You might not know it, but Canberra is experiencing its New Romantic period.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
That is, at least when it comes to drag.
Walking into Reload Bar on a Thursday afternoon it looks how you think it would. Relatively empty and ready for people to knock off work and grab a drink.
Nothing is out of place except for two large suitcases laying open on the floor and filled with wigs, make-up and some sparkly platform heels. The type of heels that are so high they would scare many away from wearing them.
And the near-fearless owner of said shoes? Toni Kola.
One of three co-owners of Canberra drag entertainment company Phish and Phreak Productions and the 2019 winner of Drag Nation ACT, this queen knows her stuff.
It's an hour before people are expected to start showing up for one of Phish and Phreak's weekly trivia nights and it's the time when Kola and her fellow drag queen Faux nee Phish use the bar's mirrors to complete their transformations.
"This is the side of drag that most people don't get to see," Corey Passlow says.
And he's not wrong. There's a relaxed nature to the process of putting on the final touches. Kola and Phish laugh and chat, and occasionally sing to the bar's music, all while applying their mascara and glueing their wigs into place.
Passlow is the founder of Phish and Phreak Productions, and - as Kola describes him - he's part of the old guard of drag, having started about a decade ago. Nowadays he mostly leaves the wigs and makeup to his performers, but Passlow is the one to speak to if you want to know anything about the history of drag in Canberra.
He's also the one who has dubbed this time in Canberra's drag culture as the New Romantic period.
While there was a time a few years ago when a few of the capital's venues would have regular drag nights and potentially even a resident drag queen, it eventually died out. Phish and Phreak Productions is one of the driving forces bringing drag back into this new era.
And it's a new era filled with a new type of drag queen.
While the classic drag queen - the type you often see on RuPaul's Drag Race who is all about high kicks, lip-syncing and death drops - is still very much alive and well, drag is more diverse than ever.
It's no longer just cis-gay males who dramatically fall backwards while dancing and strike a pose on the ground (aka doing a death drop). There are now no limits on not only what a drag queen, king or non-binary performer can do, but who it is that can fulfil those roles.
Not to mention they're performing for a more diverse audience. Yes, you can go to a Canberra bar for a drag performance, but just as coronavirus hit, Phish and Phreak were in the middle of launching a drag storytime for children at some of the city's libraries.
And obviously, they're not the first to do that with drag storytimes popping up across the country and internationally. In a way, in these instances, drag performers fulfil a similar role to a clown. They are these colourful, vibrant, happy, over-the-top people. It just so happens that they are also promoting gender exploration and acceptance to youth.
But it's this side of drag - and those who perform it - that is not often seen in the mainstream media.
"We, in our community, not even just as performers but just queer community generally, we have such diversity in every way," Kola says.
"Having a mainstream platform like Drag Race is good in some aspects because it means people are seeing drag, more people are interested and more people are coming along to support it. But at the same time, there's still that awkward stigma of 'Oh, but you're, you're a woman. So you can't do drag the way that I've seen it on TV.
"As a performer, you can do whatever you want, as long as it's not licking people at the moment. We're social distancing and we're making sure we're safe at all of our venues, but it's art in the purest sense of the word."
Even looking at Kola and Phish's journey into drag, you can see that they are completely different.
Kola was introduced to it by Passlow after another performer couldn't make a gig four years ago and someone was needed to fill in.
"He was like, 'Hey, you look like you could fit the dress. We can get heels in your size and we'll make you pretty'," Kola says.
"Then I got this terrible drag name. They had a bunch of old booze posters. So they blindfolded me, I spun around and whatever I landed on was my name.
"I was so close to being Jackie Daniels. I'm so glad I didn't get that."
Traditionally, when an aspiring drag queen is just starting, she needs someone to turn to for guidance, support, and make-up tips. She needs a drag mother.
Years of high school theatre meant Kola already had the make-up skills. And these skills help her get into "functional drag" in 20 minutes. ("That's very, incredibly quick. Most people can't do that," Phish says.)
But there is more to being a drag queen than the make-up and for Kola, that's where Passlow, as her drag mother, came in.
Phish, on the other hand, became interested in drag after seeing Conchita win Eurovision in 2014.
But as her alter ego is a straight female, she never thought she would be able to it.
"I was just sort of longing but not feeling like it was my place," Phish says.
"And then I did a little trip to London in 2017 and went to a bar and they had a drag competition and two women were competing. It's a little bit of a thing.
"I was like, well that means I have to do it because I've always wanted to try this."
And so she went about making her dream a reality, turning to sources such as YouTube to find out how to do her make-up, and registering to be a part of the Drag Nation competition.
But Drag National is not just any competition. It's the national drag pageant and Australia's answer to the Entertainer of the Year - the American competition that is often dominated by contestants from RuPaul's Drag Race.
Every state has heats and the winner from each one goes on to compete to be the overall winner.
"I shouldn't have started with a competition. I just decided I needed to do something," Phish says.
"So I tried that and that was fun. But then there wasn't anything after that. And everyone was welcoming. I was prepared for them to be like they are on TV.
"Particularly because I'm a woman and I hadn't seen any women doing it in Canberra, but they were super welcoming and friendly but then there was a drought and there was nothing and I was really sad because I wanted to perform again."
With no other drag event in Canberra, the queen created her own. To coincide the screening of a RuPaul Drag Race Christmas special, Phish put on a one-night-only competition.
"Heaps of these people came out of the woodworks who either hadn't done drag in Canberra before or had but a very long time ago," she says.
But there was one guest in particular who was completely unexpected. Shangela, a regular contestant on RuPaul's Drag Race, including the Christmas special that was set to be screened at Phish's event, was set to perform in Canberra the very next day. Somehow, she had heard about Phish's event and decided to make an appearance.
"There was Drag Race royalty at this little drag show," Kola says.
It was also the night that Phish met Kola and Passlow. Three months later, Phish and Phreak Productions was born.
There's no way of knowing what to expect from a Phish and Phreak event. One week Kola may pour strawberry milk over herself, the next Phish may dress as Pauline Hanson for a satirical skit. There may be someone else who swallows a sword or have 10 costume reveals in the space of a three-minute number.
The production company encourages all of its performers to do whatever they want when it comes to their cabaret-style show that accompanies most of their events.
"It brings in a different audience compared to what a lot of other drag shows probably would," Kola says.
"It's not just one clump of people and they're all friends with each other and that's the whole premise. We've got public servants and visual artists and circus performers who come to gigs."
And all of those who do drag, do it for different reasons.
Some will do drag purely as a form of performance art. Others will be more closely linked to their persona and there isn't a difference between themselves in drag and out of it.
Then there are those who are somewhere in the middle. Those who see drag as an extension of themselves, just in a wig and heels.
And it doesn't have to stop at just one drag persona. Kola says they had the situation in Phish and Phreak's So You Think You Can Drag competition last year where they had to decide between two applications - one queen and one king - who were from the same performer.
"We so desperately wanted to cast both of them but we couldn't." That's because time constraints restrict someone getting out of one drag persona and into another.
It's not as simple as changing an outfit. Particularly when changing from a queen to a king and vice versa.
While one is hyper-feminised with make-up contouring creating high cheekbones, the other is hyper-masculine with sunken cheeks. And those who are non-binary performers may opt for a more androgynous look.
And that's just looking at drag from the surface.
Take Kola for example. She approaches her make-up to look almost Barbie-like. She has incredibly defined cheek contouring, big eyes and over-the-top makeup. Others may opt for the other end of the spectrum with soft and subtle lines - and on the days when Kola plans to pour strawberry milk over herself, she also goes down this road.
"Otherwise that would just be a waste of make-up," Kola says.
Phish, on the other hand, is someone who's make-up routine can be likened to a Babushka doll.
Before she does anything to make herself hyperfeminine, she paints her face to become more masculine, squaring off the jaw, bringing in the cheekbones and widening the forehead. Then she goes and adds her drag look over the top of that. Phish is effectively a woman, presenting as a male, presenting as a female.
"That was my aim, to make people think I was a man dressed as a woman, which has happened," Phish says.
"It's not the goal for most women who do drag. It was just what I was aiming for."
- For details on Phish and Phreak's events, go to phishandphreak.com.