Welcome to Drag Night

On April 21, current students and pre-frosh gathered in Cambridge Queen’s Head Pub for Harvard’s annual Drag Night, hosted by the Harvard College Queer Students and Allies. Yara Sofia—a Puerto Rican drag queen known for her appearances on “RuPaul’s Drag Race”—was the emcee for the show. The Harvard Crimson spoke to some of the student performers of the night.

By Grace Z. Li

Nancy Boi

Nancy Boi, a performer in Drag Night 2018, became fascinated with drag in high school after he started watching “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”

“As somebody who came from a fairly conservative school in a relatively liberal area, it’s something that I really connected to when I was watching it and the show became a sort of safe haven for me while I was in an environment that was not necessarily too hospitable for queer people,” Nancy Boi said.

When he came to Harvard, Nancy Boi spent his freshman year exploring being openly out in an academic setting, but his sophomore year, he decided that drag was something he wanted to try. “I wanted to experiment with how I portray my gender and explore the intricacies of it. I thought that I would try drag and I did it on Halloween. I loved doing it and I’ve done it ever since.”

“[I decided to do Drag Night] because I love performing and there aren’t that many opportunities here at Harvard [to do so], queer spaces even I would say. It’s a space to perform, almost an escape from ‘reality’ even, but it’s also an opportunity to show prefrosh that there are queer spaces at Harvard,” Nancy Boi said. “Sometimes they’re hard to find, but they can be carved out.”

Nancy Boi sees drag as a way to explore the nuances of gender and to challenge longstanding cultural narratives surrounding femininity and masculinity. Even on a personal level it affects him deeply.

“I think being able to do drag has been able to connect me to the gay rights movement more so than almost anything else,” he said. “Even in the short time span since I’ve been doing it, I’ve felt like it’s become a part of my life. It’s something that I really enjoy doing, even if it’s just in my room. I’ve really loved getting to learn its history, like with the queer rights movement and with [the way it] challenges the norms of society and what we’re ‘supposed’ to do. It’s all helped me to understand my identity better as a person.”

“[At Harvard, the drag scene has] been a really affirming space. It’s a queer space that’s very hospitable to all identities, even minority identities within the queer community,” he said. “That’s not to say that other queer spaces aren’t hospitable or friendly, which there are, but I think finding party spaces and social spaces that are accepting where you can really be yourself and not even feel expected to conform to the dominant norms even within the LGBTQ community is [a really positive experience].”

—Staff writer Edward M. Litwin can be reached at edward.litwin@thecrimson.com.

By Grace Z. Li

Patric C.W. Verrone ’18, Nadya Plaything

“I originally went by the name ‘Pam Cookingspray,’” Patric C.W. Verrone ’18 says. “But then someone pointed out to me that isn’t really the pun, but the name of a product.”

Verrone, a senior studying Psychology and Women, Gender, and Sexuality, first became interested in drag after performing as Frank-N-Furter in a production of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”

“That was really the first time that I was really dressing up, doing a face of makeup, changing my features with makeup,” Verrone says. “So then I created my own character Nadya Plaything and I performed in the Drag Night last year. I’ve been experimenting, honing the craft.”

After workshopping different names with friends and family, Verrone settled on Nadya Plaything. “She’s got a little bit of ’60s glamor showgirl, and some early 2000s pop-punk, and some social justice warrior activist,” Verrone says.

Rather than using drag to express his feelings about his own gender, Verrone uses drag to project aspects of gender and sexuality that he believes do not get enough recognition and acceptance.

“I use [drag] as a way to create this imagined space, this alternate universe, in which Nadya Plaything’s way of performing and expressing and being and looking is the norm, even though it might not be in our society right now,” Verrone says.

Preparing for his last Drag Night, Verrone feels optimistic about the future of drag on Harvard’s campus.

“I’m looking forward to seeing a lot of pre-frosh there. I remember last year I was surprised [by] how many people were in the audience, and it was a lot of pre-frosh. And that really made me happy that there’s this energy coming into campus that’s affirming and excited about something like drag,” Verrone says. “I’m hoping that that happens again, I’m excited to introduce Nadya to some incoming freshman.”

—Staff writer Raj Karan S. Gambhir can be reached at raj.gambhir@thecrimson.com.

By Grace Z. Li

Baby Satin

“I knew about drag way before coming to college. My home doesn’t have a big drag scene, but I watched RuPaul’s Drag Race, and there is one drag collective where I’m from. I saw them perform a few times, and it was really good,” Baby Satin said. “I remember, when I was getting into college, I looked to see if there was a drag scene at Harvard. There was this one really old video of a drag king on YouTube, but I don’t think that really exists anymore.”

Baby Satin is a new identity for this performer, having emerged for the first time last semester when a recurring drag-themed party on campus needed more students willing to perform. One of their friends volunteered to try out drag, and they knew that they wanted to try it out, already knowing that they loved prominent queens such as Violet Chachki.

“It was super fun. I always feel like it’s fun to play with gender, and having that performance element is kind of cool. I used to dance—more contemporary dancing, so it was totally different, and I haven’t been on a stage in super long. But this seemed like a cool kind of performance art,” they said.

For them, drag is a unique kind of self-expression, and at Harvard, their masculine-presenting form of drag is uncommon, they said. They are one of the few drag kings on campus, and they have found that there is a unique challenge in the different limits of the masculine presentation. However, they said this challenge allows them to experiment and innovate in ways that might not be necessary as a queen.

“Women’s clothing is just more fun, and you can do much more with it. Typically, you create a story with your makeup, and I think it’s a little more difficult. It’s a cool way to express yourself,” they said.

Though they feel that Harvard’s drag scene is limited in that there aren’t many students willing to try the art out for the first time, they also believe that the willingness of the student body to welcome and enjoy drag will allow the drag community on campus to grow going forward.

“I was going to say Harvard has a lot of potential for drag, but I’m not sure that’s true. I don’t think it has potential as much as it has enthusiasm, and I hope that that keeps growing. We’ll see what happens,” they said.

—Staff writer Natalie J. Gale can be reached at natalie.gale@thecrimson.com.

By Grace Z. Li

Trevor W. Ladner ’20, Miss Annie Thang

When Trevor W. Ladner ’20 stepped into Visitas Drag Night 2016, it was not an introduction but rather, as he put it, an “affirmation.” For Ladner, known for his popular drag persona Miss Annie Thang, the journey to drag began long before setting foot on campus. More specifically, the journey began back home in Southern Mississippi—in the closet.

“It literally was in my closet,” Ladner said, “I have a desk in my closet at home, so I literally would spend time getting into drag in my closet in my room for like a year or so without my family knowing.” A community theater production of the musical “West Side Story” provided the introduction Ladner needed when his friend in the show, who was also a drag queen, brought him a pair of fake silicone breasts to rehearsal. “I went home, I had a bunch of makeup already because I had been doing theater for so long and so I put on the makeup haphazardly and felt incredible,” Ladner said. “It was a really liberating experience.”

For a while Ladner practiced drag in his closet, sending packages with supplies to friends’ houses to hide his art from his parents before finally deciding to tell them. “I grew up in rural Mississippi and it was something very new to them,” he said. Ladner’s mother was very understanding, he said, but explaining drag to his father took more work. “My dad was an evangelical pastor, so drag was not something that he was accepting of,” he said. “It took a lot of conversation and growth for us to get to a place where he supports me.”

“I essentially became a professional drag queen,” Ladner said. He began performing in local bars, making drag his source of income during high school. The ability to perform drag was very important to him during his college search. “I saw that there was going to be a drag show at Visitas and it sort of was my affirmation that this was where I needed to go,” Ladner said. Just a year later, Ladner himself was up on the same stage performing as Miss Annie Thang for the pre-frosh of the class of 2021. Then, as a member of the Queer Students Association Board, Ladner planned both IvyQ Drag Night in Nov. 2016 and Visitas Drag Night April 2017.

Each performance requires hours of preparation. Ladner needs time to do makeup, shave, exfoliate, glue eyebrows, get pads on, get into costume, paint his nails, and more. “Usually I devote the whole day to really focus on drag,” he said.

Ladner’s favorite number so far has been a Hillary Clinton themed performance he did of “Bug A Boo” by Destiny’s Child during the 2016 election. “I really played up the emails bit,” Ladner said. “It was interesting because performing in a queer space in South Mississippi there are equally as many progressive people as there are conservatives and everyone enjoyed the performance because everyone could relate to it.”

Ladner said it’s important for him to incorporate politics and advocacy into his drag. “Recently I helped raise tens of thousands of dollars to build the first LGBTQ center that will have been built on the Mississippi Gulf Coast,” Ladner said. “Annie likes to do all of those things.”

Additionally, Ladner wants to make sure everyone remembers to tip their local drag queens. “If you want to continue seeing their art and enjoying that entertainment, they have to be able to support themselves,” he said. “So definitely support and tip your local drag queens.”

—Staff writer Allison J. Scharmann can be reached at allison.scharmann@thecrimson.com.