New show brings drag to rural New Zealand
Meet reality TV’s new queens, a Panguru trio who like to dress up. By Glenn McConnell.
A new Kiwi show is taking on Kim K in the battle to be queen of reality TV.
The most intriguing programme in Maori Television’s new season line-up, which launches tomorrow, is the story of a trio of drag queens who say they were ‘‘literally birthed into this world with jazz hands’’.
All three hail from Panguru – a small hunting and farming Northland town where the only school has just 74 students, and the Queens of Panguru shows them returning after years of city life.
‘‘It’s the city slickers gone bush! We basically swap our high heels for gumboots,’’ dancer and Panguru queen Jay Tewake says.
Think of the Queens of Panguru as Country Calendar meets Paris Hilton’s The Simple Life.
Originally, the idea for the show had been to fill an entire bus of Takatapui queens. That may have been a little too much, jokes Maihi Makiha, the second of the trio, but it definitely would have been doable.
‘‘We’ve got quazzins [cousins who are queens] everyone,’’ he screams, before returning to laughter. ‘‘There must be something in
the water.’’
The show’s producer and star Ramon Te Wake is transgender and describes herself simply as a ‘‘storyteller’’. She spent her 20s working on music, then she fronted a world-first documentary series telling queer indigenous stories.
Her fellow queen Jay Tewake says she is ‘‘everything’’. ‘‘Entertainment, storytelling, dancing, modelling, she’s it,’’ he says.
Jay first noticed Te Wake when he was a Juice TVwatching teen. He recalls being caught out by her as the first transgender artist he’d seen on music television in the early 2000s. Then he found out they were related.
That moment, Jay says, was a pivotal display of the queer community being normalised in culture.
The crux of her latest show is how the family back home will respond to their fabulous ‘‘quazzins‘‘. She’s putting herself on the line to tell a story of acceptance in a hilarious documentary series.
‘‘We do come from a small town, right, so with a lot of small towns there’s always going to be a lot of people who don’t necessarily understand difference,’’ she says.
‘‘There’s a beautiful scene in this show where CHRIS SKELTON FAIRFAX NZ our uncles take us up to the top of the maunga and we korero about them growing up as men – masculine men, cowboys on the farm – and how we’re the complete opposite of that,’’ she pauses, and laughter once again overtakes the room.
Even when the discussion gets heavy – we are talking about their own family’s acceptance of them as people – the queens find a light side.
‘‘It’s all just the banter,’’ Jay says. They joke about everything; cooking chicken to fixing their van. Everything. It’s hard to keep up.
When he gets back, Makiha asks the photographer how low the shot reaches, ‘‘because I do tend to get a little excited, so tell me if anything...’’
At the end, the conversation turns back to the show’s message and the cackling grows softer.
‘‘If we can impact not only our community but other communities in small towns and make them say, ‘hey I’ve got a queer niece or nephew and it’s okay’, that’s what I want,’’ says Te Wake. ● Queens of Panguru, Maori Television, March 22, 9.30pm.