Edited photograph of drag kings (from left) Christopher Noel, Johnny Kat, Carlos Las Vegas, Pat Riarch, and Luster Dela Virgion, featured in the 2004 documentary Drag Kings on Tour. Photographer unknown.
Project Overview
The Drag Kings Oral History Project (DKOHP) is the first large-scale oral history initiative dedicated to documenting drag king histories in Canada and the United States. Launched in 2025, the project will record 35 video interviews with drag king performers, producers, and community members active around the turn of the millennium, whose work has shaped local scenes, aesthetics, and political imaginaries.
Co-interviewed in collaboration with longtime drag king producer, performer, and documentarian Clare Bradley-Smyth (aka Flare), the project centers drag kings’ own accounts of performance, community-building, and cultural labour. Alongside interviews, the project will gather ephemera—including flyers, photographs, video, and selected material objects—to be preserved with The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives for future generations of artists, researchers, and community members.
Historical & Community Context
Drag kings—performers who use masculinity, gender play, and theatrical transformation as creative tools—have been central to LGBTQ cultures for decades. From bars, cabarets, and festivals to activist spaces and informal community venues, drag king scenes have fostered experimentation around gender, sexuality, class, race, and embodiment.
Despite this long history, drag king cultures remain significantly underrepresented in both academic research and public cultural memory, particularly in comparison to more extensively documented drag queen traditions. Many drag king histories survive through fragile forms of transmission—word of mouth, personal archives, and embodied practice—making them especially vulnerable to loss. The DKOHP responds to this gap by committing sustained resources, visibility, and archival care to drag king histories at a moment of renewed public interest in drag and gender expression.
Project Goals & Methodology
The project aims to preserve drag king histories while advancing oral history methods attentive to performance, embodiment, and material culture. Interviews follow a semi-structured life history format, tracing narrators’ pathways into drag, their participation in local and translocal scenes, and the social and political contexts shaping their work.
A central methodological feature of the project is its adaptation of somatic elicitation, a sensory-based interviewing approach developed by the Collaboratory. For this project, somatic elicitation is brought into dialogue with dress and costuming. Narrators are invited to engage with an item of clothing or costuming connected to their drag practice, using sensory attention and embodied reflection to access memories that may not surface through conventional questioning. This method foregrounds how masculinity is learned, inhabited, and transformed through the body.
Research Scope
The DKOHP anticipates collecting 35 video oral histories with drag king performers, producers, and community members whose practices were shaped primarily in the 1990s and early 2000s. Rather than focusing on contemporary drag scenes, the project centers this formative period to examine how drag king cultures intersected with—and helped make legible—the emergence of trans masculine identities in the mid- to late-2000s.
The project brings a trans history lens to drag king cultures, attending to the porous boundaries between performance and identity, experimentation and becoming. Interviews explore how gender was learned, rehearsed, and embodied through drag, with particular analytic attention to dress as a technology of gender performativity and trans ontology. By situating individual life histories within broader regional scenes and cultural shifts, the project traces how drag king practices contributed to evolving understandings of masculinity, embodiment, and trans possibility across time.
Emergent Themes
Interviews are designed to explore questions related to masculinity and embodiment; mentorship and lineage; humour, parody, and realism in performance; relationships between drag kings, drag queens, and trans communities; race, class, and power within drag scenes; and the emotional and physical labour of performance.
The project also expects to surface reflections on documentation and erasure, including how drag kings have preserved—or struggled to preserve—their own histories, and how performance circulates as a form of knowledge across bodies, spaces, and generations.
Project Outputs
Planned project outputs include a publicly accessible oral history collection; the preservation of related ephemera and selected material objects at The ArQuives; and interpretive public history initiatives that connect archival research to live performance and community engagement.
The project is envisioned to culminate in a celebratory international drag king cabaret, bringing together performers, audiences, and archival materials in a live setting that foregrounds drag as both history and practice. Additional outputs may include digital storytelling, public programming, and educational resources developed in dialogue with narrators and community partners.
Impact & Significance
By centering drag king voices and practices, the Drag Kings Oral History Project intervenes in longstanding gaps in queer, feminist, and performance histories. The project affirms drag king cultures as sites of artistic innovation, political critique, and community care, deserving of sustained archival preservation.
In doing so, the DKOHP creates a community-informed archive that supports future research, creative work, and intergenerational transmission—ensuring that drag king histories remain vibrant, accessible, and usable for years to come.
Project Team
For the Collaboratory
For the ArQuives
