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‘We put on a frock,’ says Ryan Styles, London’s ‘pop surrealist drag’ scene leader, ‘but we’re not parodying women. Britain’s perception of drag for the past 20 years has been Dame Edna Everage and Lily Savage. They’ve made drag acceptable to mainstream society and now we’re tearing it apart. What we’re doing is guerrilla drag. We’re drag terrorists.’

Think drag and it’s men in big wigs frocking up and stepping out in stilettos, right? So far, so ‘Priscilla’. But there’s a new generation who are currently reinventing drag. The likes of Styles, Taylor Mac, Scottee and Jonny Woo incorporate extreme visual art, surreal theatrical production and grotesque costumes, and it’s a world away from doe-eyed miming to Gloria Gaynor.

‘I’ve always had trouble defining what it is that I do,’ says 22-year old Styles. ‘I use drag as a tool, but I still can’t determine whether I’m drag, fine art or cabaret. That’s what’s great about this movement. It crosses the line.’
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Taylor Mac spent thirteen years finding an audience in America, only to discover that ‘it took two weeks of shows at the Edinburgh Festival last year to find one in the UK’. His shows have a sky-high production value and are political, yet many of the songs are profoundly intimate. ‘The political stuff is a backdrop. Why are people having difficulty with love, life, friendships and work? It’s because of the landscape.’

Ryan Styles © Kate Garner

‘The aesthetic that I’ve been creating encompasses as much as it possibly can,’ Mac continues. ‘It’s wonderful, but it’s also a sad, goofy, chaotic, graceful, beautiful, ugly thing. I’m masculine, but I have another side to me. It’s American and British machismo we’re battling, and the most revolutionary thing that I can do is to put on a pair of heels.’

So whatever happened to drag being confrontational? ‘Somewhere along the line,’ says Mac, ‘drag became plastical. Everything that was phantasmagorical became entertainment. It didn’t start out that way, it was fools speaking truths. That’s how I see myself, speaking truths that others can’t see. Drag used to be challenging. People would get freaked out and scared, now a lot of the time it’s just about entertaining.’
Styles agrees: ‘It’s interesting that traditional drag entertainers are older men, too. With this new flux of performers, no-one’s over the age of 35.’

While the Divine David was famously scathing about ‘traditional-comedy drag-mime’ being reactionary and insulting to women, this new breed believe that ‘old-school drag’ should and will always have it’s place in the gay community. It’s just no longer cutting edge.

Want some? Duckie at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern is an outstanding long-running ‘homosexualist’ cabaret night that has always given a rare platform, but Bistrotheque is proving to be the Factory of our day for this new generation.

Lisa Lee, Bistrotheque’s cabaret programmer, recognises the role the east London cabaret space is playing in this new scene. ‘We see ourselves at the forefront of “drag art”. The performers live here, rehearse here, hang out here. They’re not on their own, they’re a collective, a real community of artists. Our new new season, UnderConstruction allows the experimentation to take place before it goes to the mainstream Friday and Saturday nights. We came up with the title to make audiences aware that the shows are in very early stages. They’re very raw and very new, but equally very exciting.’