International Drag Day

Since 2009, July 16th was chosen as International Drag Day to celebrate and recognize the art of drag worldwide. 

International drag day was founded by Adam Stewart through his fan page for Drag queens on Facebook, with the main objective of providing drag artists with the space to expose their creativity and culture in a proper way.

But what is drag?

Drag performers (often known as drag queens and drag kings) take up personas (usually of the gender different than one assigned at birth) and with their fabulous costumes dazzle their audience with their performances. Their aim is to entertain, challenge and explore gender identities and social norms. These performances can range from lip-syncs to full out performances and dance numbers. 

However, drag performance is not only limited to gender identity imitation, but can also be a way of expressing a different (non-)human aesthetic, such as drag creatures.

In the past drag queens were often gay men, while drag kings were mostly women. But today anyone of any gender can perform drag in whatever way they wish. 

Some mentions of the well-known drag queens are RuPaul, known for their show RuPaul’s Drag Race, Trixie Mattel and Bob the Drag queen (who were also winners of their respective seasons of RuPaul’s Drag Race), Divine etc.

Unfortunately, their counterparts aren’t as famous as they should be, but drag kings are equally crucial to drag culture. Some international examples of drag kings are King Molasses, Ivory Onyx and Landon Cider.

In Slovenia we also have quite a few drag performers who mostly belong to so-called drag houses. Some of the houses who had their stands at Pride village are the House of Vulva, House of Kunt and House Laboratory. One of the stands was also dedicated to Drag Kings. In Slovenia we also have other drag performers who do not belong to these houses but they are equally important to the local drag culture.

Alex