Salt Lake City drag scene thrives despite pushback

Salt Lake City is known as the hub for the Latter-Day Saints and a crossroads for world-class outdoor attractions. But a different scene is emerging: the drag scene.

Drag performance has exploded in Salt Lake City in the past few years, much of it credited to the mainstream cultural acceptance of it.

But it hasn’t been without pushback. Protests have ensued at many shows billed as “family-friendly,” most recently at a back-to-school drag show hosted by BYU students in Provo. Earlier this summer, a drag group called Quorum of the Queens hosted an all-ages event at the Gallivan Center, which was met with similar protests.

Most queens ignore people who oppose them, and the drag industry in Salt Lake City continues its upward growth. This is especially thanks to new venues like drag bar Why Kiki, which opened last year.

Drag performer Trey McEuen, known professionally as Hysteria, said the drag scene has “grown immeasurably” in the last three years.

“Now, you go to Why Kiki on a Saturday night, you’ve got three drag shows there earlier in the day that all have 12 people in them, and there’s four new queens showing up who look better than half of you.”

Studying gender through drag

McEuen, an interdisciplinary performance studies major at the University of Utah, is working on a thesis focused on using drag as a means of promoting social change.

For McEuen, drag is as much of an art as it is a science. They’re interested in the gender performance of drag just as much as the unconscious gender performance everyone plays a role in daily.

“We look at strangers on the street and their identity expressions, and we suddenly garner from that unconscious performance aspects,” McEuen said. “We can pick up on things like masculinity, femininity, race, gender, and we make assumptions.”

McEuen takes conscious and unconscious performance in communication and uses both in drag to teach about social change, “whether that is something completely ridiculous or a more serious conversation about violence, or about protest.”

Staying safe amid opposition

In order to broadcast social change to wider audiences, performers at the Quorum of the Queens event in July took necessary precautions to ensure the show would be family friendly.

The event’s organizers warned that protests could potentially turn violent, and that the performers needed to be extra cautious in preparing their stage numbers.

“There was a lot of communication up-front with us performers who were at the event that there may be danger,” McEuen said. “When we did the show, we had to be so aware of this that we had to do three-minute numbers. They had to be non-explicit, there had to be no sexual themes.”

Often, McEuen explained, performers will do a “reveal,” where they remove an article of clothing to reveal a new, exciting element of their outfit. For instance, a queen might take off a pair of black slacks to reveal a sequin skirt.

“Those were not allowed,” McEuen said. “You were not allowed to take off any articles of clothing.”

Sky Faux, a junior resident performer at Why Kiki, also performed at the event. Sky Faux is the stage name of Skigh Copier, a nonbinary drag queen who was assigned female at birth.

Though Salt Lake City has many women who do drag, few of them adopt a feminine character onstage. Faux recognizes that people, even within the queer community, struggle to understand why women and femme-presenting people would adopt hyper-feminine personas onstage.

However, they said they’ve been welcomed with open arms, save for a few exceptions, by the Salt Lake drag scene.

“Drag is just like any other mainstream art form,” Copier said. “We’re not going to show up to an all-ages drag show in the same look and with the same performance that we would for an over-21 show.”

Copier said drag queens are just like anybody else when it comes to taste and theatrical sensibilities.

“We know what’s appropriate and what’s inappropriate,” they said, noting they felt so confident in the censoring of the Gallivan show that they brought their 8-year-old sister to dance along with them.

But no matter how discerning queens are when constructing acts for audiences of all ages, a threat of danger continues to exist in places with opposing communities, McEuen said.

“At Gallivan we had to have double security, and then because it got so elevated, the Salt Lake City Police Department showed up,” they recalled, adding that the city protected the performers and made sure kids had access to see the performances.

Taking an interest early in life

Both McEuen and Copier found interest in drag at a young age, which helped them discover their identities outside of the gender binary.

McEuen secretly watched “RuPaul’s Drag Race” at age 12 and faced disapproval from their father for it, while Copier said they wished they were born male so that they could be a drag queen.

“Just seeing people happy, and loving themselves, and putting on a celebration of identity, a celebration of grandeur, opulence, spectacle, and self is major for someone, especially when they’re going through puberty and developing a sense of identity,” McEuen said.

McEuen added that they believe drag can help young people and kids who are struggling with their identity amid societal expectations of binary gender.

Copier gravitated to the gender expression of drag as well, but they also noted the importance of drag as an artform to them. Drag, Copier said, encompasses many hobbies they love – dance, music, performance, style and fashion.

“I think drag at any age can be a really cool way of play, of putting on a character,” Copier said. “Just like kids play dress-up, I think it’s the same thing. I think it’s a very welcoming form of entertainment, artform and community.”

Salt Lake City’s drag performers will not stop doing what they do, McEuen said, and they will not stop hosting all-ages events.

“The future is now, and the future is big,” McEuen said. “Drag in Salt Lake is revolutionary – it’s punk, it’s counterculture, and it’s something that is a force to be reckoned with in the waves of making change. Open your eyes and come to a show.”