Queen

Filmmaker's note

I made this film after a friend, prominent New York City drag queen Thee Suburbia America, and I struck up a conversation after one of their performances in early 2018. We wanted to portray drag in a way that it hadn't since earlier queer cinematic classics like Jennie Livingston's iconic 1990 documentary 'Paris Is Burning'. In an era where iconic drag queens were buying ranches and leasing fracking rights to oil companies, what did it mean to be a big young black drag performer in rural places like Upstate New York?

I wrote a short script for my college thesis film based around the loose narrative of a teen discovering their father's roots as a drag performer. We wanted to make this film collaboratively, and for its core to draw you in just like a great performance might at a club. The film would be as much an expression of Suburbia's talent as a performer as it was a narrative of discovery. It had to rely on camera work and an atmospheric sense of place in a rural trailer park. It also had to draw the viewer closer in a slow cinema sense, not so heavily referencing the camp and gore of 'Pink Flamingos'.

Shot on Super 16mm, this film took six years to finish. While drag continued to increase in prominence in the public eye, we chose to depict a social and geographic landscape that is foreign to many iconic drag portrayals in the queer cinematic landscape of the 2010s and 2020s. We did reference early John Waters as well as experimental minimalist films about working-class characters in small communities like those of Kelly Reichardt.

In the end, it became Queen. It's a film about Suburbia's evocative home life with a teenager, as well as their explosive drag persona. Suburbia's story, while avant-garde, is a portrait of binaries. They are socioeconomic, environmental, racial, and gendered.