Drag debonair Art Simone is no stranger to drama. 

With a drag career that spans more than ten years, she has seen and heard it all. From the drag scene in regional Australia to the drag community in the United States, Art Simone has experienced highs and higher highs in diverse drag societies around the world.

But beyond that, there’s a personal side to drag queens that doesn’t always sparkle. Art Simone’s book Drag Queens Down Under spotlights the lives of famous Australian drag queens when they’re off stage, and dispels common misconceptions about drag. 

Art Simone began her drag career in high school. She says experimenting with makeup allowed her to escape her own life for a while, which was a collective experience among the drag queens she interviewed. 

In her own words, Art Simone says drag is “life heightened, dialled up to the absolute max.”

“It is a way to brighten a room and make other people feel happy, and it is an art form that can exist in so many different ways.”

Drag Queens Down Under showcases the art form of drag in all its glory, detailing the struggles and celebrations of performing, and ultimately aims to change the narrative that drag is for men only. 

When asked what the biggest misconception of drag is, Art Simone says, “I think that it's drag queens are scary or threatening. 

“I think they're very misunderstood creatures. There are a lot of people that haven't met or experienced drag, it can be quite confronting or out of the box. 

“So I think that would be a very big misconception.

“We're actually just loveable, larrikin, dorks. We're just all a pack of fabulous friends who love to get glitz and glam and make other people feel happy.”

Art Simone says her favourite thing to do with drag is to “demystify it” for people who have never seen it before. 

“There's never been one scenario where I haven't done a show and at the end, somebody who’s never experienced drag, they go oh you guys are all right.”

Art Simone has starred on RuPaul’s Drag Race Down Under, which is a spin-off series of RuPaul’s Drag Race, an American competition and reality show for drag queens. 

American drag queen RuPaul hosts the show, and is the former host of the Australian series, in which Art Simone was a runner-up for the first season.

Art Simone says people should be sceptical when watching shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race because it is not necessarily reflective of drag as an art form.

“I think what people have to understand is shows like Drag Race can only spotlight and platform a certain type of drag artist and it's a very small sector of the community.”

“Our drag scene is much bigger, we've got drag kings, we've got AFAB artists, we've got trans women, we've got drag queens from the ages of 16 all the way up to 80.” 

AFAB artists stands for assigned female at birth and it refers to cisgender women and non binary drag performers. This separates them from male and trans male performers.

Misconceptions of drag include that it is reserved only for men, that all participants want to be women, and that all men might be gay. That’s “not the reality of it at all” according to Art Simone, as drag is an art form and a creative outlet for anyone. 

“I think you just need to go in with open eyes and celebrate the people that are there for you, and come for the show.

“That's what drag is all about, it's about the show, it's about the fun, it's about the escapism and the community that's built around it.”

There are also slight differences in drag culture overseas, compared to Australia. Australia’s drag is more “effervescent”, whereas the US has a tipping culture. 

“You go to a drag show, you see a drag queen walk out and traditionally she has the first moment on stage, shows off her look but then she starts walking around the audience and grabbing money off people.

“Whereas in Australia we don't have that, you'll get a performance from beginning to the end.”

It was important to Art Simone that they accurately portrayed the world of drag in Drag Queens Down Under.  

“You see the glitz and glam and you flick through the pictures of the drag queens, but I want you to read the stories and find out about them, and what made them to be who they are.”

Art Simone says “being in the room” with the drag queens she was interviewing was a priority in her research. 

This priority stemmed from frustration with prior “surface level interviews” from the media that focused only on trivial aspects of drag, such as makeup. 

“We could pass all that superficial stuff and just, you know, have a chat and talk about some fun stories.”

During the writing process of her book, Art Simone says her biggest roadblock was tracking down certain drag queens. 

“Cindy Pastel, who's in the book, she doesn't even have a phone and you could only speak to her between a certain hour of the day when she goes to the library to check her Facebook.

“And then she got hacked out of that, so then you had to talk to her through another person, you had to send a carrier pigeon on the third Tuesday of the month. 

“I didn't even get a proper interview with her, I had to attend an event she was doing at a community fair that was a Q&A session with her.

“I took over and I just asked her all the questions I wanted to know for the book and recorded it because I could not get her to sit down.”

On the changing nature of Australian drag culture, Art Simone says the closure of queer-only venues is making the biggest impact. 

“We're very lucky in this day and age that we can now feel welcome and safe in many different spaces and we don't rely on those venues as much anymore, but what that means is we're losing them. 

“But on the flip side drag has become a lot more mainstream so it's created a lot more opportunities for drag.

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Lilya Murray is a third-year student at UNSW, currently completing a Bachelor of Media, majoring in communications and Journalism. You can most likely find her rearranging playlists and listening to a different song on repeat each week, or reading in a book, in which case you won’t find her.

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