Their Majesty: Drag Performance and Queer Communities in London

This book explores drag performance in London since 2009 via the pubs, bars and clubs that make LGBTQ+ communities thrive.

It studies the complex relationship between drag performance, LGBTQ+ venues and queer communities. In exploring drag performance, the book develops a greater understanding of the connection between drag performance and queer communities, in particular exploring how drag might facilitate queer communities and offer queer modes of survival and resistance for queer people. Through this, the book describes a contemporary moment in which drag performance is increasingly popular and increasingly important at a time when homophobic and transphobic violence is prevalent and LGBTQ+ venues are often under threat of closure. Understanding the increased/increasing mainstream popularity of drag, the book examines drag performance that is connected to and resists mainstream attention in order to account for the complexity of in London (and beyond).

This book takes the author’s engagement with and love for drag and exerts a critical, political, and queer pull in order to develop new terrains of queer studies and queer performance studies.

Joe Parslow is a Lecturer at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, UK. He has worked as a producer of drag and cabaret shows, the largest of which were known for bringing the performers of US-based reality television show RuPaul’s Drag Race to the UK to perform at, now closed legendary LGBTQ+ bar in Camden, The Black Cap.