Untitled Queen is the reigning ‘titan’ of the artistic drag scene

Her Untitled Family puts on a show that is light years from the sensibility of the mainstream ‘Drag Race’ world

If you think “RuPaul’s Drag Race” — with the fake boobs, the puffy wigs and the elaborate make-up — is the epitome of drag, you might be in for a bit of a surprise to uncover a flourishing artistic and innovative drag scene in Brooklyn.

RuPaul, who was actually born in California, came up during the East Village scene of the ‘90’s and ‘00’s when the highlight of the year was Wigstock, a drag-stravaganza originating in Tompkins Square Park and hosted by queens like Lady Bunny in her short skirt and fantastically high wig. RuPaul is largely credited with bringing the art of drag gleefully into the mainstream, and several drag queens who have gone onto fame in RuPaul’s “Drag Race” world have come up in the Brooklyn world of drag, including Thorgy Thor, Aja and Scarlet Envy, just to name a few.

Untitled Queen performs while Tiresias plays guitar (Photo by Stephanie Keith)

However, Brooklyn has also historically, at least for the past decade or so, been the epicenter of other forms of drag, specifically, high-concept artistic drag, whose leader is arguably Untitled Queen.

Untitled Queen has been performing and mentoring other drag queens for over a decade in Brooklyn and last Friday at Bed-Stuy queer space C’mon Everybody, she performed alongside her drag family, younger queens who she mentors.

Tiresias sings an original work (Photo by Stephanie Keith)

“Untitled Queen is a titan,” says Tiresias, one of Untitled Queen’s drag daughters. “She has inspired so many artists, she has really pushed the envelope on innovative art, drag that asks questions that isn’t afraid to address big political realities, that isn’t afraid to be sad and slow and dark and I think that’s what draws a lot of people to her work.”
Tiresias, with a bald head and plain white face make-up, didn’t lip sync her song — rather, she sang an original song for her performance.

Untitled Queen performs to a poem by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (Photo by Stephanie Keith)

In another signal that we’re not in RuPaul’s world any more, instead of a wig, Untitled wore a white box over her head for her performance. Her face was projected onto the outside of the box from a small camera inside of the box. Her all-white outfit reflected the video projections of Palestinian daily life as she performed to a spoken poem by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. Against a projected backdrop of a textile factory making keffiyehs, women making pottery, people harvesting olives, she intoned the poem: “We have on this land all that which makes life worth living.”

A resistance poet. Darwish wrote the “Palestinian Declaration of Independence” in 1988, a declaration for the creation of a State of Palestine. Untitled’s performance was an exploration of indigenous and colonial themes, which are a regular part of her work.

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“Drag is a real deconstruction of binaries about gender, it really is a questioning of that and an exploration,” says Untitled Queen. “It’s fucking around with our ideas of gender, because you know colonialism brought along these gender rules and a lot of other like pre-colonial communities and civilizations, including like the ones I come from, the Philippines and Puerto Rico, had lots of different genders that were recognized. The spectrum was much larger part of their language. So, I think drag is a way to undo this kind of like institutionalized learning of that. It’s either playing with it, exploring with it or going straight at it so I think everyone goes about it a different way, but I find it like an open playground to try out these new ideas. And like the colonial thing, it’s a way to undo a lot of the European ideas of ways of being.”

Unwritten Queen, center, performs with her family (Photo by Stephanie Keith)

Other queens that night, performing as part of Untitled’s expansive drag family, were equally keen on breaking rules and norms. Magnifa, for one, performed head-to-toe in blue.

One of the best performances of the night was a duet between Unwritten Queen and Voxigma Lo who sang “Dealer,” a song recorded by Lana Del Ray and Miles Kane from the group The Last Shadow Puppets. Unwritten Queen, flipping her long green wig past the stubble of her full beard and painted on mustache, rolled a dollar bill and lights it, while serenading the crowd. “Please don’t try to find me through my dealer, he won’t pick up his phone. Please don’t try my father either, he ain’t been home for years.”