It's pretty safe to say that in the past decade or so there has been a complete explosion in the world of drag. Alongside the growing army of Glamazons brought about by RuPaul and her reality show empire, queens are becoming international pop stars. But drag, for decades, has been an art form almost exclusively created by ,and to an extent for, gay men.Enter: Crimson Kitty, New York's premier female drag queen.
While drag itself may be designed to question our very core notions of gender, it is the gender that Crimson was born into that makes her so groundbreaking. Despite (or perhaps because) of the fact that she is a biological female, Crimson can keep up with the other queens -- sometimes she can even beat them at their own game. When she first started doing drag, her drag mother Rebecca Glasscock, told her to keep it secret at first. Parsing through the semiotics of Crimson's act is certainly confusing, what with her heavily stylized oversized lips, opaque cheek contouring, eyebrows arched in almost 90 degree angles, hyper-expressive movements, and adoption of queer slang -- it would almost be easy to assume that her whole schtick comes from a place of ridicule. However, this couldn't be further from the truth. In fact, her entire persona comes from genuine adoration. Crimson has since gone on to snatch trophies of her own, making a name for herself in New York's queer and gay scene. She started a show featuring an ever-changing lineup of female queens, called LADYQUEEN and it's held weekly at the legendary Stonewall Inn. It is the first and only all female drag revue ever.
