Houston’s Drag Kings Are Suiting Up for Their Moment in the Spotlight

Compared to drag queens wrapped in custom spandex bodysuits, tufted wigs, and sky-high heels, Jack Hammer-Dandy’s banana-yellow three-piece suit looks pedestrian. When he comes on stage — sporting square-rimmed black glasses, his chiseled look enhanced by a beard drawn on with makeup — his appearance seems almost out of place, more mafioso than RuPaul’s Drag Race. But when Hammer-Dandy starts dancing, serving smoldering looks to a cheering crowd and crawling like a cat across the stage, it’s clear he doesn’t need more hair volume or clothing to draw in an audience. Drag kings like him rarely do.

Later in the show, Barry Mii Dandy, another member of the Dandy drag family, enters stage left, serving a cartoonish side of the drag king aesthetic. Donning a pastel clown costume with his face painted white and a lavender drawn-on mustache, Barry walks off stage, sashay-ing through the crowd to Janelle Monae’s “Tightrope.” Onlookers, seemingly mesmerized, hand him fistfuls of fake dollar bills that would later be exchanged for donations at Mint Julep’s annual HIV/AIDS benefit for Legacy Community Health.

With several hundred patrons in the audience, it was the largest audience the Dandy Drag Kings would have all year. In line with their appearances at many other events, they performed for free.

Eater Houston’s interviews with nearly a dozen local drag kings reveal that drag king performers in Houston frequently go unpaid for performances, with some local bars and restaurants unwilling to compensate them. Other bars decline to host drag king performances altogether, instead only hosting drag queens, Mii says, contributing to a lack of representation and recognition that drag kings have been fighting for over a decade to earn. Some kings in the scene correlate this lack of awareness with the dearth of mainstream representation of drag king artistry. Without a televised stage or household recognition, members of Houston’s local drag king community are fighting for recognition in a city they say largely doesn’t see them.

“We’re still fighting for our percentage of the stage,” says Sir Debonair, an award-winning drag king from Houston, referring to drag kings’ lack of opportunities in the Houston drag space. “Not being recognized for the hard work we have accomplished is just as messed up as not paying us.”

Though most of Houston’s drag kings Eater interviewed have been active for less than a decade, this performance style isn’t new. Like drag queens, drag kings — traditionally defined as people assigned female at birth who perform as masculine identities — have performed in the U.S. since at least the 1800s. Then, female vaudeville performers in the U.S. and England held shows in drag to entertain a predominantly male audience, where they took on an exaggerated, upper-class persona through song and dance. While drag kings performed openly in the later half of the 19th century, in the 20th century, drag shows became more heavily associated with the LGBTQ community. In gay meccas like New York, San Francisco, and London, drag shows were held in relative secrecy at gay bars due to anti-cross-dressing laws, many of which weren’t overturned until the 1960s.

In Houston, drag kings have performed publicly since at least the 2000s. Some of the first documented instances included the Front Alley Girls’ Backstreet Boys-themed drag king act at the Houston Pride Parade in June 2001 and the drag shows hosted at Chances Bar, a now-defunct lesbian bar, in the early 2000s.

Houston Gendermyn, a self-deemed “gender-variant” troupe formed around 2007 with help from fellow drag troupe Kings and Things in Austin, performed frequently in the city in the 2010s. The group worked to educate residents on the various genders of its members and to deconstruct the binary, according to an interview Robin Mack, one of its performing members, had with Houston LGBTQ archivist J.D. Doyle. “Drag kings are people who have no problem wavering from femininity to masculinity, and they kind of invite that magic of that process into their life,” Mack told Doyle.

Around the same time, Pearl Bar in Montrose — now the only lesbian bar in Houston and one of two in Texas — became the de facto headquarters for the Houston drag king scene and the launching pad for Ian Syder-Blake’s drag king troupe, Kings of Houston. Syder-Blake launched the Kings of Houston show out of Pearl Bar — he had approached every queer space or venue in the gr Houston area, from Kingwood to Galveston, but Pearl Bar was the only venue that would agree to host a drag king show. It also pays its performers: Owner Julie Mabry says drag kings make $400 per show or about $45 to $50 per hour. The host of Pearl Bar’s regular Drag Royale show makes $35 per hour for two to three shows a week.

Syder-Blake and other kings contend that few bars other than Pearl have been willing to give performers assigned female at birth a chance on stage. Drag king performances have never been as popular as drag queen shows, which some kings say is part of the ongoing struggle for female entertainers to be recognized on the same level as male entertainers. Despite that, the performance style is essentially the same: Instead of removing facial hair and adding breast forms, Syder-Blake says, drag kings may bind their chests and wear shoes with lifts. Either way, drag king and drag queen artistry involves exaggerated gender performance.

Mabry and Pearl Bar staff were unique in that they were receptive to drag king performers regardless of their gender identity. The exposure became the Kings of Houston troupe’s gateway to performing at other gay bars around Houston, including Barcode and Michael’s Outpost, he says.

Though Syder-Blake says he had not heard of drag king shows before 2013, he felt moved when he first saw his friend and ex-wife host a performance that year. Fascinated, he decided to perform himself at a country-themed drag show. “I got in there in a flannel shirt and jeans — bad Walmart drag — and a badly lined goatee, and I performed for the first time,” he says. “I was super awkward on stage, but I had fun.”

Today, many of Houston’s kings trace their drag heritage, so to speak, to Syder-Blake. The 40-year-old native Houstonian and self-proclaimed “drag dad” is now one of the longest-running drag kings in the city. He’s long served as a mentor to kings and members of the LGBTQ community and has offered numerous drag shows and trainings, as well as an overnight adults’ Queer Camp through his company, Houston Queer Events & Entertainment.

In the summer of 2024, Juecee, a Pearl Bar security guard and drag king, took over for Kings of Houston and began hosting a new drag show at Pearl. To bridge the gap, his show brought back older drag king performers to offer comforting, familiar faces for the audience. “The energy was just basically a big celebration,” Juecee says of the first show he hosted in August. “We’re all back. … It was just a big reunion.”

Though many performers see the drag king scene as an expressive outlet, others say they have encountered challenges regarding their identity and how they present themselves on stage. Before falling in love with the scene, Zestiel Celestial, a 26-year-old transfeminine and nonbinary Houstonian, tried out for a drag show at Pearl Bar on a whim. (Transfeminine is a label that refers to someone assigned male at birth but whose identity leans feminine.) At first, since he leaned feminine, Celestial says there was pressure to perform as a drag queen, but it wasn’t a fit. The more he performed, the more he realized there were parts of masculinity he still enjoyed. In the end, he decided to perform mainly as a drag king. “I feel like through my drag, I get to express the boy I never got to be,” Celestial says.

Baytown’s Mii, the 28-year-old pastel clown who performed at the Mint Julep show, is one of the most popular drag kings working in Houston today, but his performance styles and costumes also stray from the typical. Mii’s distinct presentation alternates between cutesy pastels to suave, masculine looks — a defiant shift from the typical pencil-mustache-and-suit ensembles and hyper-masculine presentations that often characterize drag king performances around the country. While his typical style outside of drag is more femme or feminine, Mii dared himself to make his stage act, Barry, more feminine, too. He describes it as a leap of faith that also challenged audience members, who can already be skeptical of — or less familiar with — drag king performances.

“I started like, ‘You have to be super, super masculine. It has to be like this. You have to perform this way. The moves have to be like this,” Mii says. “The more I did drag, the more [I was] forcing myself to be super masculine in a way that came off as a straight, masculine man. It kind of wore me out because people weren’t responding to it.”

Many local drag kings tell Eater they’re not as respected, compensated, or sought out for their work compared to drag queens, who have more exposure through popular television shows and major events. Only a handful of big-name king performers and even fewer competitions exist nationwide, and many drag kings say it’s not uncommon for audience members to tell them they never knew such performances existed.

At the Mint Julep show, the different attention given to drag kings and queens was apparent in their green rooms: While drag queen performers had an expansive space filled with professional-looking makeup counters and enormous wigs on styrofoam heads, the drag kings shared a small room, their bags spread over the floor. (Legacy Community Health, which runs Mint Julep, did not respond to a request for comment.)

Hamburger Mary’s, a drag-themed restaurant whose Houston location closed earlier this year, was once considered a haven for local drag. Its Mary’s Kids contest, which promised new drag artists exposure and mentorship from veteran performers, was considered a stepping stone for many drag artists. However, once Mii was crowned as the first king to win the contest, he felt he was not given the same attention as Mary’s drag queens — even as he promoted and performed in Mary’s drag shows for free, he says. His shows at the restaurant were often canceled, and the promised mentorship felt lacking.

A spokesperson for Hamburger Mary’s said in an emailed statement that the parent company cut ties with the people who operated Houston’s Hamburger Mary’s earlier this year and has not had contact with them since. The restaurant has been closed for over a year, despite operators using its name to promote their own events since its closing.

Mii had taken the Mary’s Kids opportunity as a sign that he could make it as a drag king. Though the experience was unpleasant and demoralizing, he still considers it a learning experience. “I’m the kind of person, like, no matter what the situations are, I want to learn something from them,” Mii says. “I learned to have thicker skin, to be able to go out and perform at my 100 even if people don’t understand or don’t want to look at me.”

Despite all this, Mii says Houston’s drag scene has been slowly growing, and that progress has rebuilt his confidence after Hamburger Mary’s.

“[Drag] taught me a lot of self-confidence — [to] be yourself. You can be loud. You can take up space. It’s not that you need to fit, look, or talk a certain way. Be yourself, and that will get you wherever you need to go,” Mii says.

In 2024, drag kings don’t need to perform in secrecy like they did in the early- to mid-1900s. However, as drag increasingly becomes the center of the national culture war, local performers have been caught in the crossfire. Senate Bill 12, a failed state bill that would have made “sexually oriented performances” held in the presence of anyone younger than 18 a civil or criminal offense, rattled the local queer bar scene. Last year, only a few months after the bill was announced, Mabry was denied insurance for Pearl Bar because it held drag performances.

Syder-Blake says that, after the bill was announced, fewer people began coming to his shows, and several times, people came to heckle or laugh at the performers. “SB 12 essentially emboldened people, thinking they had some sort of protection, that they could come out and be hateful towards others,” he says.

Though SB 12 failed, another similar bill, House Bill 1075, was filed in November for the upcoming 2025 Texas legislative session, only weeks after President-elect Donald Trump won his reelection bid. Trump’s win could slow down — or reverse — any progress drag performers have made in Texas. Trump and the Republican Party spent tens of millions of dollars on transphobic ads during his race, which made false or misleading claims that demonized the transgender community, as well as drag performers.

“I do not believe drag has changed in Houston yet, but that does not mean that the future for drag is not in jeopardy right now,” Celestial told me in a direct message. “Texas is trying to pass 32 anti-trans and some LGBTQ ban laws right now. The main focus for me is HB 1075 because this would [fine] a drag performer if they were to perform in front of a minor … Drag is not a crime.” He says he’s contacting different organizations to see what can be done at the community-organizing level to oppose the bill.

Still, the kings have pressed on. Despite not having the platform of a mainstream television show like RuPaul’s Drag Race that showcases drag king culture, a consistent stage, or a wide understanding of their work, Houston’s drag kings have still made the city’s drag culture richer — and made drag kings part of the broader conversation involving drag performers in Texas. Statewide-recognized drag king Sir Debonair strives to propel Houston’s scene to be as famous as the drag king communities in Los Angeles and New York City. His newest project, Crowned Illusions, a drag summit launched in October, promises to offer headshots, panels about anti-drag legislation and mental health, classes on the art of drag, and more to help engage the community.

Progress has been made over the past decade. Several drag kings report receiving more invitations to compete in an increasing number of shows alongside drag queens, and they’ve received more accolades, including awards and titles previously held exclusively by drag queens, like Mii’s status at Hamburger Mary’s.

“We’re going to continue to grow. We’re going to continue to make it,” Celestial says. “I know that we’re going to continue to thrive. If it took us six years to get to this point, I’m pretty sure that in another six years, we’re going to own this shit.”