ARTS & LEISURE | May 20, 2024

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
By Stephanie Keith

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.
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.
“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.
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.”
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.”