The screenplay “All born naked (and the rest is drag)” : men in dresses or fabulous queens?

Abstract

The purpose of this project is to explore the issues of gender, sex and sexual orientation as they relate to the art-form of drag performance through a musical feature film screenplay. The project was inspired by the current globalisation of drag through documentaries like Paris is Burning and television series such as RuPaul’s Drag Race. Aside from the theoretical background on gender studies and queer theory, it also delves into interviews with two local Maltese drag queens, Chucky Bartolo (stage name Tolqueen) and Tristan Zammit (stage name Trihanna Wilde). The questions constructed for the interviews were created based off a similar study conducted by Rupp and Taylor (2003), where they interviewed drag queens at a cabaret in Florida to discover the reasons as to why they did drag. These primary source in-depth interviews provided key themes that were then used as source material for the screenplay. The final project created was a story set in Malta about a shy boy entering the world of drag and becoming a drag queen, along with all the pressures and prejudices that this brings along with it. Finally, the project analyses possibilities for further studies to be conducted, such as interviewing drag queens from different countries and also looking at drag king culture.