Interview by Daisy Greene

Photography by Troye Alexander & Tana Pistorious

When I sat down with Bruce Conway at Cafe Ganesh, I thought I had a crisp idea for an article in my mind’s eye, something about the difference between doing drag here and Jozi.

However as the interview went further on, an article about more than just surface level cultural comparisons began to happen.

We touched on the process of drag and what it means to be visibly queer, in a world where it's very much needed.

One thing that stands out to me is your style - it's really interesting, it's quite camp. What would you say influences it? How did you develop it?

Well I did want to do fashion design as a kid, but that kind of fell off when I got a little bit older. I went to a Waldorf school in Joburg and at Waldorf, you don't have to wear a school uniform. I think when you're little and you get to wear what the fuck you want and your parents really don't care. So by the time you leave high school, you already have some sense of what looks good.

Then style became much more about visibly looking queer, style for me now is about visibly looking queer and looking like someone I would want to see. Like if I see someone on the street who I want to say something out loud to… fabulous, you've done your job.

That's what I want to do - every single day you get dressed, no matter what you put on your clothing, you're making a choice. You may think it shows that you don't care but you do. I think to show that you care and you want to be seen as queer or you want to be seen as interesting or approachable or something, that is a choice you can make.

I think being visibly identifiable as queer is something we get the privilege to do and that's really special, I don't want to scoff at that privilege, I want to take it and enjoy it and lap it up. It's exciting.

You've been a drag king in Jozi and you've been a drag king here (Cape Town). What would you say the difference between the two cities are?

I think with Jozi, what we had was the co-op, which was very much a co-op. There were no leaders, no one in charge. There was no one running the show but we all pulled our weight and that made a strong sense of community.

So my drag was very linked to the community I had with the fellow drag kings and that made a big difference. Whereas here, I feel like a performer who was linking up with other performers to form a temporary community for a show, which isn't really the same. I would say that's one of the main differences.

Another big difference is there are just not enough POCs in drag in Cape Town or in space generally. But especially in drag ballroom, I have a massive issue coming from the ballroom in Joburg. Ballroom is black in Joburg, very black and it is historically black.

When I was adopted by my house mother after my first ball, I'd done really well and she still called me Miss Europe, just to humble me. Just to be like, ‘know your place, you're the white kid who did well’, and I think that's missing here in a lot of ways.

I feel like drag in Joburg, especially because of how the group worked, it was very political, heavily political. ‘We always wanted to make a statement, make it clear’ and I feel like that's something that's like, ‘oh that would be a nice idea here.’ but it's not always a driving force for it. Those are some of the bigger differences for me.

You're so right. But I feel like that's Cape Town as a whole.

It is Cape Town as a whole, absolutely. It's interesting to see that in its own microcosm almost.

What would you say was your favorite thing about being a drag king in Joburg?

My favorite thing? My favorite thing about being a drag king in Joburg was my first performance I ever got to do, so my group did a performance and the very first show, I was at my cousin's wedding.

So I unfortunately missed it, it was a little gutting. Then they did the exact same show again but I got to be in it a month later, that felt like a dream come true. It felt like something I hadn't even comprehended was possible a year before and suddenly I was doing it.

I did a lot of things I didn't think I could do and it was the most exhilarating experience I've ever had in my life. Like I've done MDMA. I've taken acid. I've been dare devilish, but there is something so unbelievably freeing about putting something forward that you have worked on and worked hard at and curated and having people scream and celebrate that. It's a massive rush, I was high on life for weeks afterwards, that was one of my favorite experiences ever in drag.

I don't think I'll ever have that again because it was my first stage show and that's what made it so unbelievably special but also to do that with a group and to do that with people who were so excited for me as well was just incredible.

Is there anything that you love about drag in Cape Town?

I like that drag in Cape Town is a lot. There's a lot of drag in Cape Town, especially for drag kings, because the co-op is so spread out and it's a much more mainstream thing.

There's a lot more opportunities for drag kings specifically and even ballroom here is a little bit more accepting of drag kings because they're a much more stable part of the community where I would say drag Joburg kings are… it's new, it's a fresh idea and it's still getting accepted whereas here there is space for that.

I really like that and it's quite exciting to know that people are interested in that.

What got you into drag in the first place?

Definitely Vogue Nights in Joburg, the ballroom scene in Joburg is quite a sacred thing to me and I started doing drag to walk for that. From there , it wasn't strictly drag kinging, it actually started off as being quite a femme drag thingy. It wasn't very gendered, but it was more feminine than it was anything else. But from there, I progressed to being more of a drag king.

When Salty Crax from Cape Town moved up to Joburg, we had this massive ball and suddenly it's supposed to be me being the only drag king who walked. There were like five of us and I was like, ‘what the fuck is happening? What's going on?’ And Salty said Yo, I'm starting a co-op here in Joburg based on Kings Collab in Cape Town. Do you want to join?’

I was one of three people who joined with Salty who had done drag before, everyone else who joined hadn't done drag and that's how I got started.

What makes you still do drag, what do you enjoy about it?

I like that drag for me is like a mask of sorts. It's a mask I can put on and I can be a version of myself that I am not. It's a version of myself that's kind of like an ego - it's a little bit of you, but it's also a little bit of something that you want to be.

You can play with that. It's a mask you can put on and you can be different people. My first drag character that I properly developed was a very villainous man and that was to deal with a lot of the toxic masculinity that I didn't really want to accept while I was becoming more masculine in my identity and it was a good outlet for that. But now my drag is a lot more silly. I'm working on a pigeon sex-worker piece.

(laughs) okay…

Yeah, just to kind of get some of my absurd person out, it's a mask that allows me to express things that I don't get to express in a day to day. And that's why I love doing it, but it's also so much fun.

No wait, let’s go back to the pigeon sex worker?

So the pigeon isn't really drag. It borders on drag, but it's also a drag thing, it's very drag-absurd and it's not.

I won't be painting my face like a pigeon, I'm building a head that goes on top of my head and she's doing stand up - she's a retired sex worker from Joburg who’s moved to Cape Town to retire. Her standup piece will be her telling the stories of her life.

It's a really absurd idea I had and I told one of my friends about it and she laughed really hard. So then I got the delusion that I could do it.

Legitimately, It sounds like a fantastic idea.

I hope it ends up being a good idea, I really do.

Sourced From @hate.city.cowboi - Instagram

How would you say you, gender and looking into it introspectively has influenced your drag - drag influencing that?

So I think, and I've had a lot of conversations with people about this, but my drag and my gender identity are separate but linked. My drag identity is a way for me to play out things in my gender identity that I don't actually want to take on. I don't want to be a pigeon. I don't want to be a misogynistic man.

I don't want to but those are things that I sometimes need to work through in my identity, that absurdist kind of sense of humor or something because I take myself quite seriously. Especially when I was becoming slightly more masc. The idea of being this really heinous man and having everyone laugh at it was a really good way for me to work out embracing that masculinity in myself. It made it easier to embrace because I let people know through my drag, I was in on the joke.

That's what drag has been for me, it's a good outlet to work out things that aren't necessary. I don't want them for my personal identity, but I do want to play with it a little bit, kind of to release it or to work it out. It's like massaging out a muscle.

It's a piece of tension in my identity, I can't work out through just an outfit but I can work out through a performance and then it becomes a little bit more critical, It becomes a little bit more thought out, It becomes something I can critique.

That's how that links to my identity but I don't think my drag persona and my personal persona are at all the same, my drag persona is very different and I think that's good. I think it's good to have a separation because then if you have a bad show or you get a critique, it's not a personal critique and I think that's very important to have.

So it's almost like a way to filter out the bad parts of whatever you're experiencing gender wise?

Sometimes but sometimes it's like… I'm quite campy as it is but my drag persona is more campy, much more campy, more campy than I think is socially palatable. So it's a good way to release some of that extra campiness that I have inside of me that I can't just release on a day to day in my nine to five or out on a Saturday.

It's a way of releasing something you can't release generally. So if my drag character wants to do something very self-obsessed, it's a little too narcissistic for me to take on and it's a little gross for me but it's a good way to work it out as something I need to in drag, so it's not always negative but it is very intense.

Where do you think you're going to be going after this?

Ideally what I would like is to win a ball here and start a spinoff of House of Diamonds Cape Town, which will be very draggy, but it will also just be a general new queer space.

There've been a lot of critiques I've heard from different sides of queer space in Cape Town and I'd really like to make a spinoff of queer community within a house so I think that's like the big ambition, but from there, I don't know… From there, I kind of just want to do what makes me happy.

Where do you think the cultural scene is going in Cape Town?

It's hard to say. I think the Cape Town culture is, it's like a self-fueled cycle and it won't develop unless you bring in people who want to develop it in a certain direction.

If you don't bring in dreamers and cultivators, because of the nature of Cape Town, there's always space for events, there's always things going to happen, it will just fuel its own flames, but it will take people to direct it into a specific direction.

Whether that be people who say, ‘okay, we want more POCs and we're going to make that happen and we want to lead that charge, we want it to look like this.’ It will take people to do that, to drive it.

So I can't say that that direction is picked because of the culture that things just happen, it will just keep burning, It doesn't have to grow in one specific direction. It's got enough of the base, so I think it will take very ambitious dreamers who want to shape it to push it in that direction.

This interview has been enlightening to say the least, speaking with Bruce really highlighted to me that drag can be more than just a fun queer experience, it goes even deeper than community or local differences.

It's a form of self expression in a way that you can't replicate normally, an amplification of your inner self, worked through the process of a performance.

Something both deeply therapeutic and culturally important at the same time.

Bruce Conway, Drag as a process

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