A crowded room, smoke heavy in the air – two undercover police stand surrounded by swaying bodies. Men dance with men as the lights periodically cut out. Gasps ring out amid the brief darkness. 

The year is 1932, and this is Lady Austin’s ball, a working-class, queer dance held at Holland Park, London. It began with the turn of a rouged face: ‘Are you going to the Drag tonight?’ It will end with the arrest and charging of fifty-six people.

In the half-light of the gay bar basement, a drag king hunches, blood rising from their mouth. Their body contorts, twisting to the beat of Nirvana. They howl. 

The year is 2024, and this is What a Drag, an open mic featuring exclusively trans performers, held monthly at Cloak, a queer-owned Bristol venue. The acts are political, gothic, silly. It is a space carved out – beyond the basement door, survival is often the best our community can hope for. 

Nearly a century apart, Lady Austin’s Ball and What a Drag each created a space for radical queer expression in a time of societal and state oppression. Lady Austin carved their dance into an era of criminalisation, each kiss shared on the dancefloor a transgression against a society that sought to suppress any and all acts of queer existence. 

What a Drag emerged as part of a growing trans-drag scene in Bristol. In a decade of rapidly increasing transphobia, artists perform against a backdrop of rising levels of hate crime, medical discrimination, and overt transphobia from leading political figures. 

Today, as the rights of trans people are stripped away and dehumanisation becomes a feature of our daily lives, the creation of such spaces is more vital than ever.

‘Tired of trans people being disrespected’

The origin of modern drag is impossible to trace to only one place. Drag, as a performance style, was born out of communities of people cast out of conventional society. 

Appearing in the Molly houses and underground parties that existed pre-decriminalisation, the strongest influence on modern drag can be found in the ballroom culture created by queer global majority artists in 1900s America. What is universal to this history, however, is that trans and gender-queer bodies stood at its heart.

Gender-queer performance spaces have given me a lot of tools of resilience against a world that wants to erase our people and subdue our joy

Gender Criminal

Despite this, in recent decades, trans performers have been shunted to the sidelines. RuPaul, whose show RuPaul’s Drag Race is arguably the primary vehicle behind the mainstreaming of drag, caused controversy in 2018 when he told an interviewer he would not allow trans women to compete on Drag Race. 

Although he later walked back this policy, his attitude towards transness in drag reflects a cultural moment in which the communities that birthed drag found themselves excluded from the opportunities that came with its move to the mainstream.

It was in response to this erasure and bigotry that Roux, who performs as Gender Criminal, founded House of Boussé, a trans and gender non-conforming drag house, in Bristol in 2022. The performance house organises drag shows, cabaret, theatre pieces, and educational events. Events are not centred on one particular venue but rather appear at a number of trans-positive event spaces including Cloak, Strange Brew, and the Loco Klub. 

“Trans people are a deeply marginalised community. Getting through the day can be difficult. People struggle with poverty, mental health, and finding a workspace that respects their identity,” he explains to me. “That’s why House of Boussé exists. I just felt: I’m so tired of us being disrespected on all fronts. We are human. We are people.”

“When I began, there were only three drag artists in Bristol: myself, Roxy Tocin, and Calumbo Kelly, all starting together as the old queens hung up their wigs for retirement,” Red, host and owner of Drag Queen Bingo Bristol, a monthly event held alternately at The Love Inn and The Orchard Coffee & Co, reflects on the growth of the Bristol drag scene over the last decade. “Since that little Eden, it’s been incredible to watch an entire scene grow from literally nothing.”

I am sitting in the basement of Cloak for another night of ‘What a Drag’. On the stage, stained in amber light, a drag queen mimes to Fuck You by Lily Allen cut with sound bites of Rishi Sunak mocking the trans community. Political performances are common on the trans-drag circuit. Artists vogue to remixed political speeches. Artists raise placards as they dance on backlit stages. Artists grapple with their personal experiences of healthcare, bigotry, and familial rejection.

These pieces join performances that lean into comedy, surrealism, and sexuality. “It’s not all pain and rage and trauma; being held in that space allows us to melt into something else. So much of it is clowning,” Xanthe, drag father at House of Xanarchy, tells me. 

‘We are all trying to break even’

By providing an opportunity for pieces that scratch beneath the surface of mainstream drag, the trans-drag scene in Bristol has created a space in which gender non-conforming people can explore their relationship to art, gender, and the stage in an environment that welcomes pieces that defy easy definition.

“There are definitely performances that I would do at a trans night that I wouldn’t do at other nights,” says Casper, who performs as Cas Enovah. “Because I’m like, well, will the audience get this? I definitely feel safer [at a trans show]. I know people in the crowd will support me, and it’s that thing of being surrounded by your community.”

The creation of these spaces is not without its hurdles. Typically springing up as one-off events, centred in alternative Bristol venues such as Cloak and Strange Brew, sustaining such spaces over time can prove difficult.

This transience echoes the queer communal spaces of Lady Austin’s era. ‘The queer scene [of late 1920s to early 1930s] is based around hiring these venues [commercial dance spaces] for a short period or series of events before, if things get too hot, moving onto another venue.’ Professor Matt Houlbrook, professor of cultural history at the University of Birmingham, explains.

Whilst criminalisation is no longer an obstacle as it was during the 1930s, from funding to burnout, organisers speak to me of the struggle to maintain essential hubs of trans community and resilience in Bristol. 

“We want to put on an event, but we’ve got limited funds because we’re all passing around the same £10 note to help people afford their HRT,” Casper explains. “We are all trying to break even on multiple fronts. Financially, these spaces are difficult to cultivate.”

When cash is stretched thin, creating accessible spaces becomes a struggle. Covering the costs of the venue, performers, tech, and organising requires ticket pricing that can leave low-income members of the community unable to attend events. 

This hurdle is nothing new for queer spaces – back in the 1930s when accused by the Metropolitan Police of profiting off of a space in which sexual acts occurred, Lady Austin replied that the ticket price of 1/6d covered only the costs of the venue and band, “so we don’t run it for profit, only for love, but of course you don’t understand that”.

These practical difficulties combine with the daily struggles of organising whilst oppressed. As an event organiser and trans activist, burnout is commonplace for both myself and my community. 

Enduring the systemic subjugation and rising oppression that trans people across the UK are subjected to while engaging in unpaid labour to provide necessary spaces for community and support takes a toll on the health of those at the centre of the community.

Despite this, organisers and performers tell me they will continue to fight for these spaces, not out of desire but necessity. Gender-queer performance spaces have “given me a lot of tools of resilience against a world that wants to erase our people and subdue our joy”, Roux tells me. 

For a community whose voice is unheard on the major stages of this country, the creation of our own stages is an act of survival. When I began on the Bristol drag scene, to dance, to speak, to explore transhood on a stage, each was an act of rebellion. 

Vinny, who performs as Sir Real, explains: “You do it because you need it. You do it because you love it. You do it because of everyone else who’s also doing it for those reasons.”

For all the barriers to overcome, there are moments of reprieve and support. Roux ends their interview with a message: “For any trans or queer young people reading this, there are resources out there.” 

Without organisations like Creative Youth Network and Artspace Lifespace, who have provided funding and support to a number of House of Bousse projects, along with Bristol’s thriving DIY scene “none of this would have been possible”.

Whispers of the past

Two drag kings stand bare-chested before an audience of hundreds; poetry merges with music, merges with testimony. Turning to one another, they paint each other’s skin with streaks of sun-bright yellow and spiralling purple, colour exploding across the flat chests that they have fought for. This is Transformed, a theatre piece curated by House of Bousse and performed to a sold-out audience at Strange Brew.

Lady Austin’s ball ended in a police raid. Twenty-eight were found guilty at a trial where the accused wore numbers around their necks. Jail sentences added up to over 24 years, with Lady Austin serving 15 months. 

Queer history is, too often, recorded only at the point of ruin. Even these records of queer expression, crushed, however, hold within them the whisper of spaces that survived – echoes of dances that left no mark lying just beneath the skin of a society that saw us as little more than disease given form.

At a time when the world was designed to degrade and dehumanise the queer other, a dance was an act of rebellion. Lady Austin refused the shame that was placed upon them, refused the isolation that was positioned as the natural inheritance of their queer body. They forged a space from the material of a hostile world in which, for brief moments, working-class queer people could dance.

While Lady Austin’s dance ended in state violence and suppression, a thread exists, however frayed, between a queer ball in 1932 and a drag king strutting to Nirvana in 2024. A thread passed down through the fingers of generations of queers to a community still standing at the margins of society, still dancing despite every force that commands us to be still.

Kai Charles is an artist, activist and journalist based in Bristol. They perform as a spoken-word drag artist and are involved in trans activist networks throughout the South West.