Queens of the night answer
Drag is about much more than just the fanfare and costumes — it is also about self-realisation and affirmation
The oiled-up Tyler William strutting the stage of Athlone’s iconic Joseph Stone Auditorium in neon green and bright blue swimwear is whiplash-inducingly different from the person I interviewed less than an hour earlier.
Then, in the auditorium parking lot and dressed in plain T-shirt, burgundy shorts and flip-flops, William spoke about how, for most of his life, he had been “antidrag”.
Now living in Mitchell’s Plain, the Durban-born William says: “In Indian culture, [being gay] is forbidden or feels like something bad.”
As a result, he spent most of his life in the closet. It was only after meeting his partner, Skyler Barrymore, that his views on being gay, and on drag in particular, changed.
“I never knew she [Skyler] dragged. After about two years of us dating, I found stuff, like clothes and stuff and some pictures of her, and I put two and two together. I didn’t confront her about it. I waited another six months for her to tell me herself,” he says.
The pair eventually relocated to Cape Town because, he says, “with Skyler being a drag queen in Durban, she wasn’t really feeling herself there. The community was accepting but it was an old community. We came to Cape Town and our lives have been better. Everyone accepts you for who you are.”
Skyler’s popularity as a drag queen has played such a significant part in the couple’s new-found sense of place that Tyler has also started to enter pageants, albeit in the “Mr” category. The two were among nearly 40 entrants in this year’s Mr & Ms Cape Town Pride who, like Tyler and Skyler, take months out of their lives — and wads of cash from their pockets — in the hopes of winning the title.
“It’s lots of stress. You gotta go for fittings, you gotta know what looks you are going for, especially if there are themes, gotta do research and know your Q&AS, so you have to be clued up with what is happening in the world. Gotta work on your ramp. In total, I would say it cost us, together, plus-minus R25000. On clothes, make-up, fuel ... all those things.”
The months of preparation have culminated in entrants from across the Western Cape clamouring for space in the tiny, packed backstage dressing room. Filled from the worn carpets to the ceiling with highly flammable everything — sequined dresses, wigs, nervous temperaments — the room flits between the contestants’ panic (“Waar’s Destiny? Is Destiny al hier?”) and generous dispensing of advice (“Dis fokken warm, jy kannie met shoulder pads loop ’ie [It’s fuckin’ hot, you can’t walk with shoulder pads”] to the focused, nervous silence unique to those consumed by both nerves and a dogged determination to win.
Surrounded by faffing femmes furiously fanning themselves, futilely trying to fend off the heat, Tyler carefully applies Skyler’s eyelashes. “I help her do her hair, her nails … What a husband would do for his wife, basically,” says Tyler.
Skyler, with an exterior so calm it could come across as aloof were it not for the occasional smile, says, although she has been dragging for “about four years now, I wasn’t really into it until I did Miss Gay Western Cape about two years ago. That was where I discovered my potential. I embarked on a journey to discover myself in drag.
“Pageants are a platform to create awareness in our communities to say that drag is not just what people perceive it to be. There’s beauty behind it. When I’m on stage, I’m in my element.”
In the 2017 report, Dragging Rights, Queering Publics: Realness, Self-fashioning and the Miss Gay Western Cape Pageant, Bryce Lease argues that the aim of the Miss Gay Western Cape pageant “is to provide a platform for queers of colour to perform in a secure environment without exploitation, [and] entails a number of complex movements: across the urban landscape, between poorer peripheral suburbs (Cape Flats, Atlantis) and the predominantly white city centre”.
In a corner of the bustling dressing room, Paris Faithful — or Kurt Johannes, as her mother named her — takes needle and thread to the leopard-print swimming costume she will be wearing for the swimwear leg of the competition. “I’m busy fixing my tits,” she laughs, shyly.
Paris is one of those who have crossed the urban landscape to enter this year’s Ms Cape Town Pride competition. From Mamre, a town “about an hour and a half away from Cape Town, when there’s no traffic”, the