My name is Mo B. Dick.
The B stands for Bodacious
I'm Maxxx Pleasure.
Sigi Moonlight.
Johnny Gentleman.
King Molasses
Also known as the sweetest and stickiest drag king you'll ever meet.
When I first saw Drag Kings perform, I remember being like
why hasn't nobody told me about this?
I was completely mesmerized, wondering why have I not done this before?
I got hooked right away --
--just being on that stage and having the light hit me
and I feel like I'm finally me.
I feel the fullness of myself when I'm in drag.
As drag kings, we're stepping out of the box
of who we were told we were allowed to be.
And people think it's only new now.
But it's not new.
I think the history of Drag Kings has been very much obscured.
It hasn't always been the way that we understand it today,
but it's always been there.
Drag is just the performance of gender.
The performance, the absence, the transformation of gender.
The majority of drag kings are AFAB performers: Assigned Female At Birth.
I do, however, know that there are AMAB performers who also perform drag kings
and also lots of trans performers.
It's about playing with masculine identities, masculine performativity.
Whether that's politicizing it, vulgarizing it
making it a farce, making it silly
You know, you can create this character, you can say whatever you want
you can do whatever you want and people laugh.
Whether it's clowning, striptease, dancing, singing.
I might do a monologue to music.
I draw a lot of inspiration from American rock stars.
I definitely am going for the bad boy with a heart of gold type of thing.
Can I say I'm a hoe on camera?
Is that cool?
I'm kind of a hoe when I perform.
That swag you get in the shower that like, nobody sees, it feels like that.
I am a Latin “papi,” which is like, a Latin sex symbol kind of guy.
It surprised me, like I even started incorporating like a lot of cultural elements into my drag.
Even the palm hat that I'm wearing now
a lot of men from where my mom's village in Nigeria, Eniwari
a lot of them wear like big wide, very present hats
and they walk with big, broad shoulders and drag takes me there.
Especially being a transmasculine, nonbinary, Latinx person.
I just want to make sure that every time I hit the stage that
there's somebody in the crowd, hopefully, that when they see me, they see themselves.
Performing femininity was something that I constantly felt like I was failing at.
It's funny that transforming and becoming an alter ego
is what allowed me to finally accept
and love myself for who I was.
And I started using they/them pronouns as Molasses
before I started using they/them pronouns for myself.
So it just has been this really rewarding experience where...
it's a way to navigate the world and make sense of things.
A lot of people don't know there's this long history of drag kings.
A Chinese scholar who has male impersonation dating back to the Tang Dynasty.
And so male impersonation in the Chinese opera started then.
Then it moved to the West.
There were pioneers like Annie Hindle, Vesta Tilley, Ella Wesner.
To our knowledge, the first indigenous male impersonator is Go-won-go Mohawk.
And she was in the early 1900s and she specifically wrote a play
because she did not like the way
indigenous people were depicted in theater.
During that time there were many females and lesbians
that were doing male impersonation
as a way of expressing themselves and to protest against what defines being a woman.
And then moving on into the 1920s, Gladys Bentley
came out as the forerunner in Harlem
dressing in men's attire, was a prolific performer.
Cross-dressing became illegal and it was a crime.
People that came out and did that were real true blue pioneers.
Like Stormé DeLarverie.
Someone who just epitomized what it meant to be Black
what it meant to be masculine, what it meant to be strong.
What it meant to be swaggy.
Male impersonators were more refined.
It wasn't drag in the sense of the comedic, camp element.
The first time we see “drag king” in print was in 1972.
It's “The Queen's Vernacular: A Gay Lexicon”.
And in that, it defines drag king,
So that was the first time that we have found that in print.
There was this huge, thriving scene in the 90s in New York City
in San Francisco, in London, in other parts of the world.
Drag, kings are growing and they're getting bigger and bigger but...
they still got a way to go when it comes to representation
within the cabaret and the drag industry as a whole.
RuPaul's Drag Race is so fantastic because so many drag queens
have become celebrities and pop culture figures
thanks to RuPaul's Drag Race.
That has not happened for drag kings yet.
We don't wear heels, but we give story, we give the drama, we give emotion
energy just like Queens do.
Because we're not in the mainstream, we don't have the same opportunities.
As an AFAB person, I've had producers tell me before,
that I was unsellable and that's why they didn't book me.
What I do want is for folks to acknowledge the power of misogyny.
We are usurping male power and privilege.
And that's still scary to people.
Our patriarchal society doesn't really take kindly to the idea
that masculinity and manhood is something that anyone can put on.
It's tiresome.
But the great news is that Drag Kings have been in other
reality television competition shows.
And won.
We've got the Hugo Girl in 2018 who won in New Zealand.
Landon Cider in 2019 who won Dragula.
Tenderoni in Chicago.
Who won in 2021.
I am hopeful.
I'm optimistic.
And in the meantime, we're not waiting.
This new generation of kings that are coming up in the scene in the last 5 to 10 years.
It's shaking up the scenes in a lot of different ways.
We're making our own platforms.
We're also taking up space in platforms that have
traditionally been dominated by by cis men.
All of us are starting a revolution to be seen
to fight for respect, because that's what we deserve.
I firmly believe that us drag kings will make our mark.
Like, we're kind of the coolest.
We've kind of always been the coolest because
we're kind of counterculture within a counterculture within a counterculture.
Like how punk is that?