Imagine a job that takes you three hours to get ready for, before you then have to hike across the city on a tube or bus with the chance of getting called a f****t.
You then work all night for pay that barely reaches the national minimum wage in a job with no sick pay, no pension and no respect. Afterwards, you’re scared for your life getting home via public transport, too.
That has been the reality for me and thousands of drag entertainers for many years.
As someone who’s been working with drag artists for 16 years, and now employs close to 100, I know all too well how lacklustre and poor their rights are. That’s why I fight for them everyday.
When I first moved to London in 2007, I got a job as a cleaner in a gay bar, having been kicked out of my job as a high-profile estate agent after coming out. I worked hard and, within a year, I ended up managing drag nights at the venue – when their popularity was nothing like it is today.
At this time, drag was loved in the LGBTQ+ community but ridiculed by heterosexual audiences. We were called ‘t**nnys’, paedophiles and many other vile names.
One night, a performer didn’t turn up and the manager said it was up to me to find someone or there’d be consequences. So I found an old dress in the back and went out to perform myself, but I couldn’t just use my real name.
I had seconds to think of one, and looking at my old Nokia phone to check the time, my last caller was named Linda. My eyes cast over the sleeve of my dress, it was gold and thus Linda Gold was born.
Honestly, I thought I was going to die climbing up to the stage. I had no idea what I was going to say or do, so I just decided to ad-lib.
Almost immediately, people started to cheer and laugh. My nerves settled and I felt an overwhelming desire to dance and burst into an acapella version of Whitney Houston’s I Wanna Dance With Somebody. At that moment my show was born.
I’ve never really looked back. In fact, I still wear the same dress and do the same show 16 years later, but times change and that’s why I brought new queens into my drag family.
After years on the drag circuit performing for between £40 and £100 a show (plus free booze) – and seeing the rise of RuPaul’s Drag Race – I launched Linda Gold’s FunnyBoyz, a new concept in drag cabaret bringing hilarious shows, comedy bingo and entertaining games from world-renowned drag queens, in 2020.
Unfortunately, due to an immediate lockdown, our official launch wasn’t until April 2021 at our flagship venue at Blundell Street, Liverpool.
Alongside creating safe spaces for the LGBTQ+ community and providing comedy and entertainment, one of our main goals was to ensure every queen had an opportunity to perform and earn a living through drag.
This became more important to me than performing, having experienced the lows of roughing it over the years. I did not want my drag family – including my drag queen boyfriend Dys Alexia – to ever live through the humiliation of drag in the early years: the low pay, being taken advantage of and the lack of self-respect.
There was a time when many members of the LGBTQ+ community – especially our trans brothers and sisters – were paying bars to let us perform, without so much as a thank you. I cannot begin to describe how unestablished drag performers were used and abused in those days.
I recall one bar in Soho charging me to go on their open mic night because it was giving me ‘free publicity’.
It was pointed out by drag legend Lawrence Chaney on Drag Race that queens can often work for as little as £15 per gig and one of the only ways to make decent money is by virtue of getting a lucky position on RuPaul’s Drag Race.
Of course, we still love hosting the Drag Race girls but we launched our own event for queens and alternative performers to find work without having to rely on the show.
Such as Imani Versace, drag daughter of Crystal Versace, DRUK season three winner, who had never done drag outside of her bedroom. After joining our team selling bingo tickets, she now travels the world performing. Many of the Ru Girls also started their career in our in-house talent contest, EuroDrag.
There are simply too many to mention, but one of our proudest is Vanity Milan, who was the host of our Enfield event and has since gone on to be an international superstar.
Our concept, which is centred around treating drag as a professional, credible and reputable business, makes it affordable for venues to pay performers a fair wage and give them a commission incentive to earn more.
Our motto is ‘all drag is relevant’. That includes drag kings and queens, non-binary and trans – plus everyone in between. It is a sad reality that this latter section of entertainers can often be excluded when they also have so much to offer.
So many drag queens work cash-in-hand. With that, there’s obviously a lack of sick pay, holiday pay and general rights in the workplace.
I’m trying to change that by introducing contracts for performers, enabling them to claim things they currently cannot, such as travel costs, childcare, tax credits, sick pay, health care and start pension funds for later in life.
It’s a really important change and one I believe must be implemented across the industry to ensure stability for everyone involved.
Outside of this, drag queens can be abused on nights out and subjected to unwanted harassment, but don’t really have anywhere to turn. It is common practice for people to simply presume it is perfectly acceptable to just grab the queens, hug and kiss them, even grope buttocks, breast plates and, in some cases, our genitalia.
If we fight back, with no contract and no rights, we run the risk of being fired so we simply put up with it – but it shouldn’t be like this. I will never forget a drunk lady grabbing my testicles with the force of a wrecking ball. I was unable to work for days and the memory still haunts me.
For that reason, I have put in no-tolerance policies that give drag queens the right to end a performance or night out if they feel uncomfortable, with no fear of retribution that they won’t get paid.
Again, this is part of our idea to not only protect performers, but also to make sure every person attending one of our nights is safe at all times. It also means the best performers want to stay in the industry as they are being looked after.
Through sheer hard work and determination, in just one year, we launched our own venue and created 27 satellite events across the UK. We’re in the process of purchasing two more venues too.
Our success is down to sheer hard work of the team, but must also be attributed to our commitment to continued fight for equality.
FunnyBoyz is primarily an entertainment show and a new concept in drag cabaret, but more importantly, it is also a political statement.
Drag queens, trans people and all members of the LGBTQ+ community will not hide away in backstreet gay bars, like we did in the past.
We will always put the fight for equality before profit.
If I retire and all drag artists are treated with respect, kindness and paid equally – as they deserve – I can be happy.
Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing James.Besanvalle@metro.co.uk.
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source https://metro.co.uk/2022/08/30/being-a-drag-queen-is-hard-work-but-we-dont-have-any-protections-17199135/
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