Strut your stuff: How racialized drag performers in Vancouver spotlight culture and gender expression

Jolene Sloan has been paving her way to a career in drag before she even knew what it was.

She competed and won multiple folk dance competitions put on by the Indian language department. She also performed the Bollywood classic “Kajra Re” at her uncle’s wedding at seven years old — a song that, today, she gets booked for the most as the widely recognized premier Punjabi drag queen of Canada.

Upon moving from India to the Yukon and going through a difficult breakup, Jolene Sloan decided to revisit her old passion as a way to cope.

“I started exploring dance and cross-dressing again,” she says. “People told me it’s called drag, and I was like, ‘Oh, what is that?’ They were like, ‘Go to a gay club.’ I’m like, ‘What is that?’”

On a visit to Vancouver, Jolene Sloan went to The Junction gay bar and saw drag queens on stage. Once back in the Yukon, she started pursuing drag herself by performing at the territory’s Rendezvous Festival in 2021.

Now based in Vancouver, Jolene Sloan says drag has become a way for her to celebrate her transgender identity as well as her Punjabi background.

“[It] was really important for me to be the representation that I was looking for,” she says. “We have a lot of Punjabi drag queens in the country after I started doing drag. That’s really fascinating to see.”

In 2024, a Canadian Media Fund and Pink Triangle Press survey found that 97 per cent of 2SLGBTQIA+ respondents — and 78 per cent of straight respondents — in the country’s media industry said that queer representation is extremely important to them.

The research determined that caution from the media industry over 2SLGBTQIA+ representation being a risk for audience retention — a perceived barrier to spotlighting queer people — is a myth.

It highlighted Canada’s Drag Race as an example. The reality TV series, which is an offshoot of the American RuPaul’s Drag Race, became Crave’s highest-rated original production upon its launch in 2020 — a record that has since been broken by Heated Rivalry, a gay romance series.

Canada’s Drag Race centres on queer creators — and some of its top contestants were BIPOC, including Priyanka, Icesis Couture, The Virgo Queen, and Kendall Gender, who helped guide Jolene Sloan at the start of her drag journey.

The franchise expanded visibility of the modern drag scene, which Erique Zhang, assistant professor at Simon Fraser University’s School of Communication, says is inspired by ballroom culture.

“Ballroom was primarily created as a community for largely Black and brown queer people in New York … who were unhoused, who had been, oftentimes, cast out by their biological families and were trying to live in the streets,” says Zhang, whose research focuses on queer representation.

“They started to come together and create these units where they would have found family, support structures, and put on these ballroom competitions, where they compete against each other for prizes.”

Zhang says BIPOC drag performers can show younger queer people of diverse backgrounds that they, too, can live their lives authentically — something that they relate to personally with their own identity formation.

“I was in college when Drag Race first came out, and there were several Asian drag queens on the first couple of seasons who I saw as inspirations,” Zhang says. “[They] inspired me to interrogate my own gender identity and to explore femininity in a way that I previously didn’t feel like was a possibility for me.”

How drag intersects with culture and identity

Jolene Sloan credits her grandmother for teaching her the expression of performance by immersing her in Punjabi culture and literature.

“I really wanted to do drag, but I didn’t want to westernize it,” she says. “I love Punjabi culture and I like to promote it a lot. I wanted to make sure people don’t forget the folk culture that we have. I want to make sure that’s alive.”

Something Jolene Sloan is proud of is attracting multi-generational brown audiences to her performances.

“[There] were mostly middle-aged aunties coming with their families to watch a drag show at a gay club in Vancouver,” she says. “It was really beautiful to see … because their kids are the one [whose] generation I’m trying to make an impact on. I want to make sure that those queers are safe and they have a safe space.”

For Vancouver-based, two-spirit drag king Theo Rhetical, who is of Peepeekisis Cree and Métis ancestry, identity isn’t separate from him and he feels a responsibility to acknowledge it when performing.

“There’s no performance I do that isn’t Indigenous because I am an Indigenous person, you know?”

Theo Rhetical is part of the House of Eden, an all-kings group, with Genesis and Heathen, his drag parents — a term that refers to seasoned drag artists who mentor newer performers.

He debuted in July 2023 at the Pantry Drag Show in Vancouver’s Fable Diner. Theo Rhetical says his main goal when performing is to invoke feelings from or for the audience.

“Art is a way that we heal. If we’re able to feel things fully, that is medicine.”

He says he has done numbers that focus on his two-spirit identity. One that comes to mind is an October 2023 performance for the multi-week Drag Derby competition at The Birdhouse, where he performed “Lemon Boy” by Cavetown.

“I picked that song because it had gotten me through a lot of really difficult mental health times. I had a puppet and I painted my face half masc and half femme — it was an acknowledgement of being two spirit. I hadn’t started transitioning at that point,” Theo Rhetical says. 

“Especially for an audience that big, I’d never been perceived in such a large way as queer. I won first that week.”

Not being raised in culture and attending Catholic school growing up, he says drag has allowed him to heal and reconnect with what it means to be Indigenous.

“It’s a journey. I’m still learning, as so many of us are, because that is the point of the colonial project — to make us feel disconnected and like we’re not allowed to know.”

Romi Kim, who performs as drag king SKIM, started pursuing drag when they were living in South Korea in 2019.

“At the time, I was really yearning for some queer community because I was living in a rural city at the time,” Kim says.

“I saw there was a competition happening in Seoul. I signed up for it, and the prompt of the competition was duets. Because I didn’t know anyone [in drag] at the time, I decided to paint myself half as a king and half as a queen…. I ended up winning — and then I’ve just been hooked ever since.”

That year, Kim moved to Vancouver and soon signed up for the Drag Derby, where they met House of Rice’s Shay Dior, a queen who would become their drag mother.

Kim says there are certain performances they do that invoke their identity and culture, such as by using specific Korean songs or motifs.

For example, in 2020, they explored Talchum, a Korean mask dance-drama.

“I thought this was a very interesting relation to drag, because I feel like the drag community is often performing not just for community, but within our own community and for ourselves, too,” Kim says. “Because drag is performance art of the body, my Koreanness is never hidden away.”

They produce the reoccurring King Sized show with fellow BIPOC drag kings Velvet Ryder and Percy Pegg. Kim is also the director and producer of Long Live Kings, a web series that documents Vancouver’s drag king community.

“There’s very few drag kings in mainstream media, so I think I really wanted to have a series where drag kings get to share their own stories and get to play in a very silly way.”

Fostering representation

When Kim came to Vancouver and started performing, the late Indigenous drag king, King Fisher, was one of the only kings performing in the city for some time.

Flash forward to today, Kim and the King Sized collective has ignited a broader drag king community — one that includes many drag kings of colour.

Kim says queer spaces in Vancouver’s nightlife scene are majority white, which makes having BIPOC performers very important for other audience members to feel seen.

“All the media we consume, and our culture in general, has been really pushed through whiteness, white patriarchy, and colonialism. So to have BIPOC performers — their bodies on stage, no matter what — will show a bit of resilience.”

Theo Rhetical adds that he feels more hopeful than not about diversity and progressiveness in drag spaces.

“There’s always new artists who bring good magic into the scene in different ways.”

When Jolene Sloan first started performing, she says she was told by some that what she was doing wasn’t drag but “just Indian dancing.”

Instead, she sees drag as a tool that creates opportunity for racialized people.

“Drag and culture are not mutually exclusive to each other, and drag exists in many different forms,” she says. “Drag is a way of activism to take away the hate that there is towards queer people out there in the world.”