Almost 30 years ago, finding a drag show in Calgary meant knowing which gay bar to walk into.
Now, on any given week, you might find queens tucked inside a pub, lip-syncing over brunch, covered head-to-toe in latex, or sharing an open stage with a magician. Drag has escaped the confines of the gay bar and fallen into the mainstream culture’s embrace.
“There’s drag everywhere, my love. In most major centres, they’re right across the board,” says long-time local drag performer, Carly York Jones. Few people have watched that transformation for as long as Carly York Jones, who, when not on stage, goes by Craig Taylor, the creator and owner of drag performance company Carly’s Angels. Arriving in Calgary in 1997, already fresh-faced in drag, she quickly found a home performing at the now-defunct gay bars Metro BoyzTown and Plush.
Many of Calgary’s former nightlife venues had gay bars like Detour/Arena, Metro BoyzTown and Rek Room, all of which hosted drag shows and performances. However, it was largely set apart from the rest of Calgary’s club scene.
“There was quite a large [drag] scene actually,” says Taylor. “It was popular, but it was also underground in the aspect of being in the gay bars only.”
In 2000, Taylor started Carly’s Angels. The show first took the stage in November under the decidedly inaugural title Dine and Bedazzled with Carly and Friends. Fast forward 26 years and three ownership changes, and Carly’s Angels continues its 27th season in the same physical space, now The Attic Bar & Stage.
“Thanks to [RuPaul’s] Drag Race, there’s no reason for drag to be underground anymore,” says Taylor. “ It’s not really sort of private anymore. Lots and lots of places in town that are not necessarily established as gay bars allow us to do pop-up shows in their spots.”
Outside of the city’s gay bars, the stage has travelled farther out, as drag brunches, pop-ups and shows have spilt into venues across Calgary. However, much of the definition of who and what constitutes drag has become more abstract.
While the Carly’s Angels weekly Saturday night dinner shows host a static cast of queens, its Sunday brunch show line-up is ever-changing. The Deviled Legs brunch show happens once a month at The Attic, showcasing a wide range of performers of different aesthetics, gender-binaries and age groups. The same goes for Dickens’ weekly Tuesday night drag competition. At They Got Talent, a contemporary line-up of drag performers can present their persona for the first time or experiment with the art form.
Dogiichow, a Two-Spirit performer and current co-host, found their way into Calgary drag through that same stage several years ago. They entered as a contestant and stuck around, finding friends and community before eventually graduating to hosting the show themselves.
Calling They Got Talent simply a drag show, however, undersells the range of its performers. Drag and burlesque may make up most of the roster, but the event has also hosted clowns, magicians, stand-up comics and tap dancers. Contestants can bring virtually whatever creation they have been cooking up, with the night’s top two performers eventually competing in a lip-sync battle.
Dogiichow’s own drag fits comfortably within that “anything goes” philosophy. They describe it as “femininity to a monstrous extent,” mixing more traditional drag with burlesque and horror. For a recent performance, they constructed a body horror look dripping in latex, tentacles and teeth — a collision between beauty and disgust that would be difficult to squeeze into the conventional image of a queen in a gown performing a pop number.
“Drag is essentially the performance art of gender,” says Dogiichow. “What gender means to every single person is going to be different.” Even for Carly’s Angels creator, whose self-described aesthetic remains decidedly “pretty girl,” arrives at much the same conclusion. “You’ve got to be more open to the word ‘drag.’ It’s an art form versus just dressing as a girl anymore,” says Taylor.
Calgary’s got a new appetite for this transcendent new era of drag. When Dogiichow first entered They Got Talent, some weeks drew only five contestants. Today, the show caps its roster at 15, generally hosting around 13 performers each week, with many of its seats filled.
It makes Calgary’s current drag scene almost an inversion of the one Taylor entered almost 30 years ago. Sure, there are fewer dedicated gay bars these days, yet drag is seemingly everywhere.
Today, a Tuesday-night show might hold a seasoned queen, a performer’s first-ever number and maybe even a clown for good measure. If that still sounds like a pretty narrow idea of what drag is, that’s kind of the point. As Dogiichow says, “If you think you know what drag is, you know nothing.”
