Unmapping drag History
Edited for length and clarity
UnMapping Fellow Wilfredo Hernandez and collaborators Rebecca Fisher and Joey Leroux joined Drexel student Anna Cham and Writers Room staff Lillian Fenzil to discuss the Drag Arts Oral History Project.
Anna: As an oral historian, you have been asking people about their stories, but how did you choose the people to ask? What was that process like?
Wilfredo: It's been three years of this work. The idea lived in my brain since I lived in New York... I've worked in arts administration, leadership, and community for 20 years now. During my work in the queer community, I often thought, “why aren't drag artists part of our work? Why aren't they members of our organization? Why are we only consulting organizations and not individual artists?”
[When I] moved to Philly in 2018... I kind of jumped in the deep end and formed relationships early on, including Joey and Rebecca from Beyond The Bell Tours. We worked really hard, and Joey was really keen to help me unlock and develop a process for outreach, engagement, and building relationships with drag artists and other folks in the neighborhood to know who the movers and shakers are in the scene.
We prioritize the first cycle of stories to help us get a lay of the landscape. We wanted to talk to the most experienced producers of drag in the city... Intergenerational folks -- those who've been holding space for a long time. [Joey and I] attended a lot of drag together. We do “R&D” or field research, which is very fun work. We asked each artist, “If we can only talk to one other artist, who would you recommend?”
Anna: What is the span of people you've talked to and interviewed when it comes to generations and experience?
Joey: The longest running drag show in America is at Bob and Barbara's Lounge every Thursday night and it's currently hosted by Lisa Lisa: the woman so nice, they named her twice. She held court at that show since 1991... we also have people who are new to the Philly scene who came here from other countries, other places and share their perspectives.
Wilfredo: Yeah, I think it runs the gamut of people who have been doing this from like thirtyish years to...maybe like two years? The dynamics have changed a lot. I think that intergenerational perspective is really important to this conversation that we're trying to build because drag has become a pop culture staple.
Rebecca: It's also been highly politicized in the last four years. I think the first drag ban was in 2016. As it's become politicized, there's also been a lot of discussion of where drag happens and to whom. It's no mistake that this goes hand-in-hand-in-hand with some of the ways in which trans health care and gender affirming care has been politicized as well.
Left to right: Anna Cham, Joey Leroux, and Wilfredo Hernandez
Anna: Because of the way people within the scene were and are still marginalized, was it difficult to get people to open up about their experience?
Joey: There has been a lot of trauma for people in the scene. One of the powers of drag is that it creates this space where we teach each other different value sets of what it means to be beautiful, what it means to be yourself, and what it means to be celebrated for that. That's not true on the outside...
Wilfredo: We really tried to create the questions in a way that is open ended, yet thematic, exploring drag art, drag activism, and drag community, which offer a wide room for people to play and to center joy. It's not always about trauma, but we have to contextualize and give homage to the things that have happened and that continue to happen. We wouldn't be where we are without the sacrifice and the hard work of folks throughout the generations.
Rebecca: We would have had a different experience if we weren't all queer and doing work in the queer community, especially the queer arts and culture community. I think maybe people would have reacted differently about being approached [from people with a different background] ...
Anna Cham and Joey Leroux flip through some of the books used in research for Wilfredo Hernandez's UnMapping Project
Anna: There is also this stereotype of the struggling artist because it's so hard to get paid for the work that you do. Do you feel like media, shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race have helped “legitimize” it in the eyes of like people who are not queer or who are not involved in drag?
Rebecca: My gut reaction is that the average consumer of drag feels like it's entertaining, but the artistry behind it is still sort of elusive to people who don't get the understanding of the craft around producing a show, the showmanship around theatrics...There's so many different components of what makes a show good, and every artist has a different interpretation of that.
Wilfredo: You're talking to folks who practice in their homes. They don't have access to fancy rehearsal space or technical capabilities like lighting or sound or things that a typical performance artist might have access to. One of my central questions and my curiosities was, “How do you do this professionally, if this is your profession?”
RuPaul's Drag Race has definitely skewed the sense of what is commercially worthy of support. If you compare it to when it started, the aesthetics alone have shifted. You're talking about artists on those stages who are wearing $30,000 gowns, custom Couture, and all these things. People are taking out loans to be on that show with the understanding that that platform is going to have a different kind of payoff. It's calculated investments.
What's important for this project is the hyper locality of it. I think it was Eric Jaffe, who we talked to with the question, “How much does it cost for you to get into drag every time you get into drag and leave the house for a gig?” [It] was upwards of $150 or $200.
Beary Tyler Moore says they pass the same $5 bill around the Gayborhood. It's a joke, right? They're going for one show, and they're giving each other their tips, so like the same $5 bill is working its way around. That sense of mutuality is not just unique to drag. It’s also inherent in communities of color who support each other in a communal way and share resources...My perspective as a cultural producer is: How can we also use philanthropy and the nonprofit systems and structures that exist to move these resources to the people who are doing this work who are not recognized by those systems?
Rebecca: I feel like the Brittany Lynn model is interesting in terms of the Philly Drag Mafia operating in union by negotiating the contract to be at a certain rate and then paying out each performer...She's negotiating contracts for everyone, getting everybody a gig...There's such a sense of paying your dues, but our country has shifted to higher rates of class inequality...I think the idea of $50 at a bar and a train ticket is just not an acceptable amount of money for somebody to come out for the whole night.
Wilfredo: These are artists who have been doing their craft for 20+ years. When they're playing major venues, they command a certain price, not just because of their reputation or their skill or their talents, but they're also building in that like lineage of work that they come from and that they've invested in, in education and training probably their whole lives. I'm sure that gets baked into some art drag artists fees and older, more accomplished artists might be able to command a certain booking fee.
Rebecca: Something that completely shook me in this project is how many people had formal training or had an art degree or were classically trained. That's maybe something that people don't really understand or don't know, and they have the student debt to prove it...
Joey: Philly also has the Painted Mug Cafe model, which tries to do something interesting by owning the venue together as a collaborative space. It ties the profit to the people who are performing, who are working in the venue. I'd like to see more models that are collaboratively owned by the artists.
Wilfredo: ...[Continuing with the political lens], when you start to see governments limit speech, freedom of speech, of movement, of expression--artistic or otherwise--it's usually followed by not good things. There's usually a rupture of some kind.
There’s a book I love called Glitter and Concrete: A Cultural History of Drag in New York City. It goes from the 1700s to now and it tracks the legislative efforts to suppress gender expression. There were laws in the book called the Cabaret Laws that banned dancing in bars, so squads in the police force would raid bars and specifically target spaces they knew were "hotbeds of homosexual activity.” That's happened throughout time. [It] happened in Weimar Germany.
“It’s not always about trauma, but we have to contextualize and give homage to the things that have happened and that continue to happen. We wouldn’t be where we are without the sacrifice and the hard work of folks throughout the generations. ”
...It’s crazy how laws are formed and then manipulated in insidious ways to target marginalized groups... There were over 500 pieces of legislation introduced in the 2024 legislative session across the country. Many of which were public drag bans, two of which passed at the state level, in Tennessee and Montana. If you read the language in the legislation, it's just crazy...It's all focused on the presence of a minor, using problematic and outdated tropes about homosexuality and pedophilia that are just really sick attempts at trying to write trans people out of existence. That's a kind of genocide, I think. It's happening right now as we're sitting here talking, and in a country that the rest of the world looks towards for freedom and liberation...We want to talk to drag artists, but we want to talk to scholars, we want to talk to leaders and paint a full picture of drag in its fullest form and potential.
...[When looking at our project], oral history is kind of a dusty dry field because it lives in academia. It lives in archives and libraries which are secluded and privileged spaces that aren't always accessible, including the language you use and how you frame your work. We want this to be a living archive. There has to be a mutual benefit. It's not about getting fellowships or grants. Those things are important for the work to advance, but if we're talking about systematic and narrative change, those things will not happen in the year of a grant or a fellowship.
I've been doing this kind of work for 20 years, and I've seen organizations come and go. I've seen artists rise and fall. I'm definitely doing this work differently than I would have 10 years ago, 15 years ago. Joey and Rebecca run a very successful organization. They have a nuanced understanding of history and public space.
Lillian: It's exciting to hear that the archives come together. When do you expect it to be open to the public?
Wilfredo: Given the politics, I've been privately concerned about how we roll this out in a way where the materials are beyond approach, the materials are protected in every way they can. Accessible, but not in a way that can put our artists at risk. Once these things go out on the internet, they live forever, and they live in their own ways.
We're going to start releasing the videos in January 2025. Everything will be free and available to the public on our website. Folks can go there now and see our language and process. We're also at the handle, @DragArtsOPH on Instagram. We'll have lots of beautiful content to share soon...We have 17 full oral histories to date. The goal is to have 30 by June 2025. That'll be the founding collection that is Philly. It doesn't mean we'll stop collecting oral history in Philadelphia, but that's the meat of where we will work from.