Welcome to Drag School

I
n late February, a group of budding radicals gathered in a bare bones studio space in Brooklyn for a nervous first meeting. A far-right administration had taken power in Washington, D.C., just five weeks prior, immediately launching a nationwide assault on their community. Now, these 13 New Yorkers, default members of the Resistance, were here to learn how to fight back. Unlike other agitators, though, their lessons would focus on characters and choreography — their future weapons, songs and sequins. This wasn’t just any school, after all. This was Drag School. 

Officially titled “Drag Performance: Between & Beyond Gender,” this program at the Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX) is the brainchild of instructor Kelindah Bee, 31, who has been performing in drag as Theydy Bedbug since 2017. This would be their fifth in-person cohort of the class (their first program was taught online amid the pandemic). But this new crop of students would also eventually become the first to graduate — draguate, if you will — in the Trump 2.0 era, starting their lives as drag performers just as powerful, ultra-conservative political forces had come to power on a message that framed them as degenerates. A culture war was raging — one these students didn’t start, but which, by virtue of enlisting, they were determined to help finish.

“The pushback on drag in the last few years has made it clear to me how necessary this work is. It’s made me take it even more seriously and want to reach even more people,” Bee told me shortly after that first class. “It’s made me dig my heels in and be more unabashed in advocating for spaces where people can experiment and express themselves and come into their fullness and authenticity.” 

Bee had just 12 weeks to teach these protégés and prota-theys the ABCs of drag before they would all take to a stage and unveil their new personas to the world. Now, class was officially in session. Each student had their own personal reasons for being there — some were looking to rediscover a confidence the closet had taken from them, others to explore a different, more playful sense of gender — but they all understood the weight that their presence in this class carried at this particular moment for the country. For them, drag school would be both a refuge and a revolt. “There’s something really cool and even more rebellious about it now,” said Patrick, one of the students in the class. “I think there’s something that’s, like, a big “fuck you” to the current administration.”

THE CONCEPT OF taking a $600 class (some scholarships are available) to learn how to do drag would likely seem unnecessary or perhaps even ridiculous to many already in the community. Historically, most performers have developed their art by being taken under the wings of friends as part of drag families or drag houses, or by practicing at home and summoning the courage to sign up for open sets at bars. “Even clowns have an official clown college,” RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars winner Trixie Mattel once said. “For drag, it’s the school of hard knocks.”

While there have been other drag schools and classes that have taught newcomers (RuPaul’s Drag U, which ran for three seasons between 2010-2012, also madeover cisgender women into drag performers), the classes aren’t what you might be picturing. Bee’s program, for example, is not designed around an end goal of lip-syncing for your life on an episode of Drag Race, or teaching the basics of padding or tucking. Instead, their objective is to explore and experiment with gender in a safe space in order to develop a drag persona that feels right. Students aren’t required to offer a drag name for several weeks, for example, and even then they’re free to change it and their drag pronouns as the classes progress. Maybe, the persona isn’t even a person — maybe it’s a drag thing. The goal, Bee tells me, is finding an identity that suits each student, which can also build their confidence outside of drag. 

“I remember telling people about this drag class, people who are actual drag performers, and them being like, ‘What the hell is that? You don’t need to take a class to do drag.’ People were very skeptical,” says 26-year-old Xavier Ruiz, a 2023 alum of the class who now performs as Luckiii. “Having taken it, I can definitely vouch for what a transformative and special experience it was. It was nice to be part of what was essentially a drag persona incubator.” 

It’s because of this gender freedom that the class tends to attract transgender and nonbinary people, including many in this year’s cohort. It’s this “gender play” and “gender fuckery,” 2024 alum AC Carey (now performing as Miss Honey) tells me, that can make the classes both appealing and affirming for these particular students, including Carey, 33. “I have really come into my own trans expression through the safety that the class has offered me,” Carey said. 

This is all by design. It was through drag that Bee initially began experimenting with their gender and realized they were trans. Born to American parents in Indonesia and raised later in Singapore, Bee says it wasn’t until they moved to New York City in 2015 that they stumbled into a world that helped them overcome feeling “culturally confused.” Acting in theatre had lost appeal because they felt tired of playing ingenues or “vapid girl roles,” but drag was fascinating because it felt playful yet radical, political yet silly. It allowed them to experiment with femininity as a costume that could be removed, rather than an expectation. They soon felt emboldened to lean into androgyny, ultimately developing a more gender-queer persona that they describe as a “feminine masculinity, a flamboyant faggotry.”  

In these early years of performing, though, Bee often felt excluded and isolated in the scene because their work didn’t align with more traditional gender switching that had been typical in much of mainstream drag. “This was a time when people were calling what I was doing appropriative,” Bee recalled of an era that seemed to only accept drag queens and kings. “There has since been a big movement to expand whose drag is valid, but at the time it felt kind of toxic, and I was really craving something that I didn’t have.” (Drag Race and RuPaul herself, arguably the arbiters of mainstream drag, have both since evolved dramatically when it comes to trans and nonbinary performers.)

These classes, then, are a chance for Bee to share the life-changing experience they have had in drag with others, while also changing drag itself. “I want to see drag that transforms everything — where the performer transforms by the end of the number, where the space transforms, where conceptions about society at large transform,” Bee said. “That’s what makes something drag: a transformation happening.”  

WITH THE BLESSING of the students, Bee granted me special access to attend several classes to document this cohort’s transformative journeys, but only on the condition that I participate as much as possible, so as to properly immerse myself in the experience — heels and all. We also didn’t want to make the students feel gawked at as they experimented with creative vulnerability. (Because of this sensitivity, some students asked to be referred to in this story only by their first name or drag name.) It was my duty as a homosexual to say yes. 

When I attended my first class in early March, the seeds of learning were still being planted. There were movement warm-ups and improv games, but also big theoretical discussions about the “homowork” we’d been asked to do: watching videos about the history of drag, including Paris Is Burning, the 1990 documentary about New York City’s Ballroom scene, which continues to influence much of drag culture today. “What are you calling on (tranifesting) with your drag?” Bee had written on a large sheet of butcher’s paper, on which several answers from the class had been etched in colorful permanent markers: Brave joy, trans Joy, ancestral sexual healing. One scrawled in blank ink stood out to me: “Revenge.” Bee suggested that drag was like unlocking a superpower. Applying this to myself, a reporter, I picked the drag name Clara Kunt. 

As the weeks progressed, fresh horrors from Washington piled up. In an apparent effort to erase transgender people from public life and U.S. history, the new administration had swiftly set about targeting their healthcare, government documents, military participation, sports participation, and safety in prisons. They banned drag shows at the Kennedy Center, stripped funding from public broadcasting because of their coverage of transgender and queer people, and ordered schools to misgender trans students. But inside the sanctuary of the studio walls, having fun felt like its own act of vengeance. “The way that we stick it to them is we build queer community and we make art together,” says student Rae Thomas, 36, who had recently left both her marriage and the Mormon church and was now using the class to explore her androgyny. “The power of this class at this political moment right now is that in spite of all that — guess what? The queers are still gathering. We’re still doing something beautiful.”

Elsewhere in the class there was Frankie Bingxin Yu, 31, a genderqueer bodybuilder who hoped the experience would help them open up after a conservative childhood in China stifled most of their self-expression. There was Patrick, 35, a gay man raised in Staten Island who had recently rediscovered old home videos of him performing in drag as a young boy before years in the closet robbed him of this confidence. And there was Ashton Atteberry, 27, who was taking the class in part to explore their queer masculinity after their father struggled to accept them as nonbinary. “It has really become a deep investigation into ourselves. I don’t know if that’s what I expected when I signed up, but I’m so grateful,” Atteberry says. “It’s been really healing. I feel like I’ve learned as much about myself as I’ve learned about drag.”

Every week, Bee would send out the readings for the next class, which were often how-to guides for things like makeup and hair, lip syncing, song memorizing, and choreography. Sometimes students would be asked to upload pictures or videos of looks they’d prepared at home so they could critique them together, but often these evaluations were done in-person. At one class I attended in mid-March, where the Brooklyn queen Mocha Lite was a guest lecturer, each student nervously performed their first minute of lip syncing to the song of their choice wearing an element of basic drag. (I opted for way-too-big black heels from a charity store.) Mocha was kind, but astute in her feedback: try fixing your eye somewhere if the song is supposed to be directed at someone; remember there can be power in standing still; make sure not to actually sing the words because we’ll hear you and it’ll ruin the illusion. “Knowing the words is one thing, but I want to show you how this song makes me feel,” Mocha told us. “It’s important to step into it.”

Although we were learning in Park Slope, one of the most LGBTQ-friendly places on the planet, most of us opted to paint on our drag once we were at BAX. But conscious of the privilege she enjoys living in Brooklyn as a cis-presenting but gender-questioning person, Angela Vo, 36, did decide to pencil on a mustache before boarding the subway to class. Vo felt it was important to experience “a tiny sliver of what everyday people deal with, not being in drag but just being themselves.” Plus, Vo says, “You see things on the train in New York all the time and people don’t bat an eye.”

Weeks later, in mid-April, the burlesque performer Queerly Femmetastic delivered a movement-heavy class centered around pacing and eye-contact. We were upping our looks this time (I added a sultry if ineptly drawn red lip) as she asked us to consider the difference between sensuality, which is felt from within, and sexiness, which is about the perception of others. “You have to be OK with witnessing other people but also letting other people see you,” she instructed. “Let them perceive you. Let them look at the you that you give them.”

By the end of the class, the students had to improvise an entire number to “I Want It That Way” by the Backstreet Boys for a photographer and me. We squealed with glee as they seductively made eye contact with us, bobbing up and down, voguing clumsily, and falling over one another. Yet their confidence was electric and the room felt charged. 

“After the third class, I started calling it drag therapy. It’s deep and it gives me some kind of medicine that I didn’t even know I needed,” says Alissa Schwartz, 56, a married writer, organizational consultant, and mother who was taking the class after only beginning to embrace her queerness a few years ago. “Drag is the conduit for something bigger happening for all of us in that class.”

A DAY OR SO out from the final showcase in mid-May, Bee called me in a panic. Some of the students had gone out to a local lesbian bar to celebrate after their last lesson, and now, one by one, they were starting to test positive for Covid. The final tally fell at five, which meant almost half the class would be out sick. There was no option but to cancel. Bee was crushed. And yet, they weren’t giving up. 

In just two weeks, Bee and the BAX staff managed to arrange an even grander showcase at Bushwick nightclub House of Yes, which routinely hosts professional drag shows. There would also now be room for even more audience members. And it would take place in the opening days of Pride Month. It was a queer miracle. 

On June 2, before a raucous audience of roughly 100 friends, family, and alums, the students graduated as actual drag performers. As some did splits or seductively removed clothes and wigs, the crowd cheered and hollered, tossing clumped up dollar bills onto the stage. (Mocha Lite and I laughed when a few people tried unsuccessfully to actually hand the performers cash, but the cast was so locked in they didn’t notice — or perhaps collecting tips hadn’t been covered in class.) Some of the acts were silly, like that of Ella Lang, 26, who performed as Luce Change to Norah Jones’ “Turn Me On” while dressed in a lamp costume that eventually illuminated. Others were sexy but politically charged, like that of the bearded Father Fay, 33, who stripped out of papal garments while gyrating and twerking to “Unholy” by Kim Petras and Sam Smith before revealing a riff on Zoe Leonard’s 1992 poem “I want a president” that had been tweaked for the Pope.

All the acts revealed something about the performer, but many were intensely personal — a reflection of the impact the class had had on them. Vo, for example, performed a number as Phuc Bui that was intended to mock the toxic masculinity in her Vietnamese-American family and saw her straddling a Bánh mì sandwich as a phallus. Schwartz was now Po$ter Chylde, dressed up as a mix of her father and Vampirella, the skimpily dressed superheroine her dad had long enjoyed. And Thomas, the ex-Mormon, greyed her temples as the ingenuously named Titts Romney and stripped down to a pair of temple garments while dancing to “Hot Gospel” by Jake Wesley Rogers. “It really is changing me at a root level,” she says of the classes. “I was expecting to be creatively challenged, but it’s really making me think about who I am in a new way.”

“This class is all about giving queer and trans people the chance to tranifest their fantasy,” Bee, now on stage as Theydy Bedbug, told the audience. Drag shows could also be like attending church, Bedbug added, allowing you to find meaning and enlightenment through song in a community of like-minded people — with one big difference: “Are you getting gayer by the minute?” Bedbug asked the crowd. “That’s our agenda.”

As the cast wrapped one final choreographed number to “I Want It That Way,” they each took their bows and the curtains closed. Pulsating with excitement and the promise of possibility, they then formed a circle and embraced. Some wept. All smiled. In three months, they had been bonded together through drag, gender fuckery, and a shared strain of the novel coronavirus. Drag had helped them find each other — and themselves. No wonder it’s considered so dangerous.