Jonny Woo as the Duchess of Windsor
'I think the Duchess of Windsor is an interesting character,’ says Jonny pensively while lounging in the grass naked but for a pair of pants and full Wallis Simpson hair and make-up. ‘I think there’s a lot more to the story than just a straightforward love story.’ Jonny, 45, calls himself ‘a performer, curator, producer, director and writer’, but he could also be described more simply as the biggest dog in the London alternative-drag scene (he co-owns the hugely popular Dalston gay pub the Glory). In November he’ll be bringing his successful Un-Royal Variety – ‘a sort of old-school-punk political pastiche on the classic Royal Variety Performance’ – back to the Hackney Empire. He’s also co-written a musical interpretation of the events that led to last year’s referendum called Jonny Woo Sings Brexit, and he creates shows for Glastonbury and Lovebox, bringing along the coterie of emerging queens and artists whose careers he supports. So huge is he that brands clamour to have him at their events. ‘I do some really odd things,’ he says – like treading grapes in France in drag, or leaping out of a car at a Vauxhall party and flinging his knickers onto a massive mirror ball. (He wasn’t actually asked to do the latter and had to write an apology the next day.) ‘What I love about drag is the transformation. Drag lets you behave in a slightly more outré or outrageous way,’ he says. (Evidently.) ‘I like dressing up and I like wearing clothes that are designed with women in mind – I don’t like saying “women’s clothes” because clothing isn’t gendered. You know, I like chiffon. I do. I really like chiffon.’
James Spencer as Consuelo, Duchess of Marlborough
'It’s a form of self-expression for me, it’s not necessarily a performance.’ James, 23, has just graduated from the London College of Fashion, where he studied fashion illustration. It was there that he got into drag, although he admits he was ‘a bit of a late bloomer’, since his friends who were already in the drag scene had decided (wrongly) that he ‘just wouldn’t look that good’. He ignored them and was soon to be spotted at all of the happening drag nights (he’s still mortified by an incident at the club night Savage in which his wig got caught on a hanging flower basket and was left dangling in mid-air like a long, blonde jellyfish), and he used his final-year project to focus on exploring his identity. ‘It was about coming to terms with being masculine and being feminine and trying to exist between those two worlds. There was no answer at the end, there was no “This is what I am” – it was about exploring facets of your identity and your image, and how you project yourself aesthetically.’ His thoughts on Consuelo, the wife of the 9th Duke of Marlborough? ‘She’s very me. She’s very elegant, very poised, and my drag is poised and cool and collected.’
Jonbenet Blonde as Cayetana, 18th Duchess of Alba
Next year is a big year for Jonbenet: it will feature his 30th birthday and also mark his 15th year of doing drag. He’ll be celebrating in a big way, much as the 18th Duchess of Alba was known to: ‘Apparently, she loved a good old party, which I do too.’ Jonbenet is originally from Belfast. As well as doing drag, he’s a DJ and stylist – he’s DJed at a Tinder party and used to be on the fashion team at Russian Tatler. He’s been part of the east London drag collective Sink the Pink since 2010, working on the extravaganza that is their quarterly ball and running Savage for them. Or, in his own words, throwing a good old party. His name is a reference to JonBenét Ramsey, the murdered American child beauty queen. ‘To me she was an iconic blonde,’ he says. ‘It’s not done in jest, it’s more in her memory, a homage to her.’ He describes his style as ‘pop princessy’ – his first Sink the Pink show was a re-creation of Britney Spears’s 2001 Video Music Awards performance of ‘Slave 4 U’, complete with live python. He was supposed to perform for Britney on her Asia tour, but they had to cancel because they couldn’t afford him. ‘Britney can’t afford me!’
Dinah Lux as Margaret, Duchess of Argyll
In a recent exchange at Oxford, Jacob Mallinson Bird’s tutor asked, ‘Jacob, you were, I assume, the drag queen running around naked at the ball?’ This is a bit of a theme with Jacob, 24, who performs as Dinah Lux. His most popular routine is his ode to Donatella Versace, a striptease with strategically placed pictures of Gianni’s sister. At the end, he says, ‘I’m naked and I do a full jump split and there’s just Donatella’s face glaring at the audience.’ He didn’t even get to that point at the Trinity May Ball at Cambridge before they tried to kick him out for being too naked. Similarly, Wadham, where he is studying for a DPhil in musicology (on lip-syncing in drag), banned him from bops after he ended a show naked but for a bit of duct tape. Jacob went to Charterhouse and then to Cambridge before doing an MA at Oxford. He writes a diary for Love in the voice of Dinah, mainly reporting on the fun she’s having, in much the same way that Margaret Campbell, the wife of the 11th Duke of Argyll, once wrote for Bystander. The two of them certainly share a philosophy, and Jacob quotes her, saying: ‘All you need in life is a three-strand pearl necklace and a poodle.’
Lavinia Co-op as Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire
Rather like Deborah Cavendish, the late Duchess of Devonshire, Lavinia is something of a legend. The 66-year-old, lauded by the Glory pub as ‘the Maggie Smith of the east London drag scene’, has played an important role in the history of queer performance. He was part of Bloolips, a ‘radical drag’ musical troupe that emerged from the Gay Liberation Front and, ‘pre-Priscilla, Queen of the Desert’, toured Europe and North America in a VW van. Their shows were mad and hilarious, with fantastic costumes they made themselves and bonkers names like Lust in Space and Slungback and Strapless (about Madame Mao and the Gang of Four). In the Nineties, Lavinia got into the New York club scene and went on to live there for about 20 years, doing his own solo shows – he calls himself ‘a sort of music-hall, vaudeville, stilt-walker, drag artiste’. Among his skits was the ‘bag person strip’, involving a costume made of layers of balloons, umbrellas and plastic mesh. To him, drag is about androgyny: ‘I’m not a female impersonator... I’m not trying to be a man or a woman – it’s about the Feminine Principle within the male.’
