AUSTRALIAN FEMALE PERFORMERS OF MASCULINITY & DRAG KINGS 1980 to 2000
Performance Troupe: Natural Normans
Location: National
Australia Performance Period: 1980s to 1990s
Performance Type: Comedy Troupe
Biography: Coming soon
Performer: Imogen Kelly
Location: London, UK
Australia Performance Period: 1994 character development only
Performance Type: Drag
Role Notes:
The earliest currently located date for Mr Monster is 1994, based on Imogen Kelly’s retrospective testimony. The precise date of the first or subsequent Mr Monster performance cannot presently be established from independently verifiable contemporaneous sources.
Biography: Coming soon
Drag performer: Catherine Fitzgerald
Location: Adelaide, South Australia
Australia Performance Period: 1995
Performance Type: Cabaret Drag performer
Character name: Ben Dover
Biography:
Catherine Fitzgerald is an Australian actor, director, writer and arts practitioner whose career spans theatre, cabaret, film, television and queer performance.
Fitzgerald created the drag persona Ben Dover, developing a distinctive comic and theatrical performance of masculinity. Ben Dover subsequently expanded into Ben Dover and His Beautiful Boys, a group of drag performers whose work became part of Adelaide’s emerging drag-king and queer performance culture of the late 1990s.
Drag King: Lisa Kemball aka D- Vinyl
Location: Sydney, NSW
Australia Performance Period: 1999 to 2010
Performance Type: Drag King
Biography:
Lisa Kemball is an Australian drag king performer D-Vinyl and producer of Sydney’s drag-king scene in the late 1990s. In 1999, Kemball and DJ Kate Monroe founded Drag Kings Sydney (DKSY), a drag-king performance and competition event held at Sydney’s ARQ nightclub. DKSY helped establish a visible community for performers exploring masculinity through drag, comedy, music, character and live performance.
Kemball continued performing and participating in Australian queer performance culture through the 2000s, with surviving audiovisual material documenting aspects of the early drag-king scene and D-Vinyl’s work.
Drag King: Bumpy Favell aka Bumperbar
Location: Melbourne, Victoria
Australia Performance Period: 1999 to present
Performance Type: Drag King
Biography:
Bumpy Favell is an Australian writer, performer, musician, producer and drag king, best known as the founder of Melbourne’s King Victoria Drag Kings. Established with Tom Erge in 2000, King Victoria became a landmark queer performance and cabaret club, running weekly for more than a decade.
Favell also performed as Bumperbar, creating comic and theatrical performances of masculinity within Melbourne’s emerging drag-king scene. Their work has included cabaret, music, poetry, theatre, drag, performance and multimedia. In 2006, Favell wrote and produced Sex in the Studio, a drag-king theatre production at Gasworks Arts Park.
Beyond performance, Favell has worked as a playwright, dramaturg, director and cultural producer. They have also played an important archival role in preserving the history of Australian drag kings through the King Victoria collection, now held by the Australian Queer Archives.
Favell’s career spans more than three decades and connects Australian queer nightlife, drag, cabaret, theatre, music, writing and community performance.
