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Farce and parody is quintessential to burlesque, too: the word comes from the Italian burla, meaning a joke or mockery, and the original burlesque variety shows featured women in feminized men’s uniforms who mocked the patriarchy. Some performers embrace it. Burlesque girl Bana-banana, whose unmissable pink-orange hair is almost as flamboyant as she is, spent one performance ripping off a dress made of newspaper headlines while lamenting the West’s response to the migrant crisis.
However, outright activism is more fully at home in drag, which brings visibility to queer people. Although Lilly Mortis expresses feminist and political views in her shows too, she doesn’t credit herself with being a drag artist. “I don’t feel I’m in a position to claim something like drag because it doesn’t belong to me. I’m still a cis woman. And there’s a long history of drag queens fighting very hard against pressure from all different sides to establish their art form,” she says.
For some queens, activism isn’t just inherent in the art itself, it is also the subject. Olympia Bukkakis, a non-binary, transgender, trash-drag-intellectual, co-hosts Queens Against Borders, which bills a unique variety of artists for “a performance party in solidarity with trans and queer refugees.” The tall, leggy, bald Australian, alternating between flowing white dresses and black Grim Reaper garb, co-hosted the latest Queens show at a grungy punk club in Kreuzberg, SO36, which looks like a college party from the 90s that never ended. The March edition featured queens from Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Lebanon, shedding layers of belly-dancing costumes while lip-syncing Middle Eastern songs to an Arabic-, English-, and German-speaking audience. Diva Maguy, the show’s co-host, is a trans-woman and a migrant from Lebanon who performed in a stylish, lacy faux-hijab, and provocatively shed layers down to her belly-dancing beads. ...
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