Ashland’s Drag Community Thriving, Despite Challenges

Ashland has more fans of drag than you might think. The artists who produce today’s shows are just the latest building on a rich but tenuous history of drag in the small Rogue Valley town, population 21,000.

At times, it was at risk of dying out all-together if not for a handful of dedicated drag artists.

“I was really the first person to come into that performance already knowing that I wanted to do it professionally,” said Maisie Smith, who goes by the drag name Bettie Wood.

Wood was referring to the annual “Winter’s a Drag” show, hosted by SOU’s Queer Resource Center. When Wood first participated in 2016, the show only featured people who were new to drag and trying it out for the first time.

In time, more drag performers would join her, including Austin Ewing, who goes by Dandy Lyon.

“I could see that there was such a demand and a support,” Lyon said. “We would fill the Rogue River room with people who wanted to see this show once a year.”

The group of friends eventually formed a drag family called the GreenHAUS, which, alongside Wood and Lyon, included local drag artists Daddy Devito, Holly Hazmat and Sammy Drake.

Lyon said in the ensuing years, the world of drag opened up to them. Lyon inherited a show called Dancing Queens, held at what was once Ashland’s Vinyl Club, and was reopened as Trapdoor after the pandemic. The drag family also started an all-ages show in 2019 at the Black Sheep pub, opening up drag in the community to those who were not just students or over 21.

“That’s when I saw a lot of the appeal not only come from SOU, but from community members,” Lyon said. “That’s when I saw a lot of diversity of the Southern Oregon drag scene. A lot of people started coming out of the woodwork there.”

“Because Ashland is seen as the liberal bubble, it does draw performers from the rest of the Rogue Valley to come and perform here,” Wood said.

But, Wood said just as they were building a thriving fanbase for drag in Ashland, the COVID pandemic struck, putting things on hold.

“When I left, and when the pandemic shut everything down, everyone who was in my era of drag left; just scattered to the winds,” she said.

Wood says she was already worried, because most of the drag performers she knew were graduating from SOU at the same time, and there wasn’t a guarantee that there would be a next generation of drag in Ashland.

Aside from a few one-off shows like virtual performances Wood organized, drag became rare in Ashland during the pan- demic. Lyon said they were lucky to be able to start an annual Halloween drag show at the Oregon Cabaret Theatre in late 2020.

Chance McCloud, who performs under the name Bleu Dinah, started doing drag right before the pandemic, and built an online following during the lockdown. She says she wanted to create a more accessible drag show than the ones that used to be run out of Ashland’s clubs, an event where SOU students and others under 21 would be allowed.

Her new show, now called Bleuprint, started in January of 2022, as a birthday celebration. Bleu now organizes the Ashland show from Portland, where she lives after graduating from SOU.

“I have my friends here and I’ll bring them down, they will even say, ‘Wow, that was the most fun I’ve ever had in drag,’” said Bleu. “The people in Portland, they see drag all the time. And so in Ashland, we’re creating something different and new.”