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259 CHAPTER 14 Boy to the Power of Three: Toronto’s Drag Kings BOBBY NOBLE Let me make a confession at the outset: I love drag kings. I am what you might call an academic fan of drag kings. I saw my first drag king show on June 29, 1995, when the Greater Toronto Drag King Society staged a “Drag King Invasion I,” at a Toronto drag bar called El Convento Rico to an audience of about 600 screaming fans. It was quite a ride that night quite beyond just about anything else I had seen before. The performers were equal parts campy, sexy, outrageous, raucous, and utterly tenacious. The crowd was whipped into a kind of queer frenzy, and in a bar designed for drag queen performances, lesbian public cultures were permanently transformed. This chapter will explore those transformations through three different waves of drag kinging in one major urban centre: Toronto. I borrow the wave metaphor from feminism and find it useful to characterize three different historical moments in the evolution of drag king cultures in Toronto. These are not easily characterized as generations; age ranges may not differ dramatically between groups and some kings travel comfortably between each wave, mentoring young generations of upcoming kings. But what is significant about these waves is the social, historical, and epistemological context that each maps. The first wave– –the Greater Toronto Drag King Society– –is easily situated in but not of lesbian performance contexts, such as those mapped by lesbian performance theorists, Jill Dolan, Kate Davy, and SueEllen Case. Even as these drag king performances challenge the work of the lesbian theorists, historically this first wave overlaps with changes each notes Reprinted by permission from Sons of the Movement: FtMs Risking Incoherence on a Post-Queer Cultural Landscape. Toronto: Women’s Press, 2006, 53–75. 260 ABJECT MASCULINITIES in the development of a body of literature on lesbian performances, such as those of the WOW Café and the performances of Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw of Split Britches. Drag kings do not fit easily into the work of Dolan, Davy, and Case, but are significant in the sense that they begin to mark the rupturing of lesbian discourse, theory, and identity by what I call the butch-femme renaissance. This first wave of kings in Toronto begins to expand the circles around “lesbian” to map an imbrication with the then emerging queer theory and nation. The second wave– –The Fabulous Toronto Drag Kings– –emerge, as waves do, at the end of the first wave. With the emergence of this troupe, drag kings are dis-identified with lesbian cultures even though they perform in lesbian contexts. What begins to emerge instead is an entirely different set of relationships marked by affiliations with both gay masculinity and trans masculinities . Where the first wave engaged in mimicry of masculinity, the second wave begins to complicate that mimicry through an increasing identification with masculinity and dis-identification with exclusively lesbian subject positions. I trace those identifications, dis-identifications, and the ways that a second wave begins to foreground a consciousness of race, especially of whiteness, into performances. Finally, I explore the work of one king in particular, Deb Pearce, and hir alter ego, Man Murray. Finally, after the dissolution of the Fabulous Toronto Drag Kings, which overlaps with the emergence of a third wave that includes a variety of groups, including Big Daddy Kings and United Kingdom, and then with a fast fourth wave, Bois Will Be Boys and KingSize Kings– –what I will develop as “bois to the power of three”– –discernible gender identifications and affiliations are all but rendered incoherent. What exist instead are both self-referential (performances that signal the representational practices of the first wave and earlier lesbian cultures) and a plethora of gender identities off known gender maps. These are productively incoherent genders in No Man’s Land. Moreover, what makes each wave newish, in addition to the existence of a new group of performers, is also physical performance space as discursive as well as geographical location, particularly bars in a large urban centre like Toronto, where different neighbourhoods with varying demographics lend each wave an entirely different character through its fan base. One of the things that links these waves together, even through some pretty significant differences, is their proximity to discourses of masculinity and a dependence on this larger problematic for their condition of possibility . While not every performer identifies with masculinity, even the dis-identifications mark...

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