How Bengaluru’s drag performers are building community, one song at a time

Izzy B is a 26-year-old drag queen born and raised in Bengaluru. Drag was not something she had set out to do. It was her curiosity about queer spaces that led to her first queer party in 2022. “I saw these beautiful queens, dressing up, with wigs and beautiful makeup, lashes and everything, and I was fascinated,” she says, recalling the first few drag performances she witnessed.

Izzy started loving the art form when she saw another drag queen, Cologne Doll, perform. “I saw her on the stage of Kitty Ko (a queer-friendly nightclub in Bengaluru), and I was like, this is so good, I love it.” 

Drag is a performance and visual art, rooted in queer subculture. Drag performances often involve exaggerated traditional gender expressions to challenge the same. Performances usually feature drag queens or drag kings who dress in clothing associated with the opposite sex or otherwise. Performers choose a drag name or a stage name based on their interests and build a unique drag persona. A drag performer can be cis, trans, non-binary, or any sexuality; the persona performed on stage can also differ from how someone identifies off stage.

Miss Bhenji, who is now Izzy’s drag mother, is known for her quirkiness. “I saw Miss Bhenji being all quirky on the stage and I related that to myself,” Izzy says. 

A drag mother is a senior drag queen who shelters and mentors their drag children.  

“And slowly things started becoming familiar, and I could see myself performing.” After Kitty Ko's auditions, Izzy got her first show in July 2024. “The show was a hit. People loved me instantly. People know me for twerking, and they recognise me as Izzy B, the twerking diva.” Izzy found her joy, but that didn’t last long. 

Having been born and raised in Bengaluru and still living with her family, Izzy was hesitant to do drag as she came from a family steeped in religious orthodoxy and the idea of performing drag felt like a risk.

As Izzy was practising, only for her third show, her biological mother saw her. What Izzy had been dreading actually happened. For almost eight months, Izzy was shut in — not allowed out of the house. “My performance was also very sensual, and they have never seen their son doing these things. And it was quite a hectic period.” She was staying with her family, had nowhere else to go, and depended on them financially. “So I had no choice but to accept what was happening, and I stopped performing,” she says, eyes welling up. 

The recent amendments to the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2026 have further taken away access to a lot of queer spaces. The act restricts self-identity and penalises what it frames as “forced transgender identity”, putting those who care, that is, chosen families, in danger.

Lisa (name changed) is a sixteen-year-old drag artist who identifies as a gender-fluid bisexual person, says she has been restricted to queer events and even kicked out of WhatsApp groups for queer people, just because she is a minor, feminine-presenting, and doing drag. “Without queer spaces, queer events and queer friends groups, I wouldn’t have survived,” she says.

When Izzy was in distress during her confinement, and now as Lisa is struggling to find safe spaces, their drag family offered shelter. Izzy became the first daughter of Haus of Bhenji, which became a shelter for her drag persona: a place to practise, do her makeup, keep her things, and stay when Izzy moved out of her parents’ house for a time.

In ballroom culture, a haus is a chosen family that provides shelter, support and community. For newcomers in the drag scene, a haus, led by a senior drag performer, becomes a platform to develop their skills and find their way to performance opportunities. 

That is what a haus does at its simplest. But the word is not local, and to see what it carries, one must understand the history that can be traced back to a black American drag queen of the late 1960s.

History of Hauses

Jiya, born in Patna, lived in Bengaluru between 2008 and 2014. She was trained in Kathak, Bharatanatyam, and Indian contemporary dance forms at that time. She was associated with the dance company Nritarutya by Mayuri Upadhya. Jiya, along with some other queer folks like Masoom Parmar and Romal Laisram, was trying to create spaces for queer people, like the QAMI - Queer Arts Movement India, for example.

She also continued performing at The Humming Tree, a major cultural hub that has been and continues to be a safe space for queer folks.

After spending some years with Nritarutya, she wanted to branch out into more exotic forms — like heels dancing — and learn it from where it originated. "You can't even walk in heels on Indian roads," she says, taking a dig at the country's civic infrastructure. So she moved to New York in 2016.

The first time Jiya stepped down into a Ballroom in New York, she says she was "gagging and crying at the same time." She had just arrived from Bengaluru, a city where, in her words, cross-dressing and even clapping too enthusiastically in a queer space were not allowed. 

She went on to learn voguing, a dance form that emerged from the underground ballroom scene, defined by dramatic model poses, sharp angles, precise hand positions, catwalks, duckwalks and flexible floor performances. Justin Gomez, aka Monster LaBeija, her voguing teacher, approached Jiya to join the House of LaBeija. 

The House of LaBeija is historically the first haus of the ballroom scene, founded by Crystal LaBeija, an American black drag queen in the late 1960s. 

Racism was at its peak in the pageant industry, forcing black and Latino girls participating to do lighter-shade makeup. However, they were never selected as winners. This infuriated Crystal LaBeija. Along with Lottie LaBeija, in 1972, she threw the first annual House of LaBeija Ball at the underground queer venue, Up the Downstairs Case in Harlem, New York. 

Ballroom culture is an African-American and Latino underground LGBTQIA+ subculture. Ballrooms became a safe space against the systematic erasure of black queer people.

Ball events had subcategories like schoolboy/schoolgirl realness (which defines performers’ style and is not related to their age), lawyer realness, doctor realness, etc., where people would dress up and walk as school students, lawyers, and doctors, as they didn’t get the opportunities in the real world. Participation is voluntary, and the performers would choose a category and walk it, aiming to embody the role as convincingly as possible.

In the ballroom scene, minor queer folks were treated with familial protection, survival advocacy, and creative mentorship. In the early 2000s, the ballroom community even created ‘kiki ballrooms’ especially for minors.

Haus of LaBeija, Haus of Xtravaganza, Haus of Ninja, Haus of Pendavis, etc., at that time housed several queer folks who were denied basic rights and shelter.

“It was hard to be Black and gay and even harder to be Black and trans. And these hauses became the safe space for Black queer folks at that time to be themselves and showcase their art and talent,” Jiya says. 

Now Jiya is the Mother of the Indian chapter of House of LaBeija. She is a pioneer in creating spaces for queer people in Goa, through ballrooms, LGBTQIA+ runways, Vogue and waacking workshops. She now teaches femme vogue in Bengaluru and says students must learn the culture's history and its bloodshed along with the steps.

For drag performers, hauses, kinship, sisterhood, and chosen families play a vital role. 

Izzy fondly remembers the support of Sylveria Frost, known outside drag as Animesh Mahato, whom she calls her sister. When Izzy started performing in Kitty Ko, Animesh was helping her with costumes, makeup, and giving other support. “Every time you have a drag queen, there will be a friend walking around here and there. I was that,” Animesh says.

When Izzy was in confinement, Sylveria, Bhenji, and Cologne Doll used to check on her constantly. Rayaan, a bisexual man whom Izzy fondly calls her brother, was a constant support to her. “If it wasn't for Rayaan, Izzy B wouldn’t have been born,” she says.

Among drag sisters, empathy comes easily — rooted in the shared hardships they faced growing up because of their queerness, experiences that often mirror each other so closely they need little explaining.

“I have also gone through a lot of hardships and bullying as a queer kid and seeing Izzy, a person who wants to fly and flourish, suffer, I knew I wanted to be there for her,” Sylveria says, adding that Izzy was her first queer friend in Bengaluru who always stood by her without question — and that she knew she had to do the same when Izzy was suffering.

Politics of drag kinship, access for the caste marginalised

Beyond being a support system during Izzy’s distress, Sylveria remembers how Izzy helps her with shopping for drag stuff. “Because I am not familiar with the city, she knows a lot of places where she can find things. So I always pick her up and go shopping," Sylveria says.

Kareem Khubchandani, an associate professor at Tufts University who studies queer nightlife in South Asia and performs as LaWhore Vagistaan, calls such small acts of access "everyday politics": queens gifting each other clothes and jewellery, taking a newcomer to a tailor or showing them where to buy a first wig. “Cis-heterosexual people usually get this from mothers and aunties,” Kareem pointed out.

Makeup is often where these bonds begin. "People are teaching each other makeup skills and doing each other's makeup, which is a very intimate thing, right? If someone is putting kajal on you... being that close to your face is very intimate. It's the kind of behaviour you see between a parent and a child," Kareem says. 

Cologne Doll, who spent a year practising her own makeup through the night after chef shifts, mentors Sylveria and other queens in the same spirit. Vee, a bio-queen (or AFAB - Assigned Female at Birth drag queen) and Legendary Karma’s drag daughter, remembers how, for their recent performance, Choco Bae, their drag brother, helped with painting their face, the costume, etc. Even Lisa makes and styles wigs for her drag sisters and other drag queens.

KaMani Sutra, who calls LaWhore her drag mother, slightly contradicts this: "I honestly do not believe in the system of the haus, if it is functioning out of very biological family traits and there is automatically a hierarchy." Her bond with LaWhore works differently. 

"LaWhore herself says, 'Please do not call me a mother; call me auntie," KaMani says. Bhenji believes "haus system or any drag relationship starts out as queer friendships."

On what a haus does, Karma says, “The haus system is essentially about creating a chosen family within the queer community. It brings people together through a shared love for drag. A haus gives emerging artists a sense of belonging, mentorship and support. We share knowledge, we help each other, develop our performances and create opportunities.” 

She is blunt about access due to the hierarchies in the performance industry. 

“A new artist cannot just come and go onto the stage and start performing. They need some sort of a forum. Through the haus it becomes easy, because I've already earned that claim, and any person who's coming through me has easy access to share the stage.” Her vision is wider than her own haus. “I want to create opportunities for upcoming artists and build spaces where queer talent isn't just included; it is celebrated.”

Bloody Kamina says that the drag scene itself – the entry fees, cover charge, and for performers, the attire, make-up and wigs – is a costly business and is made inaccessible for economically underprivileged and marginalised communities.

Karma calls it her next goal to bring in more people from marginalised communities into the scene. “That's my next target. There are a lot of people who have good talent but do not have that space, or are not financially stable. But the longing in their eyes, I can see that.” 

She says she wants to find Dalit queer people and create space for them.

Even within the drag community, drag kings, bio-queens/kings and androgynous performers are largely left out. While the haus system offers mentorship to new performers, Bloody Kamina had no fellow kings in the city to show him something as basic as making a moustache, and says bookings still mean “a lineup of four queens and one king as a token.” Vee, an AFAB performer, says friends assumed they would become a king because the idea of an AFAB queen “is not as commonly understood.”

Androgynous performers face the same gap. Joffrey and PawLean, who perform as The JawLeans, say the binary runs so deep. Even within the drag community, they say, understanding of androgynous performance is lacking. “We can be mascs, we can be femme, and we can be everything in between,” Joffrey says. “We are not defined by labels or constructs and we are the spectrum.”

Some performers are now building the structures they were denied. Haus of Bloody Kamina brings together drag kings, AFAB queens and Dalit performers, while Haus of Karma deliberately includes an AFAB queen, a gogo boy and an androgynous performer.

Traditionally, kuthu and therukoothu (which also featured drag and female impersonation) were performed by Dalit and other subaltern communities. Koothu, or Therukoothu, is a tamil folk art, which is a traditional street play which is also defined by energetic songs and beats. Interestingly, therukoothu also features female impersonation, though it’s not addressed as drag.

Vee argues that, when these were packaged as a “western concept or artform”, the marginalised communities were "conveniently omitted out of it”. 

Kooth Nights: Integrating drag with localised roots

On her first Kooth night in June this year, without knowing any of the South languages, Izzy pulled a performance with a storyline. 

The story goes like this: draped in a saree, Izzy enters the stage to the Tamil song Othayadi Pathayila, playing a woman caught between two lovers, unable to choose between them. Unable to decide, she brings the two together — making the two boys kiss — only to end up heartbroken herself. 

As the Kannada song Pyarge Agbitite plays, she performs the heartbreak, mourning the love she's lost. To the Malayalam song Moha Mundiri, she gives up on love altogether and walks to the bar, drowning her sorrows in a drink. The performance ends with the Kannada number Hubbaliya Sheharadaga, as she returns to being a very “sanskari” girl.

Izzy calls this her best performance yet. Despite not understanding the language, she listened to the songs on loop, day and night, to master lip-syncing — a skill central to any drag performance.

With her drag quirkiness, Izzy built a comic storyline of her own — much in the spirit of Maya, Izzy's drag grandmother, who started the concept of Kooth Nights.

Kooth Nights typically features South Indian upbeat kuthu songs, which are high-energy, fast-paced music of the folk and street dance genre that originated in South India.

When Maya started Kooth Night, she says she would try to weave a storyline into her performance. Maya, along with another drag queen, Lady Bai, who passed away earlier this year, started the concept in 2018 as a tribute to trans women. In pride marches, trans women are at the forefront, organising and dancing to powerful ‘kuthu’ beats on the frontline. 

“Trans women have never been given the chance to express themselves through dance, through art form. That is the reason why I created Kooth Night,” Maya says, “to honour them.” “We wanted to bring that joy, the joy of how trans women were performing during the Pride march.”

Now, Kitty Ko hosts Kooth Night in the last week of every month, which is almost a celebration for queer party-goers. 

"I remember, before the pandemic, travelling to Bangalore for shows. Whenever Maya was hosting, the audience would shout, asking when Kooth Night was happening. Kooth Night was huge even back then,” Bhenji says.

Maya undoubtedly is the pioneer of inculcating South Indian culture into contemporary drag. She remembers performing the Malayalam song Confusion Theerkkaname, back in the day, after which the audience told her that the song was so funny and it stuck with them. “That’s the whole point,” Maya says. 

Her curation of a “Tribute to Silk Smitha” night and her performance as Mayavally, a take on Nagavalli from the famous Mana Chitrataalu, are some of her iconic performances, as she notes.

Post-pandemic, Legendary Karma and Beyonce the Drag Queen took Kooth nights and South Indian drag performances to another level. Karma says drag was here before its Western form. “I think drag was there before the Westernised thing came up. You might see a person dressing as a female in a king's palace and performing. That is drag. And we should not forget those roots.” 

For Karma, getting Kooth Nights going meant fighting venues. “A lot of the clubs would say, ‘Only English or Bollywood.’ Beyonce and I had to literally fight with the organisers”. She credits Maya and Lady Bai with starting it, while saying she and Beyonce spread it. She adds that they took it to other cities. “The amount of travel that we did for Kooth Night, it has become a brand now, and we feel so nice about it.”

“Kuthu comes from our South Indian roots. Drag gives it a queer voice. Kooth Night is where culture, storytelling, and queer expression meet,” Karma sums it up. She says it is not just drag placed on top of a tradition. “It's about asking what happens when our culture and queer identities get to share the same stage. That's where the magic happens.”

Her drag daughter, Vee, brings this magic to the stage. In September, Vee performed at a show marking eight years since the Supreme Court read down Section 377, decriminalising consensual same-sex relations. At their first solo at Kitty Ko that night, Vee performed to the Tamil songs Chandralekha and Oru Nadhi Oru Pournami, and twerked to Thaalam Trip from the recent film DC. 

Raised in Chennai, Vee is fond of performing for the tamil songs she grew up listening to. “I am trying to not drop my culture to become appealing to the masses. There is always going to be a Tamil song (in her performances). If it's not going to fit the theme, I'm going to make something around that theme. So that's just me.”

What localised drag means for performers

Bloody Kamina says local songs can change a room. At a Pride Month show in a mall, the audience had come to shop, not for Pride.

"From a four-year-old kid to a 65-year-old uncle and auntie, they came on the stage and started dancing with me, because I played them local songs. I did Naatu Naatu... For them, it was pure entertainment."

Bhenji says local songs could be a way to take drag closer to audiences who are unaware of the art form. "People easily allow it if you feed them with information they've already known. Because then they feel safe." 

Karma goes back further, to Terukkuthu. "The men who dress up as a lady and go perform barefoot, with loud makeup and lots of flowers... We are born from that culture, and we should never let go of that culture."

Kareem, aka LaWhore, went to a gay bar for the first time in 2001 in the U.S. Since then, queer space has always included drag. In 2002, in New York City, she attended a queer South Asian party and watched South Asian trans and drag artists perform. “It was very familiar, and the place became more comfortable. I had felt a stark distinction between what was home and what was a nightclub. But drag in particular was a thing that suddenly made the nightclub feel like a home,” she says. 

The Bollywood songs from the 80s and 90s that were played at the party brought her closer to home too: “The songs we danced at weddings, that my parents would know, I had danced to in my high school.”

However, Kareem asks not to simply change English songs to South Indian songs. Kareem reflects on how drag and DJs in nightlife spaces shape taste, teaching people what to like and how to like it. She describes her own shift from mostly listening to Hindi music to discovering house music and Western pop, specifically Whitney Houston and Celine Dion, through watching drag performances at U.S. gay nightlife spaces, versus the Bollywood/Desi music at South Asian parties. 

A powerful drag performance would send them seeking out the song afterwards — showing how taste gets actively "managed and changed" within these spaces. The broader point she makes: nightlife programming shouldn't just default to serving a crowd's expected music (e.g., South Indian music for a South Indian crowd), but should expose people to many different expressions of beauty and artistry, while still reflecting and honouring the specific place/community. 

For Izzy, drag is a second persona. For Cologne Doll, it is a superhero costume for tackling what her everyday self cannot. For Jiya, it is a fantasy made real and a tool of empowerment. For Sylveria, it is a boost and a way to show her skills. For Bloody Kamina, it is a way to break the shackles, and for Lisa, it is survival. Each performer finds a different purpose in drag, but the haus and the kinship around it turn them into a community and a support system, united by the wish to bring local culture onto the stage.

The work is far from done. Lisa, still a teenager, curates her own drag brunches while being shut out of many queer spaces. Izzy works night shifts, which double as cover to slip away from her family. Karma calls bringing Dalit performers into the scene her "next target," and Bloody Kamina says he will champion a haus for them.

Beyond the community, a public that knows little about the art form still sees drag performers through the same stigma queer people have always faced. That is why Cologne Doll ends her shows with a message: "Take love and kindness seriously. Families are not just what we are born into; they are also what we make," a reminder of what chosen families mean for queer people.