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The other performers included Queensland’s Tricky Boombang and Victoria’s Lance De Boyle, Jerome, Motherfucka MC and Scon Bott, the latter dressed in ACDC denim cutoff jacket and 1980s mullet. The host was Sexy Galexy, a disco-meets-Liberacesque Glamourboi whose bulgingly skin-tight gold trousers and bespangled jackets stretched across his muscled-tending-to-paunchy torso gleamed brighter than the firmament. Sign up for our weekly newsletter here.The stage in the basement of the Imperial Erskineville was overtaken by eight legendary Australian drag kings on Saturday night.

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If you’re in New York, feel free to visit her monthly Miss Manhattan Non-Fiction Reading Series. Her work has appeared in VICE, Billboard, Vogue, Vanity Fair, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, ELLE, and now, very happily, them.

You’re thinking, 'Is it a man or a woman?' Sir, the answer is no.” More than a drag king or drag performer, Murray is just Murray.Įlyssa Goodman is a New York-based writer and photographer. In his act it’s something he handles with a deftly crafted joke: “I’m reading your mind, sir. When the language changed in the late aughts/early 2010s, however, Hill began to use it. When Hill was coming up, he told The Advocate, “transgender” was not yet an identity people identified themselves with. “Why can’t you just call me a comedian like Jerry Seinfeld is called a comedian?” he asked in 2007. He’s also been selected twice as one of OUT Magazine’s OUT 100, was recently featured in Vogue, and was given a commendation by the City of New York for his positive impact on Brooklyn’s queer community.Įven so, Hill does not define himself as a drag king and has never wanted to identify himself as a gender or sexuality alone.

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Since beginning his career, Hill has performed around the world, emceeing for Dita von Teese (she had found it difficult to find hosts who were professional, versatile, and respectful to women until her management saw Hill) opening for Le Tigre and The Gossip appearing in music videos for the Scissor Sisters, TV on the Radio, and Peaches in films like John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus on Bravo, Logo, HBO, and TLC, and countless others.

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It was after running for mayor, though, that Hill decided he would try to take on performance full time and see if he could make an impact in another kind of (then) not-often-seen drag. Kings didn’t have the same cultural visibility and thereby didn’t get the same kind of economic support.

Club Casanova had a small group of drag kings, Hill told WNYC, and it was hard to get people to pay the same amount of attention to king performances as they would queens. He didn’t have a name yet, but lived in New York’s Murray Hill neighborhood at the time, and seeing the phrase everywhere around him, the name soon stuck. At first, he played an Elvis character at a drag king night at Club Casanova in New York’s East Village. This also turned into a write-in campaign in the actual mayoral race of 1997 and, later, an act in New York City clubs. Hill’s MFA thesis ended up being portraits of himself as a man running for New York City mayor. Hill started making appearances at clubs in 1996, while still in his MFA program. But Hill wanted to change this, to inject the same camp and humor that drag queens used in their performances into his own burgeoning career. Sitting on the pier, I thought, ‘What’s on the other side of this?’” Even in the lesbian bars in the West Village, he discussed in an interview with WNYC, the goal for masculine drag was to try to pass as a man nobody smiled or laughed.

Lady Bunny was on the mic and everyone was dressed in drag, but I saw very few lesbians and trans. “When I got to New York, I went to the Wigstock festival and noticed that everybody was taking pictures of drag queens,” he told The Advocate in 2016. In that time, however, and after moving to New York for an MFA in photography at the School of Visual Arts, he realized there wasn’t a lot on the other side of the coin - that is to say, there was a paucity of masculine drag, or drag kings. Hill’s story begins when he was a photography student at Boston University in the mid-1990s, photographing drag icons like Lypsinka and Lady Bunny.

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