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I don't know why I moved to Berlin exactly, but it certainly was not to become what a friend and mentor described as "the Weird Al Yankovic of drag". I wouldn't even say I moved here per se; that implies a conscious decision, while my arrival here felt like anything but. It was as if I was possessed by a force of nature, one that I have since come to think of as a ‘divine queer energy’. It is a very real, tangible power, and in the near century and a half it’s held sway over this city, it has been concerned with only one task: pulling together the world's most precious, most radiant queers and giving them the space they never had to play and experiment, to live without fear and love without shame, to be free. It is in this fertile breeding ground of identity that I discovered Cheryl, a woman who represents me at my most gloriously actualised – a physical rendering of my brain's superego that has a Brooklyn accent, a boundless sense of wonder and an innate aesthetic urge to mix at least three prints at once. She has become a fixture of Berlin's ever-expanding queer performance scene, treating everyone she meets to pop songs rewritten as treatises on gender, sexuality, bodily functions, and the insanity inherent in living in a non-stop nightclub.
ART + CULTURE
She is one of many colourful personas that populate the back rooms and toilet stalls of this millennial-Weimar utopia, and it is an immense honour to now have the pleasure of introducing you to a few of these strikingly gorgeous and talented individuals. This is a group of the city's best and brightest, a selection of my peers that are colleagues, friends and family in one. As a rag-tag group of émigrés whose origins span four continents, we do not mean to suggest anything so bold as the idea that we – are – Berlin’s drag scene, or that we fully represent it in the slightest. Few of us even feel comfortable using the term 'drag' to describe what we do, only relying on it as cultural shorthand to give a slight indication of our distinct blend of no-holds-barred gender-fuckery. Of course, the essence of our work thrives in its inability to be defined, and in an age where those leading the conversation are attempting to set the boundaries of what drag is and who can take part, it's more important than ever to take up the mantle of subversion. Here, in the most limitless city for queer expression in human history, we are honour-bound by the legacy of those who came before us to share the ultimate lesson of the divine queer: only in shattering the rules of identity entirely can you begin to be free.