description into their work and the blind and visually impaired people learned how to do drag.Ìý And it went really well.Ìý And then from there we found, very quickly, that people were interested in what we were doing.Ìý And so, I, prior to Quiplash, had a background in training people and consulting on access, and so we found it really useful to kind of funnel that thing that Al and I respectively did independently in our own work into Quiplash.Ìý So, now Quiplash has a training and consulting branch where we can support people to learn how to make their work more accessible, we also do generally disability awareness training and then we also create shows – we create arts, we create performances.

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White

For people who’ve not seen much drag, and certainly not seen you, if people come and watch, what do they see?

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Lander-Cavallo

So, if they’re watching me, specifically, so I always introduce myself as Tito Bone, your average blind non-binary bisexual drag king, obviously.Ìý I will always do an audio description of myself first and foremost, everything that I do as Tito has integrated audio description but I’ll describe what I look like and what I’m wearing, which is usually a lot of shiny stuff.Ìý And then I will do a variety of different things.Ìý So, the act that I did for Unsightly Drag, that is often the one that gets most requested, is me singing a love song to my white cane, to Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You.

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White

One of the performers in that show is Jake Sawyers, aka visually impaired drag queen Venetia Blind. ÌýFirst of all, just explain how you got involved in all this.

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Sawyers

I met Amelia through Extant…

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White

That’s the theatre company who – you’re sort of under their umbrella, to some extent.

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Sawyers

Yes, blind and visually impaired led theatre based in London.Ìý And we were all paired up with a mentor, someone who’s visually impaired who’s already working in the industry, who’s already doing it, who’s already fabulous.Ìý And I was paired with Amelia and it was a match made in heaven.Ìý Amelia told me that they were starting Quiplash and they wanted to put on a show featuring blind and visually impaired drag performers and they asked me to be involved.Ìý And I was like absolutely, because I just had my drag debut in Cardiff, so it was really coincidental that that all happened, it was written in the stars.

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White

Well, let’s just get a little flavour of the Unsightly Drag show that we’ve been talking about.

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Clip – Unsightly Drag

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White

You moved to Cardiff from, I think, a small town, I mean did you know much about the drag scene before you went?

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Sawyers

I knew nothing about the drag scene, to be quite honest.Ìý I grew up in Port Talbot, which is in South Wales, steel working town, no queer scene whatsoever.Ìý Then I moved to Cardiff in 2017. ÌýI’d just started watching RuPaul’s Drag Race, the United States version and thought – wow, this is completely new and is blowing my mind, that’s something I would definitely like to try in the future – dressing up, makeup, being funny – who wouldn’t want to try that once in their life?Ìý And then I moved to Cardiff and discovered the local queer scene there – the drag scene.Ìý So, I was watching it on TV and then scratching the surface even more by taking in the local scene and sort of learning the extent of drag and how broad it is, like Amelia said earlier.

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White

So, this is the moment I probably need to ask you a bit from my ignorance about RuPaul’s Drag Race, can you just explain a bit about that?

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Sawyers

RuPaul’s Drag Race is a reality TV competition show…

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Theme tune – RuPaul’s Drag Race

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Sawyers

It was started in the United States, I think, in about 2009?Ìý Somewhere around there.Ìý And they go on and they compete to earn the title of the next drag superstar.Ìý And there’s challenges, there’s runway looks, there’s talent competitions and compete to win a big sum of money and the title.Ìý And it’s recently been brought to the UK and is now showing off some of the drag scene in the UK.Ìý It’s a great show but you definitely need to take it with a pinch of salt, I personally love it and it’s what got me into drag but it’s quite new on the scene, the show is – drag has been going way before RuPaul’s Drag Race.

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White

Quiplash is primarily a visually impaired organisation, I’d just like to know how your drag specifically interacts with your visual impairment.

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Sawyers

So, over my time, I’m a freelance actor, stand-up comedian, drag queen, and that doesn’t always pay a lot of money, so I got into consulting about visual impairment which I love and I think it’s really important but it wasn’t really fulfilling me creatively and I wanted to spread the message about visual awareness.Ìý So, my drag character, Venetia Blind, sings parody songs about the lived experience, mostly for me, really, just to express myself and how my relationship with my sight impairment but then people also learning things while having a good time.Ìý I sort of compare it to feeding vegetables to children, you sort of sneak them in there, you don’t know the visual awareness trainings’ there but you leave and you definitely learn something about what it’s like living with not as much sight as everyone else.

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White

That’s a good analogy.Ìý Just a bit of the practical side – Amelia, drag makeup can be pretty elaborate, I understand, have you had to develop tricks, techniques in order to do that as well as it needs to be done in a full-on performance?

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Lander-Cavallo

Yeah, the makeup and the aesthetics generally of drag felt like the biggest barriers to me, when I started.Ìý So, my face takes at least an hour to do.Ìý I’ve really made a template.Ìý So, I’ve had people say that they’re really impressed with how professional my makeup looks and it is because I kind of do the same thing over and over again.

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White

And do you have enough sight to do that yourself or do you have to get somebody to help?

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Lander-Cavallo

It’s a mix.Ìý So, I can see a little bit of it.Ìý So, one of the reasons – I really like bright colours and probably the reason I do is because I can see them.Ìý So, one of the reasons, other than the fact that I think it looks fabulous, that I have a glitter beard is because it’s actually quite forgiving in terms of shape, so I can put it on pretty sloppily and then go back and correct it or get someone to help me go back and correct it.Ìý And then I do the same kind of thing with my eyeshadows but I just do it with like pink and purple and iridescent colours.

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White

And what about Venetia Blind’s makeup, is that a problem for you Jake or are there other practical challenges?

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Sawyers

Yeah, I agree with Amelia, definitely the makeup is a huge barrier but also something I’ve really enjoyed going on a journey with, as a visual impaired person, problem solving really excites me and I’m a filmmaker and a photographer, I love to do things that people necessarily don’t think visually impaired people can do and makeup was my most recent one I’m trying to conquer.Ìý I can’t see anything out of my left eye, I’m completely blind in my left eye, with a little bit in my right eye.Ìý So, I thought, well Venetia will just wear a diamante’d eye patch.Ìý I use my phone’s magnifier to really zoom in to see things.Ìý I’ve got a little light that I use, it’s just all those little things that are really, really fun to master and get on with.

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White

Amelia, can I just ask you, what’s happened since covid, I mean are you back out performing?

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Lander-Cavallo

Hooo, what has happened since covid, whoo hoo.Ìý So, we had a definite pause and I think everybody did and I think that was the right thing to do.Ìý We started Quiplash in May of 2019 and then the world caught on fire in January 2020, basically, so we hadn’t had much time to get our feet.Ìý But then what we found, as the pandemic continued and started to go longer than everybody thought it was going to go, was that people that we had been working with in the before times kept coming to us and going like – well hey, you do consulting, right?Ìý And then we did Unsightly Drag and Friends, a kind of iteration of Unsightly Drag, we did it again as a digital piece for Bloomsbury in 2020, which, again Jake was part of as Venetia, it was beautiful.Ìý And we found that people were coming to us going – what you did in 2019 was really interesting and now we all have to stop and think about how we can do better, would you help us with that?Ìý So, we found ourselves, last year in particular, gaining a lot of consulting clients, in particular, and then through that we’re starting to find ourselves gaining creative clients.

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White

But does that mean you’re consulting more than you’re performing?

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Lander-Cavallo

On a day-to-day basis at the minute, yes but a lot of that is really about a number of things.Ìý One is that we are never in a rush to rush into any spaces and building up a performance that has the set up that we want takes time and resources, so we’re not going to, for example, perform in a venue that’s not wheelchair accessible, we’re not going to do anything without at least a sign language interpreter, ideally both captions and a sing language interpreter and all that kind of stuff and that takes time.Ìý So, we’re never in a rush.Ìý The other thing that we’re really hyper-aware of is that we know that a lot of people in our own queer disabled community are still having to pretty much isolate and so we’re being very slow about going into physical spaces.

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White

Amelia Lander-Cavallo and Jake Sawyers, thank you both very much indeed.

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And that’s all for today.Ìý I should mention, there is an upcoming performance of the Unsightly Drag show, that’s part of the Vault Festival under Waterloo Station, it’s on February 4th.Ìý And, as always, if you have any stories or experiences relating to what you’ve heard in tonight’s programme, you can email intouch@bbc.co.uk or leave a voice message on 0161 8361338.Ìý From me, Peter White, producer Beth Hemmings and studio manager Phil Booth, goodbye.