When asked recently to describe her trademark style, the drag performance artist Bianca Del Rio called it “erotic clown.”
“Basically,” she said, “I want the most unnatural look possible.”
It
was late on a Friday afternoon, and Ms. Del Rio, otherwise known as Roy
Haylock, was sitting in a dressing room in the Gramercy Theater on East
23rd Street, tending to her makeup and doing her hair.
She
wore a black zip-up hooded sweatshirt, a black Topman tank top and gray
Zara sweatpants (“Plug those,” she said, “so they’ll send me some
swag”). Underneath were four pairs of Capezio tights topped with
nude-colored fishnet stockings.
“I have to hide my candy,” said Ms. Del Rio, 39, last May’s winner of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” as she put the final touches on the night’s outfit.
She
plucked a pair of eyelashes the size of butterflies from a makeup table
in front of her, then began painting on her eyebrows. This required
four different colored pencils as well as heaps of glitter. After that,
she started in on her blond wig, which she spun and spiked and sculpted
and sprayed until it took on the shape of a Calatrava building, one that
could collapse and kill people at any moment.
By
the time she was done, the room smelled like a Florida retirement home,
and an ever-larger hole had been burned through the ozone layer.
On
the sixth season of “Drag Race,” Ms. Del Rio beat out 13 contestants
for the $100,000 grand prize (“$4 after taxes,” she said). Many looked
prettier in their dresses, many could kick their legs higher, and many
were better than she was at channeling the spirits of Beyoncé and Barbra
and Britney.
Her
competitors’ somewhat conventional approaches to the grand tradition of
men in dresses mirrored some past seasons, when winners like Tyra
Sanchez and BeBe Zahara Benet strode to victory not by lampooning
womanhood — and divadom — but by approximating it.
Ms.
Del Rio, according to one of the show’s executive producers, Randy
Barbato, succeeded precisely because she went the opposite route.
“It
sometimes feels like drag has evolved into something polished and
P.C.,” Mr. Barbato said. “Bianca reminds people that it should also be
funny and dangerous and challenging.”
And Ms. Del Rio is reaching a much bigger fan base as a result.
After
20 years of scrounging around in relative obscurity, first designing
costumes for shows in New Orleans (where she’s from) and then doing
small-time gigs in the club XL in New York (she moved here about a
decade ago and now rents a $2,000-a-month apartment in Hell’s Kitchen
that’s “the size of a closet”), Ms. Del Rio has become an in-demand
celebrity on the global gay scene.
She
hosts nightclub openings in cities as far away as London and performs
her cabaret act at nearly sold-out spaces all over the United States.
There she hurls insults at her surprisingly diverse audience, which
regards her as a kind of Joan Rivers in drag and embraces her
undiscriminating discriminations.
“People line up to be offended,” the drag performer Lady Bunny said in an interview. “They cheer.”
Certainly,
that was what they did on that Friday afternoon as Ms. Del Rio began
her victory lap with the start of her “Rolodex of Hate” tour.
Ms. Del Rio slipped into a black velvet dress and headed out front to do meet-and-greets with a long line of ticketholders.
One
man in his 20s was of Lebanese descent and came from Salt Lake City.
Another was from Recife, Brazil, and promptly asked why the tour was not
headed there.
“You
get me a gig in your rain forest and I’m ready to go,” Ms. Del Rio
replied. “Did you actually come here for this? You are insane.”
As
the man walked away with an autograph, Ms. Del Rio moved on to a pair
of 40-something lesbians from D.C. and a woman in her 20s from New
Jersey.
“It’s all right,” Ms. Del Rio said, referring to the Garden State. “We all have things we’re ashamed of.” (The woman laughed.)
Around
7 p.m., having just about worn out the Sharpie being used to sign
nearly 100 people’s merchandise, Ms. Del Rio headed back to the dressing
room, changed into a red sequined gown (think: Ronald McDonald by way
of “Dynasty”) and headed upstairs to begin her set.
The
content was unrepentantly filthy and included a monologue about having
had an affair with her uncle while she was still a minor (“I had many
good years with that man”), a shout-out to a black drag queen who had
shown her the ropes early on (“the Toni Morrison of her day”) and one
very politically incorrect joke about Asians that she refused to
apologize for when people in the audience actually booed. (“I can say
that,” Ms. Del Rio said. “My hair’s from China.”)
The
show ended around 8 p.m., and Ms. Del Rio again retired to her dressing
room. This time, she got pensive, almost philosophical.
There
had been several jokes at her parents’ expense, but Ms. Del Rio did not
seem worried about offending them when the show hits her hometown this
month.
“I’m their star child,” she said. “The tides change.”
With
much of the tour selling out, might she consider hiring a makeup artist
so she can sit back and relax before going on stage?
“No,”
she said. “It sounds grand, but really it’s awful. It’s like having S*X with the lights off and then you turn them on after and go: ‘Aaah!
That’s not what I wanted.’ ” (Ms. Del Rio, for the record, is single.)
She
took a pair of pantyhose from her duffel bag, dabbed on some rubbing
alcohol and began removing the smudges from her fingernails.
Her iPhone was buzzing with text messages from friends, including one from Courtney Act, Ms. Del Rio’s runner-up on “Drag Race.”
It read, “I hope you break both your legs and wind up in the E.R.”
“Perfect,” Ms. Del Rio said.
Waiting on the other side of the door were the drag performers Sherry Vine and Joey Arias, who came to offer congratulations.
Ms.
Arias has not been always been a fan of “Drag Race,” saying that it is
too dominated by people impersonating Britney Spears and Madonna.
But
she said she began watching it again last season because of Ms. Del
Rio, whose victory, she believed, was a shot across the bow, an
indication that drag may be about to get more interesting and more
outrageous again.
“She
pushed herself way out there in a way that’s different,” Ms. Arias
said. “She’s fast and alert and not politically correct. If she was a
boy, it wouldn’t work, but she’s so alien looking, so out there, that
you’re hypnotized. It all just comes together. I love her.”
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