What's behind Singapore's mainstream interest in drag performances?

As cinema-goers stream out of a movie screening at Golden Village x The Projector at Cineleisure on a quiet Thursday night, a curious cluster of individuals gather around a small stage at the independent cinema’s entrance. The chords of Bette Midler’s The Rose begin to play, and one of them, dressed casually in shorts and a tank top, takes the microphone.

“Maybe they are here for a karaoke night,” one onlooker comments. He is almost right.

The group – professionals by day and drag queens by night – are rehearsing for a Valentine’s Day Love Thongs cabaret showcase. A few weeks later, Victoria Wondersnatch, no longer in casual wear, would serenade a 120-strong audience in a fabulous gown with a velvet bodice, complete with a rose-inspired green and red wig. With her are fellow Drag Qabaret performers, Honey Gluttony, Unique Glow, and a rotating cast of gender non-conforming performers.

Together, they are a regular fixture at The Projector events, most of which are held at the Cineleisure mall in Orchard Road. Victoria, who holds a full-time job as a medical doctor, started the live-singing cabaret in 2022.

“For me, the concept of drag was always very scary. Growing up in Singapore, I had very strict gender roles for most of my life. Watching RuPaul’s Drag Race sparked my interest – I’ve always been into theatre, but never pursued it professionally, sticking to more conventional careers.”

For her, the fun is really in the revelry of show(person)ship.

“Drag allows me to combine all the elements of performance I love: designing outfits, styling hair, doing makeup, and more. It encapsulates everything I am in one activity,” she says.

Victoria is among a handful of local drag queens who have emerged since Covid-19 restrictions were lifted in Singapore. Vanda Miss Joaquim, Opera Tang, Sapphire Blast and Salome Blaque are just some of the popular personalities who are carving out their own niche in the city’s nightlife scene.

To casual observers, it might seem like the interest in this performance art surged after the runaway success of RuPaul’s Drag Race, a reality television show that pits drag queens against each other for the title of “America's Next Drag Superstar” (now in its 16th season).

In 2023, the cast of the reality show’s Werq The World tour sashayed into the halls of The Star Performing Arts Theatre to a sold-out audience here. Taiwanese drag queen Nymphia Wind, the first East Asian to win RuPaul’s Drag Race in April, also held a sold-out show at The Projector Cineleisure last month – just two days after putting up a technicolour showcase at the office of President Tsai Ing-wen.

Clearly, Singapore isn’t alone in this broader regional shift towards a greater acceptance of drag.

Prashant Somosundram, general manager of The Projector, muses that this increased visibility of drag artists could be due to several factors – including the above mentioned examples – although he points out that there has always been a demand for such performances in Singapore.

“I think [drag] has been visible for many years, in a way that it has been adopted by comedians like Kumar,” he says, referring to how the household name incorporates drag into his standup shows. Prashant attributes the growing popularity of drag performances at entertainment venues to the fact that people are looking for more interesting things to do, beyond just going to a regular bar or club.

“For the party promoters, it seems that to jazz up a party, it’s not just about having just a DJ anymore – which is good for drag performers, because for a long time, they couldn’t find gigs, but now some of them are performing at more than one venue a night.”

It was not so long ago – in the ’90s and ’00s – that drag queens could only find work at a few venues in conservative Singapore, where LGBTQIA+ topics were considered taboo. One well-known locale that embraced drag was Boom Boom Room, the first drag queen cabaret in Singapore established by home-grown singer-songwriter and director Dick Lee. The venue, which opened in 1992 and had its final curtain call in 2005, saw breakout performances by Kak Nina Boo and Kumar.

Now, a new generation of Millennial and Gen Z personalities are bedazzling the scene at various nightlife venues. Besides Riot!, a long-running drag revue by veteran queen Becca D’Bus that happens every Saturday night at the Hard Rock Cafe, there is Tuckshop, located in Neil Road. The drag bar was set up by Salome Blaque and her business partners in January this year.

The art of drag and drag-lesque

They may have larger-than-life personas, but drag queens are not the only queer performers in the spotlight. There are queer-adjacent, burlesque-inspired performances that are titillating audiences at private parties and entertainment venues. One personality to watch is Lychee Bye, who goes by the pronouns they/them.

Lychee, who has a background in theatre and studied in a UK university, combines elements of pole dance and drag-lesque, a subgenre of burlesque that fuses gender-bending theatrics and dances that are provocative, over-the-top and risque. They straddle the boundaries of socially acceptable etiquette with an uninhibited flair that veers on hedonistic.

“There are different types of burlesque, right? You have traditional burlesque, neo-noir burlesque and now, you have a relatively new thing called drag-lesque, which is burlesque that leans into the campiness.

“As soon as I got back [from overseas], I found myself performing in the drag scene, so I think this became a huge influence for what I do. I don’t have the same kind of formal, very technical dance training like established neo-noir and traditional burlesque performers have, like popular US stars Frankie Fictitious, Dita von Teese and Raquel Reed. I didn’t learn it until fairly recently. Now, I’m starting to experiment. So that’s where, to me, drag and burlesque come together,” they explain.

While Lychee holds a full-time job, they perform at least four times a week at various nightspots. It’s become a side hustle for what started as a passion project/part-time gig to support themselves during university in the UK.

“I find [drag-lesque] to be quite empowering, because I think you create the image and the community you want to be a part of. And while traditional burlesque can certainly be perceived as very hyper feminine, I think the best performers are the ones who have figured out what works and what sexy is to them, and how they can translate that to a larger audience. That's not really limited by sexuality or gender identity," says Lychee.

Good for business vs making a statement

It’s undeniable that the growing appetite for queer culture offers revenue-boosting opportunities for businesses and events operators. For many performers like Victoria Wondersnatch and Lychee Bye, the apparent commodification of their craft gives them the chance to showcase their work on a slightly larger scale. But at what cost?

Becca D’Bus observes that “the scene has become more crowded in the last couple of years”, largely because nightlife venues are recognising drag as an attractive form of entertainment.

“But I don’t think drag has become mainstream. Specific, tiny approaches to drag have perhaps become popular, and made it profitable for corporations to engage with. It’s almost always about makeup or fabulous costuming, and if you’re really lucky, a cute one-liner. And these are all very tiny parts of drag as a culture,” she says.

“The form is political in its utter rejection of gender as a means to organise society. Generations of chosen family connect with the diverse and often oppressed realities of queer life, including but not limited to, rejection by [one’s actual] blood family, sex work, race, class, education, and so on.”

Marylyn Tan, poet and author of Gaze Back, an award-winning volume of poetry, thinks this commercialisation presents a potentially problematic situation, where it glosses over the intended discourse that LGBTQIA+ performers are trying to create in a heteronormative society (the assumption that heterosexuality is the only “natural” sexual orientation).

“When you see it primarily as a form of entertainment, you may forget that the local drag scene also emerged from the working class. It was a low-barrier-to-entry form of art that was accessible to, and viable as a source of income for, the most marginalised members of the LGBTQIA+ community.

“When we commodify something, we move away from the idea of community, which is to uplift everyone who’s marginalised,” she states.

To understand the impact of the commercialisation of drag culture on the LGBTQIA+ community and heteronormative society, one should first consider this: Does it actually allow the art form to reach a wider audience, and beyond the echo chamber in the process?

Says Ong Keng Sen, artistic director of Theatreworks: “We need to examine the purpose of this so-called commodification. Is the commodification just to commercialise something, or to raise political visibility?

“I think it’s important to ask: Just because the portal or platform is high profile, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s commodification, because it sometimes helps to stamp a political statement for increased visibility.”

In a way, he adds, the act of “queering” itself is very much about visibility and making a public statement about social behaviour that is constructed.

“A few decades ago, punk was a bit shocking, and many people were afraid of it. And in a way, queering has that kind of confrontation, because a lot of conventional norms are so ingrained that it has to be deliberately questioned,” says Keng Sen.

Last month, the Cultural Medallion winner and former director of the Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA) conceived and directed a sold-out production of the famous Henry Purcell opera, Dido and Aeneas, as part of SIFA’s 2024 line-up.

The twist? It was a drag adaptation of the Baroque tragedy, starring Becca D’Bus as the titular Dido, the powerful queen of Carthage who kills herself after her lover, Aeneas, leaves her.

Keng Sen reveals that the decision to transform the opera into a form of drag cabaret stems from the intention to “make something strange again”.

“German playwright Bertolt Brecht talks about this idea of making something strange, so that you then re-question the socialised norms. And this ‘confusion’, or ‘strangeness’ is actually a concept that comes from theatre. How do we define what’s female or male? It creates a situation where the audience is forced to think and confront what they think they know,” he explains.

Supporting the freedom to express themselves

For Victoria Wondersnatch, Honey Gluttony, Unique Glow and Opera Tang, the burgeoning drag scene simply allows them to pursue their passion for the craft. The queens express a shared optimism about the opportunities that a more diverse entertainment scene can offer, which cannot be defined by monetary value.

In fact, the rising mainstream interest in drag has opened doors for the four theatre enthusiasts, in more ways than one. Honey Gluttony, a self-confessed “musical theatre queen”, recalls the pinch-me moment when she was chosen to open RuPaul’s Werq the World showcase in Singapore.

“I was like, wow, I’m the live-singing queen winning the show. That’s how I coined my tag line: the number one live singing queen in Singapore – and that’s uncontested at the moment,” she laughs.

“When I transform into Honey Gluttony, there’s no stopping me. I can literally be anybody I want. I can be a villain, princess, or a sexy dancer. The choices are limitless. When I become a drag queen, I can be unapologetically myself. And it’s very liberating.”

Unique Glow, the drag persona of social media personality and content creator Fauzi Aziz, shares that being a “baby drag queen” (performers who are new to the scene), lets her explore her interest in drag and her love of performing.

“I studied theatre when I was in university, so performing has always been in my blood. But after I went into the content creation space, I put it aside. It was during an open drag mic last year that one of my good friends, who’s also a drag queen, encouraged me to participate. And I’ve been doing it ever since. No grand stories about how I got started, really. It’s just about good timing.”

As for full-time performers like Opera Tang, it signals a step towards recognising drag as a career path, as well as an art form in a heteronormative world.

“The more people know about drag, the better, because drag can touch on so many topics, and it is so individualistic… The more people get exposed to it, the more they will grow to understand the true message of drag,” says Opera, who has a background in Chinese dance and wushu.

Victoria points out that “everything drag queens do is pulled from pop culture, and it excites people”, and hence, its mass appeal.

“Most of the time, it’s very glitzy – we take inspiration from pop stars, cartoons, anime, you know, stuff that people like to look at, and we turn it into something that’s live and you can interact with. And that is inherently marketable to a lot of companies.

“With drag, you are literally telling the whole world that you are queer without saying it. This commodification and increased visibility, even if it’s just for Pride Month or a company trying to clout chase, can be beneficial if done right, tastefully, and respectfully. So why not? It helps lift our community in Singapore,” she says.

PHOTOGRAPHY Athirah Annissa
ART DIRECTION Adeline Eng
HAIR Aung Apichai (for Lychee Bye) / Artistry Studios, using Kevin.Murphy & Angel Gwee (for Marylyn Tan), using Davines
MAKEUP Benedict Choo (for Marylyn Tan), using M.A.C
COORDINATION Chelsia Tan & Saw Yone Yone