Cemora Valentino Devine strutted down the stage at the White Horse Bar in Oakland on a recent Wednesday in an animal print flight attendant outfit with black mesh tights and gold heels. The long-time drag queen started their performance mimicking a flight attendant asking their passengers—or in this case, an audience of 30 people—to prepare to land in San Francisco.
“We are currently third in line for take-off and expected to be in the air in approximately seven minutes time,” Devine lipsynced to the attendees. Before long, Devine sultrily walked through the crowd to “Pretty Girls Walk” by Big Boss Vette.
Cemora Valentino Devine is their stage name. By day Devine is known as Darrell Thigpen, a 46-year-old Oakland resident who has been performing drag for 28 years throughout the country. Their work has taken them from their hometown of St. Louis all the way to San Francisco. Now, they are part of a budding group of performers striving to bring more drag recognition to Oakland.
“I would always go to San Francisco. There were places in Oakland, but it was just not mainstream,” said Devine.
San Francisco maintains a booming scene today while Oakland doesn’t have nearly as many spaces to hold drag shows. And the drag-friendly spaces Oakland has are constantly threatened with closure. In 2020, downtown Oakland gay bars Bench and Bar and Club 21 both shut down due to rising rent prices. Most recently, Port Bar announced its closure on Broadway because of a lease dispute.
Still, the queer community is hoping to find new spaces in Oakland to grow the city’s diverse drag scene, including more outdoor shows and drag-based festivals that help build the community.
“I alone just hope that the community, not just LGBTQ, but our allies out here in Oakland see that drag is also a form of entertainment and art” said Amoura Teese, a drag queen based in San Francisco. “We’re not just clowns or female impersonators.”
From violent intimidation to gentrification, it’s been hard to hold down queer spaces
The effort in Oakland comes as LGBTQ rights are under threat nationwide. For much of its history in the US, drag performances and art have been discriminated against as well as criminalized. This largely has to do with cross-dressing being considered taboo up until the end of the 19th century.
Today, far-right groups are attempting to ban drag performances. States like Tennessee, Alabama, Florida, Montana, and Texas have proposed some form of legislation prohibiting public drag shows.
The Bay Area has seen acts of intimidation also. Last June, a drag queen story hour was disrupted at the San Lorenzo Library south of Oakland after a group of men—likely associated with the Proud Boys—entered the library and shouted slurs, according to CBS News.
In Oakland, the drag community has had a hard time holding onto performance spaces.
Until it closed last month, Port Bar in uptown Oakland hosted a drag show every Wednesday where the community could experience a performance on an intimate stage with seating in the back. Proceeds from the bar and donations from the audience supported the bar’s programming.
But over the past six years, the LGBTQ friendly space’s owners have been in conflict with their landlord, Phil Leong. In January, Port Bar announced it would close after its owners, Sean Sullivan and Richard Fuentes, failed to reach an agreement with their landlord for a new lease. Leong maintains that Port has violated its lease by holding live events.
“They [The landlord] said that we could stay for the next five years if we were willing to cease all of our activities as defined by karaoke, trivia, deejays, and dancing,” Sullivan said.
According to Sullivan, there was never a problem with their street performances and they obtained city permits when needed. “What’s going on here is that they [the landlord] don’t want us to have our activities, namely queer programming here,” Sullivan said.
Phil Leong, their landlord, did not respond to a request for an interview. Leong previously told Sullivan that live performances fell outside the scope of the bar’s lease. Drag programs previously hosted by Port have moved to Parche, the Colombian restaurant on Broadway.
Amoura Teese, who has been a headlining performer at the Port Bar for the past three years, said the venue’s closure leaves her without income and further minimizes options for performing in Oakland.
“Queens depend on these bookings just to fund their rides back home, to fund their food for the night, to pay their phone bill,” Teese said.
A long history of drag performance, and an equally lengthy history of struggle to create space
The art of drag has been around for at least hundreds of years, dating back to the Shakespearean era when women were not allowed to work as actors so men dressed like women to play their parts, according to the BBC.
According to historians, before the 20th century cross-dressing was considered a crime in the United States, and the LGBTQ community faced intense discrimination and violence, which is still a problem in many communities. New York was one of the first states to declare face paint or disguising one’s face as a punishable crime dating back to 1845. In the 1950s, bars in New York and other big cities started to more openly advertise themselves as spaces for gay and lesbian people, holding drag performances more openly, although queer spaces were still attacked by police and in homophobic incidents.
In San Francisco, drag finally started to gain momentum starting in the 1960’s when people like José Julio Sarria took the stage. Sarria, a waiter at the Black Cat, a long-time gay bar in San Francisco that opened in 1906, became one of the Black Cat’s first drag queens known as “The Window Norton” in 1951. Sarria was also the first LGBTQ individual to run for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1961. He stopped performing in 1964 because The Black Cat was shut down after losing its liquor license due to a long legal battle surrounding anti-LGBTQ backlash, according to the SFGATE.
Still, spaces for drag performances slowly were able to gain more acceptance.
“Once the drag element of society was accepted, then we didn’t have to hide it,” Devine said.
Today, drag is performed all over the world, from Brazil to Berlin, Thailand to South Africa, Australia and beyond. And drag is showcased by the media, in part thanks to hit shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race and The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula, where contestants compete against one another to become a drag superstar.
Even Ursula from The Little Mermaid was inspired by a drag queen, Melissa McCarthy said in an interview at the premiere of the live-action movie.
However, even with representation on TV, in movies, and in plays, and despite drag’s long history, most cities didn’t have many physical spaces for drag queens or kings to perform until quite recently. Broader change started in the 1990s when venues like Lucky Cheng’s and Lips NYC opened in New York City, paving the way for the queer scene and drag queens to have their own safe places.
Before this, the scene in New York City was mostly underground. People held secret competitions of drag queens performing in different genres and categories with less fear of being arrested or looked down upon by the general public, according to Devine.
Energy in Oakland is growing even if drag event spaces are far and few between
San Francisco boasts numerous bars and restaurants where drag performances can be experienced. The city also holds festivals like SF Is A Drag and the Folsom Street Fair, a BDSM and leather subculture celebration that lots of drag performers attend. The Stud, a gay bar in the city for 27 years, will be the first in the state to open a drag school early 2024. Students will be able to learn how to use makeup, develop talent, and acquire all the other skills it takes to perform.
Oakland’s drag scene is less robust. Only five places show up on Yelp when searching for “drag.”
Still, there’s a sense of momentum behind Oakland’s drag scene. Today, the White Horse Bar Que Rico Night Club are the main venues powering Oakland’s drag scene. And Oakland also hosts an annual festival called Oaklash, whose organizers describe it as “the Bay Area’s premier celebration of drag and queer performance.”
The Latin gay club Que Rico opened in 2021 and makes it a point to support drag queens by hosting regular shows. On any given weekend, dozens of people dance as colorful lights flash throughout the venue and go-go dancers, people who perform erotic routines usually above or on stage, entertain the audience.
Que Rico’s owner, Valentino Carillo, believes that more people are coming to Oakland these days instead of San Francisco for drag performances. “It’s become so diverse and a lot of that is because a lot of people who have moved here from San Francisco don’t want to cross the bridge back to San Francisco,” Carillo said.
Que Rico has drag shows every Friday and Saturday as part of their regular programming. They held their own drag contest that started on Nov. 27 with a finale on Dec. 15 and showcased eight Latinx drag queens with the chance to win $2,000 and be titled “The Bay Areas Next Queen.”
“I want people to leave knowing that they had a great time and it’s a place that they want to continue going to every weekend,” Carillo said.
Open since 1933, The White Horse Bar in North Oakland is the longest-running gay bar in the East Bay, and it has hosted one of the longest-running drag king groups since 2010.
The Rebel Kings, aka the Kings of Oakland, have five core members and five other performers who are still part of the troupe even though they no longer live in Oakland.
The White Horse is also the first place Devine worked at to build their credibility and skills over the course of 15 years. They performed with the Rebel Kings when they first moved from St. Louis in 2008 until they got their own show which ran for seven years.
The White Horse hosts the Rebel Kings every 1st, 3rd, and 5th Sunday. It’s one of the only places in Oakland to see drag kings, female-bodied people who present masculine. Every show has a different theme such as “Dungeons and (Drag)ons,” where almost every performer is dressed as a dragon, pirate, or other mythical character.
During one recent performance, Will Power, a drag king, performed in a green hood, green makeup, and green pointy shoes decorated with yellow flowers. They swayed and weaved through the crowd eventually picking up cardboard wings and a dragon skull mask.
“The thing I love the most about performing is when I can shock people,” Power said.
Throughout the evening, attendees mingled with one another and reunited with familiar faces. Newcomers and regulars of the White Horse huddled at the door near the stage, getting ready to see Rebel Kings perform. Ash and Ripley Campo, siblings, sat with their drinks waiting to catch the show. Ash Campo, 31, wanted to show Ripley, 21, a drag king for the first time while they were visiting from Massachusetts.
“They bring a certain expansiveness to the scene and they are so silly and fun,” Campo said.
Devine is grateful to have moved to a place that is so supportive of drag and open to its expansion. Although there is still work to do to keep drag in Oakland, Devine said they know performers will persevere.
“We will find work. We always will. People will find us.” Devine said.
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Drag performers want to grow Oakland's scene with new spaces and events - The Oaklandside
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