Photos by Katya
If you don’t know what Bushwig is, firstly read my post on it last year, but the TL:DR is that 8 years ago queens Horrochatta and Babes Trust organized a drag festival Secret Project Robot named after the Brooklyn neighborhood where they saw a host of new arty queens performing.
Now it’s at the Knockdown Center in Maspeth Queens, with 200+ performers over 2 days. For 8 hours there’s a parade of performers onstage and plenty of chances to revel with the outlandishly dressed community members milling about, shop the variety of vendors, dance to DJs outside, or do bumps of Ketamine while sitting around picnic tables.
Even though drag elites like Lady Bunny and RuPaul’s cast members come, Bushwig is still an ode to the freaks. You’re as likely to see a queen do pickle eating ASMR or sit onstage in front of a ticking clock as you are to see a Beyoncé song. Acts like rising pop star Slayyyter felt out of place, with attendees (and the people backstage) spending her 30-minute set waiting for a drag performer to take the stage back. At one point on Saturday co-founder Horrorchatta, Charlene Incarnate, Tyler Ashley, Merrie Cherry, and a host of London queens burst onstage with trays of shots for the crowd.
The chaotic nature of Bushwig is part of it’s scrappy diy charm. In the weeks prior to the festival queens were posting online that they didn’t know what day or time they were performing. On 9/3 the organizers posted a schedule with performance times sorted by performer name, prompting local DJ Ten Yards to make a Google Doc listing a chronological schedule. The event routinely ran an hour to an hour and a half behind, and at a certain point, the order on the schedule was like a rough guide for the order onstage. Brooklyn Heights didn’t appear that weekend, promting the welcome replacement of Gia Gunn.
The chaos is fitting for a festival made up largely of volunteers. I spoke to several queens under the condition of anonymity who confirmed that most of the drag acts performed for free. (Our request to get an on the record statement from the festival organizers went unanswered. We will update this post if we hear back). If the organizers can’t pull enough from the 40 and 45 dollar day passes to pay out the 200+ queens, perhaps some nice sponser would be willing to throw in some coin. Until that sponsor(s) appears the queens will continue sinking money into their looks to bask in Bushwig’s glow. So note for next year’s attendees: tip your queens!
It’s this scrappy, anti-money, community focused motivation that makes Bushwig akin to festivals like Punk Island. It’s not about making money. The queens are there to stunt for themselves and people who understand their art.
Backstage it was a whirl of performers in mid-costume, gabbing about when their new performance time would be, breathlessly congratulating each other, and vamping in front of the single full-length mirror. I was backstage with my friend Katya taking polaroid portraits. Take a look at them along with some of my favorite performances.
Serena Tea, who’s been making waves in fashion as of late, had the most viral performance. Performing a mix of songs by Charli XCX, Rihanna, and Nicki Minaj dressed as a transformer, she had the crowd screaming the entire performance. Later after she was done voguing and death-dropping, Horrorchatta crowned her Miss Bushwig 2019 and Charli XCX herself posted clips of her performance on her Instagram.
Queen Robert did Susan Boyle’s iconic “I dreamed a dream” performance but made it a striptease, belting the final notes while twirling a nipple taste from a decidedly boy titty. It was hilarious and raunchy, but also oddly sentimental.
Babes Trust’s experimental dance band Bottoms recently came out of retirement, and their performance outside captured the raw energy of early Bushwigs. Over drum & bass and dark house beats, frontperson Jake Dibeler strode into the crowd wearing a Latex dress and a stick-straight ginger wig, screaming “I hate my body! I’m serious!” with all the aplomb of Alice Glass.
Qhrist with a Q, a spooky queen who co-hosts the monthly party Str8 to DVD with Sherry Poppins, did an emotional lip-sync to Evanescence, proving that you could have an impactful number without props or gags. All she needed was the stage, and as the lights flashed around her the emo kids in the crowd belted along.
Drag king God Complex is known for his involved performances leaning on Satanic imagery. This year was no different. He acted out the part of a satanic instructor, lip-syncing Pink Floyd’s brick in the wall with a class of backup dancers who killed him by the end of the number.
Gemma Bubblegum, clad in a Bacalla-esque dress by local designer/drag queen Pinwheel Pinwheel, fisted her backup dancer onstage. Later Rupaul’s Drag Race alumn Nina West commented on the performance saying “Thank you for allowing a little country boy from Ohio to come on stage tonight and have her little Disney fantasy while people were getting fisted just 10 minutes ago on this stage.”
La Zavaleta performed an electroclash-esque song on rollerblades in a tulle skirt and banana yellow wig. The audience was transfixed as she skated near the lip of the stage and laughed as she did the Macarena.
Sham Payne, looking like a punk after being hit with a playdough truck, lip-synced “I Fucked Your Dad” making the audience roar with laughter.
Erika Clash, originally from Brooklyn before decamping to California and competing in the alt drag competition Dragula, did a nu-metal song dressed as the Pokémon Cubone.
Baby Love performed an inventive mix as Harry Potter’s Hermoine Granger, lypsincing monologues about time turners before performing Charli XCX’s 1999 and polyjuice potion before performing Lizzo’s Juice. It was geeky and gaggy, complete with a costume change.
Rising queen Brenda, who routinely mixes the pop anthems of modern mainstream drag artists with monologues critiquing the form of drag itself, was all over the festival’s Instagram doing her fake newswoman bit. Her onstage number was A performance Ariana Grande’s “Break Free” paired with an original monologue questioning “are we really subverting gender presentation through art and performance by recycling mainstream heterosexual content?” When she jumped into a split she demonstrated her ability to uphold modern drag standards as well as critique them.
Miss Malice, Host and ringleader of the Switch n Play collective, performed “Boys Wanna Be” by Peaches as the 50-foot woman, hurling cardboard skyscrapers across the stage and motioning onlookers to “scatter!”
