How drag developed a drink problem: ‘Everyone expects us to be loud and wasted’
When the Australian drag veteran Heidi Liscious first moved to London in 2006, she found a job as a hostess at a gay club in Vauxhall. She was taken aback by what her employer did next. “They gave me a bag of cocaine and said, ‘Have a good time, and make sure that everyone else is, too’.”
Drugs and alcohol are probably not the first things you think of when you think of drag. You think the humour. The make-up. The heels. But it’s a facet of the drag world that often goes unspoken, addiction entangled with the lives and careers of many of our hardest-working queens. “I couldn’t leave the drugs at the party,” said RuPaul’s Drag Race UK champion The Vivienne while appearing on the show. “It was constant for me.”
The drag of today blossomed in underground bars and clubs hidden from the harsh glare of a homophobic society. And , the spaces in which it flourishes are still somewhere you can
