Earlier this summer, a group of us from the Collaboratory attended Thrust, a drag king festival that launched in the US last year before coming to Toronto this year. Hosted by Riley Poppyseed, Kreme Inakuchi, and Throb Zombie, Thrust brought together drag kings from across the region and beyond.  

We started with the pre-programming (“Thrust University”), where we sat in on Flare’s presentation, “Drag King Success Stories: A History Lesson,” and then spent the weekend taking in performances at the Factory Theatre. The performances were incredible, and, as event sponsors, we were especially lucky to have seats in the balcony alongside the drag kings themselves.  

I had heard of several of the local kings beforehand, but Thrust gave me the chance to meet performers I had previously only encountered online or through reputation. I followed many of them on social media and now have so many more drag kings to gaze upon. (A wonderful consequence of researching drag kings!) 

After Thrust, I kept seeing so many of these new-to-me kings posting online about their adventures in Toronto, their afterparties, and their newfound connections. Reading these heartfelt messages of thanks, I found myself thinking about all of the archival source material we are working with in our ongoing Drag Kings Oral History Project.  

One of the things lingering with me about our current project is how often certain trajectories recur in the stories we hear. Many of the kings active before 2008 discovered The Drag King Book through their existing lesbian-feminist or queer community networks. They were often working within academic, arts, or other circles where they had the resources and skills to organize events and build community. For many in the 90s and early 2000s, this eventually meant involvement in the International Drag King Community Extravaganza (IDKE).  

IDKE began in 1999 and ran until 2012, becoming an annual event where drag kings could gather, perform, teach, learn, argue, experiment, and recognize one another. Looking through the archival records shows us that IDKE was inevitably a product of its time, with acts and outfits reflecting the politics of the 1990s and early 2000s. But what strikes me is how people still talk about it today. It comes up in the majority of drag king interviews as the spark of something happening for kings, a moment whose significance they still reflect on nearly two decades later. 

Thrust is no contemporary IDKE. The political and cultural landscape has changed, as have the performers and the aesthetics (considerably!). The ways people understand drag and gender have evolved, as have the internal debates and conflicts within the scene. Yet sitting in that balcony at the Factory Theatre, surrounded by drag kings, I kept thinking about our current project narrators. 

Working on the transcription files has given me an unexpectedly intimate relationship with some of these histories. You become familiar with the small details of someone’s speech. You scroll through a half dozen websites to find the exact spelling of the name of the bar where they first performed thirty, forty, even fifty years ago. You mull over how to represent a particular pause, the way someone turns a phrase, and you become familiar with the words they reach for when trying to remember something that happened decades ago. After hours of transcribing someone’s story, you find yourself tied up in it. 

The tenderness with which many of the older kings and king-accomplices talk about IDKE is especially difficult to shake. Their memories are full of affection for the moments they had there and for the strange, messy, exciting community they built together.

Flare captures some of that affection, describing IDKE as a “first-of-its-kind event” where kings, fans, and the people who studied, photographed, and filmed them could gather collaboratively. Flare recalls: 

To get to the first IDKE, The Fabulous Toronto Drag Kings had a fundraiser, stuffed ourselves into two cars, and drove five hours to Columbus, Ohio, on 15 October 1999. IDKE lasted thirteen years. I sat on its steering committee for eight of them. My involvement exposed me to the diversity in drag culture, while working collaboratively on an international level. IDKE influenced language, politics, and art in connection to gender performances.¹

The online posts of younger kings sharing how grateful they are to have met friends at Thrust could have been written by a younger Flare, Luke Wolf, or Toni Latour. I almost screenshotted some of the posts to send to them, saying “Look! It’s worded so much like how you talk about IDKE.”

Standing against the balcony wall at Factory Theatre, I imagined what it must have meant for Flare in the 1990s to have those same experiences for the first time: walking into a room full of people who understood a particular weird and wonderful part of you and what you are trying to make, something that people outside of that room might not recognize.

In our current project, we have been asking drag kings what they think about the scene today. These questions inevitably prompt comparisons with the past. The performances are different, as are the aesthetics, the makeup, the venues, the crowds. Drag kings today also have access to different technologies, and that impacts performance.  

Being knee-deep in 1990s archival footage means watching a dozen Justin Timberlake performances emerge on grainy video, so seeing Kermit the Frog dissect himself to “Body” by Mother Mother at Thrust feels so far away from the drag kings of yore.

Dig deeper, though, and affectively the experiences are surprisingly similar. The older footage is also so filled with experimentation, absurdity, nerves, spectacle, and the thrill of watching someone try something that had never quite been done that way before.

The technologies and cultural references may change but the excitement and the community are all recognizable. There’s a world in which one drag king spoke the exact same words to another twenty years ago. 

Thrust, while not a direct repetition of the past, is part of a longer lineage of drag kings finding and making spaces for one another. It exposes continuities that might otherwise disappear: people traveling long distances to be together, navigating borders and the particular difficulties of moving through the world as queer and trans people, meeting friends, getting nervous before performances, and leaving with new (potentially long-lasting!) connections. 

Twenty years from now, someone might find themself hunting for the particular spellings of the names of the bars where Thrust’s performers gathered for their afterparties. They might become familiar with someone’s favourite phrase, the way they pause, or how they tell a story about the first time they met someone at Thrust.

The details will be different, but perhaps the feeling will be the same. 

I was incredibly thankful to be a small part of Thrust and to witness what this community is building. Huge thank you to the organizers for letting us sit in, listen, learn, and watch. And of course, much love to all the kings—both past and present.

1. Clare Bradley-Smyth (Flare), “A Salute to Our Canadian Kings,” Canadian Theatre Review 185, no. 1 (2020): 30. ↩︎

Ally Krueger-Kischak (any/all) is a writer and researcher from Wilmot Township, Ontario focusing on rural solidarity, trans rural histories and futurities, and working-class/"hick" environmental resistance. They joined the Collaboratory in October 2025 as a Research Assistant for the Drag Kings Oral History Project and continue as Resident Blogger. They hold an MA in History with a Collaborative Specialization in Sexual Diversity Studies from the University of Toronto.