21/02/2019
On meeting Daniel Lynch, the creative individual behind Shakona Fire, I offered out my hand for a handshake and was pleasantly surprised with a hug instead. Shakona Fire is a warm, friendly and educated person, a delight to talk to. She completely squashed any negative preconceptions of drag queens. “People I guess are more approachable than you think,” Shakona says.
With RuPaul’s Drag Race coming to the UK, many believe it will change the UK drag scene. Shakona Fire is one of London’s young black drag queens shaking up the UK drag scene one show at a time.
Shakona started drag in university around the age of 21. She didn’t know what drag was when she saw her first London. Despite this, she tells me happily how she grew up dancing as I kid: “I can do vogue, I can death drop and all those other things, but I can also make a statement. I can also talk about the serious things of my community, which is what I love most about my drag.”
The political side
Shakona believes there is more to drag than just performing: “drag is a political statement in itself because you’re defying the rules of gender,” she says. “The origins of drag and where it kind of got its height were in very political places.” Drag has been around for years. Before women were allowed to perform in theatre, men played female parts, cross-dressing in women’s clothes. When homosexuality was outlawed, many did their cross-dressing in secret for safety. In the 1950s and 60s, drag queens began to protest unfair police treatment and resulted in the US Stonewall riots.
Shakona, tells me about the world of drag and how it's more than just men in makeup. “I feel like a lot of people who don't know what drag is, the art form of it, they may confuse drag with being transgender,” Shakona says. According to a Stonewall Trans Report of January 2018, more than two in five trans people (44%) avoid certain streets because they don’t feel safe there as an LGBT person. In addition, a third of trans people (34 %) have been discriminated against because of their gender identity when visiting a café, restaurant, bar or nightclub in the last year. These alarming figures alone show that there is still a lot to be done in accepting transgender people and understanding the difference between drag and being transgender.
Throughout our conversation, she makes it very clear that drag is an art, that it is a way of expressing yourself, of “playing with gender in a way that isn’t the norm”. Shakona describes her drag as “the dissertation I never wrote” because she couldn’t express what she wanted to in words alone. “It’s hard to find theory with gender, sexuality and race in one” she explains. But this doesn’t mean it has to be serious. She tells me how she can have fun with these ideas through her drag. “Make fun of the stupid stereotypes but also educate ourselves and our peers,” she explains. “No-one needs to be awkward about the topic.”
Upbringing channelled into performance
Lynch, grew up in North London in the midst of postcode war and the stop and search period. “I knew from the beginning I was different and my race was obviously being singled out,” Shakona tells me. “Walking to school one day and seeing a line of all boys being stopped and searched was just normal.” Shakona lived in fear growing up and was told to behave and look a certain way to stop prejudices. “It affected the way I am as a person and also as a performer” she explains to me. This life experience is poured into her performances and as she tells me more about her upbringing as a young black person during this time, I understand why it is important for her to educate others through her performances. Shakona stresses that she doesn’t want anyone to feel “alienated or like anyone's pointing the finger” because then people “shut down”. Her aim is to get people involved in an attempt to educate and start conversations.
This is expressed in one of her favourite performances; ‘I’m Upset’ which is centred around transgender people and queer people of colour. “It’s like a protest,” Shakona says. “When you think of drag in general and gay culture, for a while the image of a gay guy has always been blonde hair, blue eyes, white, six-pack.” Shakona says, telling me how this has emulated into drag. Even in RuPaul’s Drag Race, this is an issue.
Out of all 67 of the top performing queens on the show, 32 of which are white, followed by 18 black queens, 12 Latina and only five Asian. This is a struggle that Shakona has had to face breaking into the drag industry. Shakona says in a matter-of-fact manner: “As a person of colour I feel that definitely, in general, you do have to work ten times harder than the person next to you who might not be a person of colour - and that’s not just in drag, that's in general.” She quotes Bob the Drag queen as if she’s told herself this many times before: “You’re gonna follow the people and pay attention to the people that most look like you.”
Despite this, she expresses the positives and improvements in the industry. She passionately tells me about services like The Cocoa Butter Club who work with people of colour and how they helped her tremendously. “Sometimes my minority might feel like it’s pushing me back but sometimes it’s working towards my advantage,” she tells me positively. “In this day and age of Me Too and Black Lives Matter, people are wanting to be allies, people are wanting to start the conversation.”
With there being a popularity spark in drag culture and an ever growing industry working to be inclusive to all, it seems that there’s no better time to be in drag. Shakona explains to me how it is a way for her to start conversations, create awareness and is an artistic way of expressing yourself. “My favourite saying is: ‘you have to be yourself because everyone else is taken.’”
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