3/20/2024 0 Comments Divine drag queen donald trumpSome people are pretty twinks, and they’re like, ‘Ooh! Lip gloss! Look, I’m a female!’ It wasn’t that way for me.” “A lot of people looked a mess, but it wasn’t even easy to attain that mess for me. “For some reason, I thought it would be easy, but no, not so much,” he says. When he moved to San Francisco and saw a few drag shows, he decided to try it out. (Christina Campbell)Īfter years of drawing and painting, Gomez turned his brush away from the canvas and toward his own face. (Outside of drag, Gomez is a freelance designer and illustrator, and teaches fashion illustration at San Francisco City College.) Comic books and cosplay are major inspirations for Trangela Lansbury’s drag. I still escape into drawing and painting constantly.”Īs he tells me this, his hands are feverishly at work, painting a cardboard mask for an upcoming performance. “When the kids didn’t want to play with me because I was gay, I would just draw and paint. That was relatable content for me.”Īnother way Gomez coped with his surroundings was by making art of his own. Basically, it’s about not being treated as well just because you’re born different. “Professor X is supposed to be kind of like Martin Luther King, Jr., and Magneto is supposed to be kind of like Malcolm X. “Besides them being hella colorful, it’s a civil rights allegory,” he continues. “Daly City was never an understanding place for me,” he says. Comic books were how he discovered himself and his queerness. He grew up in an “overprotective” Mexican, Catholic home in Daly City, and, as a young boy, he remembers feeling isolated and lonely. Like the last few minutes of a thriller, it’s hard to know what twist or turn Lansbury will serve up next.Įmbracing being different didn’t always come easily for Gomez, though. One night, she’s a seductive Mystique, the next she’s a bald Professor X, then a sea monster, or Sailor Venus or a piece of Warhol pop art. (A comic strip one, maybe.) Instead, her superpowers are expectation-busting and shape-shifting. Trangela Lansbury doesn’t fit into a mainstream box. Drag queen Trangela Lansbury embraces her beard as part of her gender-bending look. Then there are the comedy queens, the artsy queens and the crafty queens. And unlike most drag queens, she rocks a full beard, covered in colored glitter.Īs RuPaul’s Drag Race pushes drag further into the mainstream, fans have come to expect certain drag archetypes: there are the old-school, big-haired pageant girls and the “fishy” queens dedicated to looking as womanly as possible. Her face is beat for the gods (translation for heterosexuals: her makeup is so impeccable, it’s divine). Creo Noveno/KQEDĪs Gomez pours me homemade lemonade-laced with lavender to ease anxiety-into a Wonder Woman mug, I gaze up at the kitchen ceiling and find another unexpected hero gazing down at me: it’s a huge portrait of Gomez’ drag alter ego, Trangela Lansbury, whose latex catsuits would make her a natural fit for the X-Men universe. It’s pop culture sensory overload at its best. And Björk and Marilyn Monroe crash the party, too. A dying Captain Planet and a skeletal Gaia make a startling cameo. The walls are splashed with bright, radioactive colors and covered with posters of Storm, Rogue and company saving the world (or just kicking it poolside). Stepping into Diego Gomez’s Tenderloin apartment feels like being painted into the pages of an X-Men comic. Editor’s Note: The Changing Face of Drag is a five-part KQED Arts series spotlighting innovative performers pushing the boundaries of drag in the Bay Area.
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