RuPaul praises grownups who brought kids to DragCon NYC: 'Thank you for introducing this child to color and beauty and love'
It was hard to see her through the tall, phone-raising crowd, but sure enough, right there next to RuPaul Charles himself, was a sassy 8-year-old girl, Danica. She wore massive false eyelashes, a feather necklace, and a gold lamé fishtail dress, and had been invited to “sissy that walk” up and down the main runway of RuPaul’s DragCon NYC by Charles himself, looking dapper in a red suit. After their strut, he asked Danica who had brought her to the over-the-top event.
“I’m here with my aunt,” she said, noting that her drag name is D. Cupcake.
“Miss Aunt, I want to thank you for introducing this child to color and beauty and love,” Charles called out, and then met Aunt Nikki, who stood beaming at the edge of the runway. “God bless you, Aunt Nikki. I love you!”
And then, turning to the crowd and stressing that all kids need such mentors because the world can be “real not nice,” he declared, “You are all love ambassadors!” Everyone cheered.
A post shared by Nicole Goodman (@_darling_nikki) on Sep 30, 2018 at 9:28am PDT
Drag queens have been known for many things: clever turns of phrase, liberal use of double-enténdres, expert tucking and contouring techniques — even for their vital role in kicking off the whole gay equality movement back in 1969, when the Stonewall riots earned them an undisputed place of royalty within LGBT culture.
But hanging with toddlers, tweens, and teens? Not so much.
Until now, apparently, thanks to RuPaul’s DragCon — an extension of Drag Race, with its all-time high ratings, forthcoming Season 11, and recent Emmy win. And who better to bring fans of every age along for the ride than RuPaul, who has been lovingly delivering drag to the masses since 1993’s “Supermodel (You Better Work)”?
Because while Danica was particularly fierce, she, as a kid, was hardly an oddity at the three-day drag queen convention, held this past weekend at the sprawling Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City. Children, in fact, were everywhere — posing for pics on the pink carpet with towering RuPaul’s Drag Race stars, poking through vendors’ candy-colored wigs and silver tiaras, and even napping in strollers, their sparkly dresses all askew. They could especially be found in the Kid Zone, a formal meeting place for the tween-and-under set, replete with a bouncy house, arts and crafts, face painting, and a near-constant rotation of Drag Queen Story Hour readers.
“Drag is an adult nightlife thing and it always will be — drag queens are the pillars of the queer community,” said Jonathan Hamlit, a Kid Zone co-organizer and co-founder of the global nonprofit Drag Queen Story Hour. “But bringing them out into the daylight brings us all together, and exposes kids to gender diversity at a young age, which makes them more open and accepting.” (Something not as easily achieved with adults; on Saturday, while DragCon was in full swing in New York, a group of protestors greeted a Drag Queen Story Hour in Houston.)
In addition to the Kid Zone at this second year of DragCon NYC, co-organizers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato also offered topical panels, including “A Family That Drags Together,” featuring several queens discussing how they balance family and drag life. (“I just never put any shame on it. I never hid anything,” panelist Nicole Paige Brooks said about her career and her 12-year-old son, before quipping, “I told him, ‘All dads wear dresses — they just hide it better!’”) At DragCon LA, which just wrapped up its fourth year, Kid Zone debuted in 2016; this year, 55 percent of its 50,000 attendees were under the age of 30.
“I like the inclusivity,” drag queen Ari Kiki, whose signature is a hairy bosom, told Yahoo Lifestyle on Sunday. “I didn’t have [the ability to see drag] when I was younger, but it would have been nice to see something like that. Maybe the lightbulb would’ve gone on faster.”
Kiki’s sentiments were echoed by many others throughout the weekend, with surprisingly no one expressing dismay that the addition of tots was somehow watering down the scene.
Besides, said longtime New York City drag queen Linda Simpson, “Drag is pretty immature all the way around. It’s a bunch of guys dressing in mommy’s clothes and showing off. Adult drag is not that much different from children drag.” She added, “Personally, I would have loved to have had the permission to dress in drag as a kid, so I certainly can’t frown upon any youngsters giving it a whirl.”
E! the Dragnificent!, a 13-year-old from Pittsburgh, was one such youngster in full drag over the weekend — doing a mini-me version of legend Divine on one day and a burlesque-inspired show queen, headdress included, the next.
“He’s been doing drag since he was 3,” E’s mother, Dre Aliquo-Varela, told Yahoo Lifestyle, adding that she brought her son to DragCon so he could find his people. “I wanted him to meet other kids who do it, to feel connected to the community.” And he indeed met up with two of the most well-known drag kids on the scene — Lactatia and Desmond is Amazing. “It’s going to be real boring going back to school now,” she lamented.
Other parents explained that, while their kids did not identify as drag queens themselves, they connected with the spirit of the performance art, inspired, in most cases, by Drag Race.
“They love drag,” Michelle Stern, a Fairlawn, N.J., high school teacher, said of her two girls, 6-year-old Harper and 3-year-old Charlotte. She said she introduced her daughters to drag when it was an element in a school play she worked on and brought them to see, and that they now watch RuPaul’s reality show competition. “They’re learning ‘be who you are’ from it,” she said.
Similarly, Nikki Goodman — the “Aunt Nikki” who had so impressed RuPaul by bringing her niece Danica with her from Newark, N.J. — said that she and her extended family had been longtime drag fans, largely because of personal ties to the LGBT community, including a sister who is transgender. “I have two sons. It’s really important that we send a message that love is love, and that no matter who you are or want to be, you will be respected and not made to feel ashamed,” she told Yahoo Lifestyle. “Some families have arts and crafts, some have dinner around the table. But RuPaul’s Drag Race has become our family tradition.”
It’s similar at the Silver Spring, Md., household of Dunia Best, who brought her 9-year-old daughter to DragCon. “When Drag Race started on TV, I couldn’t stop watching it, so she watched it with me,” Best told Yahoo Lifestyle, adding that, for kids, “they just see it as something beautiful, that people dress up and perform.” And that the expansion of drag from nasty midnight one-liners to family-friendly entertainment, she noted, is not all that shocking. “Borscht Belt humor, when you think about it, is all ‘blue jokes.’ And yet George Burns and Redd Foxx — who was the dirtiest dude — are household names.”
Drag historian Joe E. Jeffreys also thinks the growth into kids’ territory feels organic.
“Given marriage equality, trends in parenting, and the popularity of RuPaul’s Drag Race on TV, the rise of drag children is predictable. Children have always loved dress-up. And with gender lines blurring in society at large, children are at the front lines in this expression,” he told Yahoo Lifestyle. Jeffreys added, “I would not have been able to predict, however, the young adult women I see who dress and do their makeup like their favorite drag performers. When does drag become cos-play — or has it always been, but [with] gender lines muddying this categorization?”
In any event, Jeffreys added, the emergence of drag as something not only accepted but embraced by parents and children has been particularly moving to many queer elders — including his friend Henry Arango, 90, who was a female impersonator at a nightclub in Queens, N.Y., back in the 1960s and a witness to the Stonewall riots.
“He was deeply touched,” Jeffreys recalled of Arango’s reaction to seeing kids dressed up at DragCon last year. “For him to see this being allowed to be expressed? He was literally moved to tears. Drag children was something he couldn’t have predicted.”
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