The Vault Cafe is filled with a crowd of mostly young adults on a Friday night, as a person with large red hair, a flashy outfit and a trimmed beard takes the stage to welcome everybody to the monthly drag night, They, Them, Theirs.
It’s Olivia Leads who is hosting a rock-and-roll themed drag night that evening that will leave the crowd screaming.
It may not be RuPaul’s Drag Race, but it’s part of Nanaimo’s vibrant grassroots drag scene.
The Discourse spoke with drag performers and producers about the local drag community and what it means to them as Pride Month prepares to kick off.
Boy Gorgeous grew up in Nanaimo and still calls it their hometown, along with their partner, Olive ThisTea. They started producing monthly drag shows in the city at The Vault Cafe in 2022 with Olivia Leads after some of the local drag producers in the city at the time moved out of town.
“We didn’t want drag in the city to just fall off,” Boy Gorgeous told The Discourse.
The show was called They, Them, Theirs — as at the time everyone involved was using gender-neutral pronouns — and is what Boy Gorgeous calls an “all non-binary, kind of punky show” that features “kings, things and drag queens.”
While there have been examples of people wearing clothing associated with a different gender going back to ancient times, with Greek theatre famously having men play female characters as just one example, modern drag is considered to have been developed in New York City’s Harlem neighbourhood in the 1860s with the first “drag ball” in the United States being held at Hamilton House in 1869.
One of the first people to call themselves a “queen of drag” was formerly enslaved William Dorsey Swann, who hosted drag dances in his Washington D.C. home starting in 1882.
During the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s to mid-1930s, the movement’s leaders included Black artists who were either openly gay or had nuanced sexualities according to The National Museum of Black History and Culture.
New York City’s ballroom culture of the late 1960s and early 1970s spawned the next generation of drag kings and queens, as Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera played leading roles in NYC’s drag scene as well as the LGBTQ rights movement.
“Drag at its core now owes so much to Black trans women in ballroom,” Boy Gorgeous said.
‘Drag is life saving’
Boy Gorgeous started producing drag shows with Olive ThisTea for fun, but said that it now feels critical to keep holding them because “drag shows and Pride are such a bastion of hope, community, solidarity and joy.”
They noted that drag is a protest against a backlash of homophobia and transphobia, and said they have also faced threats as a drag queen.
“There was an instance we had recently where we were just hanging out with some friends in drag, and this lady came up to us and started yelling at us that we were degenerates,” they said.
“[Drag is way to] basically be like ‘fuck y’all, we’re still here. We’re not going anywhere and we’re going to wear glitter and big lashes and laugh while we do it.’” Boy Gorgeous said.
Part of the reason that Boy Gorgeous and Olive ThisTea, who now live in Victoria, continue to make the trip up to Nanaimo to host and perform at drag shows is because of the inclusive space that the shows create for queer youth.
“Drag is life saving,” Boy Gorgeous said. “I know so many people personally who probably wouldn’t be here today if they hadn’t found drag as an outlet for self expression and community.”
The drag scene in Nanaimo features other producers such as Ashes, The Mortician and Spicee Pie who put on drag shows as well.
To help cross-promote their shows, local producers use a shared Nanaimo Drag Instagram account that posts information about upcoming events.
Bringing some spice from Mexico City to Nanaimo
Spicee Pie is a drag queen in Nanaimo who began producing drag shows in the city after moving from Vancouver. Spicee Pie identifies as a gay man in her normal life, but her drag character is a woman.
Growing up in Mexico City, Spicee Pie would watch her mother, grandmother and aunties dress up, do their hair and nails and wear high heels for special occasions while the men would continue to dress in their normal plain clothes.
“I always thought it was really fun, and I always questioned, ‘why do boys have to dress so casual and so underdressed, but women get to do all this shablam?’,” she said.
Spicee Pie would play with her mother’s dresses and heels as a young child and later would dress up as a woman for Halloween as a teenager.
“It was almost like mocking the fact that I was a woman,” she told The Discourse. “Not as a drag queen. It was more like a joke.”
She enjoyed the reaction that she would get from her friends who would engage and have fun with it.
“[They] would] get a good laugh from it,” she said. “That’s one of my biggest things. I love laughing, and I love making people laugh.”
A friend of hers asked if she had watched RuPaul’s Drag Race but at the time, she didn’t know much about the drag community.
“I identified as a gay man, so I was already out, but kind of closed-minded about drag queens,” Spicee Pie said. “I would say it was internalized homophobia.”
One of the things that drag performers are often asked, aside from how long it takes to dress up and do their makeup, is if they are undergoing a gender transition.
“I did get that moment where I was like, ‘Oh, wait a minute, am I transitioning? Is this me doing a step forward to transition?’” she said. But with more time performing, she realized that was not the case and instead, “it was just more to showcase my expression.”
Spicee Pie said the drag scene in central Vancouver Island is growing with new shows popping up in Parksville and Qualicum Beach. She hopes to perform in Victoria and return to Vancouver where her drag career started now that Spicee Pie is a “grown woman” who has developed as a character over the last few years in Nanaimo’s drag scene.
You can see Spicee Pie’s 90s-themed birthday drag show, co-hosted by Olvia Leads, at The Terminal on Friday, May 29. A Pride Parade Drag Brunch will be held at The Nanaimo Bar on Sunday, June 14 along the Pride Parade’s route. They, Them, Theirs will host a Pride edition, hosted by Boy Gorgeous and Olive ThisTea at The Vault Cafe on Friday, June 20. For more Pride events see our events calendar.
Back at The Vault Cafe, Olivia Leads takes on the finale and decides to take a chance and sing Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen instead of lip-syncing. The crowd joins in creating a choir-like atmosphere in the cafe.
By the end of the song, the crowd is headbanging to the hard rock part of the song as Olivia Leads runs up to the seats just above the stage. The act finishes with the crowd waving their cell phones with the flashlights on in an imitation of the lighter tributes of yesteryear.
“Give it up for me!” Olivia Leads exclaims before softly ending with the song’s final words “Everywhere the wind blows…”
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