International Drag Day

Yesterday, 16 July, marked international drag day. Drag artists are typically men who transform themselves into glamorous women known as drag queens. But women who put on pants and don jackets – called drag kings – are also drag artists.

But this fabulous day also gives us another opportunity: Time and space to honour those brave individuals at schools everywhere who begin performing during break-time: Boys who embody divas and girls who become heart-throb pop singers.

Perhaps you believe that all pupils ought to behave according to sex on their ID cards. This would save many a boy from being mocked for being a m*ffie, you could say. In this world, all the boys would be the identical, walking in lockstep – no exaggerated mannerisms. Girls would also have no differences between them, like factory dolls. Now, would this be a world worth living in? It would be a nightmare!

All the sameness would be tiring; a real drag. So your classmates who dare to disrupt expectations of their gender are setting the stage for everyone else to break free from the confines of how we ought to behave.

Your fellow pupils may aspire to become doctors and lawyers, but they could also become drag performers, or both. Across the world, drag performers – young and old – take to the stage, encouraging the audience to engage in critique of the self and society more broadly. In nearby South Africa, drag art has a strong following in theatres, restaurants and dance clubs. Drag artistry also supports the make-up industry, such as the work of local make-up artist Papaki, who swears he knows how to make a drag queen light up a room.

But the hardest part is performing and also living your regular life. Take Adriano Visagie, one of the few performers we are fortunate to have. Just last week, he underwent a dramatic transformation to become Tina Turner and lip synced to her most famous hits. Now Adriano is not just a drag artist, he has a regular job as a banker and dresses like a professional businessman six days a week. Yet he took the bold move to break free, rupturing the gender rules he never made, even though he knows his art may have raised some eyebrows at the office.

How can you too be part of this exciting profession in the creative industry? Not interested you say? Well, are you aware of the fact that you have been doing drag all along, every day? To understand this, consider what Ru Paul, drag superstar and mentor for countless aspiring drag queens, says: “We are born naked, and the rest is drag”.

This statement has more in it than meets the eye. Gender, after all, is nothing more than the clothes we put on, the mannerisms we execute and roles we fulfil, as we get on with the show called life. So drag performance actually empowers you, because now you create your gender, at least for one night.