from Perth to Sydney to RuPaul’s Drag Race: in conversation with drag superstar Hannah Conda

Tuesday 5th March, 2024

There is no doubt that internationally renowned drag queen Hannah Conda has always been one to watch. From winning the title of DIVA Entertainer of the Year years prior to her world debut on RuPaul’s Drag Race Down Under and now RuPaul’s Drag Race: UK vs The World Season 2, she’s an extremely talented performer and ultimate superstar.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Hannah in 2020, six months before the first season of Drag Race Down Under was even announced, and roughly a year and a half prior to her casting on the second season of the reality competition. What I found was an incredibly intellectual, down-to-earth, and personable individual with plenty of anecdotes to share, who wasn’t afraid to be vulnerable.

(This interview has been cut down and edited for clarity and conciseness. Conducted 09.06.2020)

Q: How were you introduced to drag?

A: I first learnt about drag... well, to be honest, looking back in hindsight, I’ve been exposed to drag my whole life in all different forms. I loved Mrs Doubtfire as a kid, and I didn’t realise that was drag; I remember going to see Hairspray when that came out and having John Travolta in drag; Bugs Bunny – I love Bugs Bunny, and he did drag in multiple episodes of Looney Tunes. Drag honestly was all around me. I love To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, it’s like the American version of Priscilla; and Priscilla: Queen of the Desert as well. I just didn’t understand – I didn’t know the name for it, but I’d always sort of been exposed to it, and then, when I turned 18 and I started going to nightclubs, obviously I hit up the gay bars – there was two in Perth. There was The Court and Connections, and I went out and in the first/second night I went out and there was a drag show, and I was stupid – I was like “What the fuck is this?”, I was very confused. I didn’t know what was going on, and it was only in becoming friends with another performer named Ruby Jewelz – we started becoming friends and hanging out, and then he started doing drag and I’d make sure I was there every show. I was front-row, and I was loving it. He was like – “You need to give it a go one night, you’d really like it”, and I said “Oh, one night, one night only”, and so he put me into drag for my first time. He put my face on and gave me the name ‘Rosie Cheeks’ and I was like “That’s an awful drag name”.

A couple of weeks before, when I was walking between one of Perth’s arts precincts, The Court and Connections, this drunk Irish man came up to me and my friends and he started calling me an ‘anaconda’, for no reason. It was very bizarre, and [my friends] just kept calling me ‘anaconda’ all night, and then when I was like “Rosie Cheeks is just not gonna do”. I was like “Why can’t I be ‘anaconda’?”, but that’s just very basic, and I’m a little more advanced than that, so I was like “I’ll be Hannah, I’ll be Hannah Conda”, and it just stuck, so then I did my first show and I loved it. It was on a Wednesday night, an amateur drag competition, and it kind of just stuck and I loved it. I was there every week after that.

That was kind of my journey of figuring out what drag was, up to doing it and realising that it’s really an art-form, and a really important art-form I think, and I didn’t realise how important drag was for the LGBTQIA+ community.

I never knew the history of drag, I never knew anything about the Stonewall Riots or anything like that and when they started; the power that political base of drag has as well – y’know, being a statement against the mainstream. All of that stuff that I’ve learnt has been over 10 years of doing [drag], and you learn so much more as you go on.

For some people drag is an escape, but most of the time, it’s an extension of who you are. Y’know, so it’s in mainstream culture. It only occurred to me the other day when I was watching a clip of John Travolta getting prepared for Hairspray, and they were doing all of the makeup and everything like that, and I’d never seen it before – it was only then that it clicked that I realised, ‘I went and saw this with my parents and they loved it!’ – they thought John Travolta was amazing, and so did so many other people. It’s so good, and you don’t even realise that drag is all around you – and a lot of people that would have a problem with drag, in a nightclub scene or in general, probably would’ve loved John Travolta in that movie. Australians resonate with Priscilla; however, they struggle sometimes with the drag community, which is interesting.

Q: You mentioned that some people see drag as an escape earlier, and that you see it more as an extension of your personality. How do you think drag has impacted you individually in terms of self-image, body-image and confidence?

A: Initially, when I tried [drag], it was a novelty. I was giving it a go; it was a bit of fun; it was a laugh. I’ve always been a performer – I did musical theatre in school; I was in bands. I’ve always been involved in the arts in some way, but I never really had the confidence to get on stage properly and perform; to be a featured performer or a solo performer. It was never in my nature. So, [when I started] drag, it was kind of a novelty, and then I realised the power of it and how great I felt afterwards. It became in some ways, a bit of a therapy for me. I was 18, and I was all-over-the-shop. Back then [2008/2009], I still felt like I had to come to terms with it, and I think it was a very different mindset that people had in 2008 as well. Like, I was still coming to terms with who I was as a person and as a gay man – y’know, I came out to my parents, which – they’ve been incredible and always are supportive – but, I had to come to terms with who I was as a person. I was going through identity issues, as we all do in our teenage years, so drag really allowed me to work through those issues through performing, and it was a way to express myself, so I did a lot of numbers early-on that were probably very ‘deep’.

That was very important for me to learn in drag. It allowed me to alleviate feelings and emotions, and I’ve always maintained that if I’m feeling something really heavy, or I’m feeling a certain way, to listen to that and use it in my performance to make it better. It’s like a therapy.

[My drag] has gone through the phases of being a ‘novelty’, to being an escape, to now being an extension of who I am now, and I don’t feel that Hannah is too different from Chris.

Q: So, you’re from Perth, and you’ve come across to Sydney. Being Hannah Conda, you’re really Sydney’s premier drag queen, but do you feel in yourself that you’ve found your identity within the Sydney drag community and the drag community as a whole?

A: Yeah, I do feel like I’ve found my identity and where I sort of fit, however it’s constantly changing; it’s constantly growing. I have definitely gotten to a point in my life where you realise and you understand that you’re always learning; it doesn’t have to be from a schoolbook; it doesn’t have to be from sitting down and educating yourself, like sitting exams or anything like that – it has been – for me – from just taking in the world around me, responding to that and understanding how I feel about that. [My drag] is constantly changing and developing – I don’t think I’ll ever stop doing that. Although my identity is what it is now, you see it changing constantly. I’ve never stuck in that one place of understanding where you know “This is me; this is what I do – that’s it,”

Q: Drag has really, now, become a part of the mainstream – it’s everywhere. Do you feel this is a positive thing?

A: It’s a double-edged sword. There are some really great ‘perks’ from it – drag, for a really long time, was what we call “the ‘bastard’ end of the arts community”. It would be looked-down upon by other performers because you’re performing in bars and clubs.

I started [drag] when Drag Race had just begun, or even just before it was a thing, so I’ve been able to see the tail-end of what drag was in the 2000s and the 90s to what drag is now – I’ve been in that changing momentum of what was happening. The great part about drag being in the mainstream is that there are a lot more opportunities for us – we’re allowed to be at a lot of different [events] that we would typically never get the opportunity to be at, we get more jobs; every company at one point, when drag became really big, maybe two or three years ago – when it really ‘blew up’ – wanted a drag queen to be involved in their marketing; Mardi Gras – every company wants a drag queen on their float, just so they show representation, which is great. Y’know, I love that about it.

The trouble that comes with things becoming mainstream – not that I’m saying it’s a bad thing – but everything becomes scrutinised. The drag that we were doing 11 years ago is probably not appropriate now, and I’m not saying that it was necessarily appropriate then, but I think we didn’t have the vernacular and the ability to understand the world as a whole because we weren’t so inter-connected as we are now. Now you’ll start noticing drag queens – things that they’ve done in the past, numbers that they’ve done in the past – are starting to make a resurgence for being tone-deaf or politically incorrect. [Drag] was really rooted in that political incorrectness, so now, that’s the hard part about it becoming mainstream – we’re now looked at under a microscope, and fundamentally, that means drag has to adapt and evolve with it – which I don’t think is a bad thing.

You also have a lot of people that have opinions on drag and now you have the RuPaul’s Drag Race fandom, and they can be really harsh about things they see on a TV show without being able to separate the fact that they’re watching reality TV and the realities of drag. That’s the ironic part about reality TV – it’s not real. It’s made for drama; it’s made for entertainment, so of course I understand when people get behind things.

Q: You were saying about how different Australian drag is from American drag – do you see any differences in drag scenes in Australia between cities at all?

A: Overall, if I were to sum up what Australian drag is all about for a RuPaul’s Drag Race viewer, it’s like the best parts of Drag Race U.S. and the best parts of Drag Race U.K. tied together. That’s what Australian drag is. In some Aussie states, incorporated into their wide range of drag, there’s a lot of ‘alternative’ artists. For example, in WA, specifically Perth, there’s a very big alternative artist scene. The term that a lot of people know it as is ‘bio queen’, which is biological women doing drag; I just call them all drag queens – if they come in drag, they’re a drag queen or a drag king to me – I don’t really care what your genitalia is; it doesn’t matter in drag. In Melbourne, it’s definitely sort-of an ‘old-school’ kind of drag – very big makeup, really long nails – it’s a 90s type of drag still there, with a modern-day effect. Then you go to Adelaide, which is like a ‘mish-mosh’ of a few different styles of drag. Queensland is very ‘girly’ – soft and pretty kind-of drag; however, they do have an upcoming burlesque drag scene as well emerging, which is pretty cool.

We just did a festival in Alice Springs called ‘FABalice’ which brought in queens from Sydney and queens from Darwin and Alice Springs. There, you definitely have a lot more First-Nations performers, which is incredible – it was so amazing to work with them – they just see drag in a really different way, and they understand the political importance of it as well, because they use drag as a medium to elevate issues that First-Nations; Torres Strait Islanders experience with racism, their rights and the political system – which is really, really important, as you know – especially with what’s happening in the world right now.

So yeah, there are variants in the Australian drag scene, but it’s all very much tied-in-one. The ‘bow’ and the sort-of ‘cherry on top’ of everything is that we’re all very well-versed, and we adapt.

You can follow Hannah’s socials by clicking here or @hannahcondaofficial