Since March 2019, artist and archivist Rachel Rampleman has been creating the largest archive of digital drag performances in the United States and quite possibly the world. Called Life is Drag, the project currently features over 350 video portraits by 200+ drag artists. In vibrant color, the artists enter Rampleman’s spotlight, where she then records two performances and an interview with each subject. These all live on the Life is Drag website with the performers’ names, Venmos, Instagrams, locations, and bios.

Rampleman’s work has since taken her not just across New York City where she lives, but to Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and New England to record performers for the project. With Rampleman’s art background — she counts among her influences Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman, and Diane Arbus, as well as David Lynch and Tim Burton — the work became both an art project and an archive. A drag historian myself, we learned quickly just how much we have in common, most notably our shared passion for preserving the legacy of drag artists, especially in a time when the queer community faces new challenges from the incoming presidential administration. “I feel like everything I’d been doing before was preparation for this [project],” she says. “It was like a rehearsal for working with these drag artists who I consider it a privilege to know and to work with. I can’t imagine doing any other project that would feel more important or meaningful.”

At the “femme and queer led, independent multidisciplinary art space” SoMad in Manhattan, Rampleman will soon begin her latest residency, and her work will also take her to Nebraska with arts organization BFF Omaha later this year. I spoke to Rampleman about Life is Drag, building a drag archive, the totality of the drag art experience, and more.

Elyssa: In your work, you traverse, as you write, “gender, artifice and spectacle.” What drew you to these subjects?

Rachel: I trace it back to grad school at New York University. I moved here from Cincinnati, and I was trying to make art with a capital A and I didn’t really know what that was. I felt a lot of pressure and stress doing it at a place like NYU. I was lost in making all kinds of work, mostly print work and recontextualized appropriated work.

For my thesis, I eventually landed on doing a linear narrative, documentary-style video about my younger sister, Sarah, and her obsession and then brief relationship with Bret Michaels from [the band] Poison. I was a nerd, a late bloomer; she developed more quickly than I did, even though she was four years younger. I thought more about my adolescence–I dated a lot of musicians and hair metal guys. I remember being confused that these men were so misogynistic, but they dressed up the way women did, but then they treated women like shit. After that, I worked with the world’s first and only all-female Mötley Crüe tribute band. I saw that hair metal was drag, but I wasn’t really thinking about it in those terms yet. I was confused about that performance of gender and the complete spectacle of a Poison show. The most interesting thing for me to explore was people not playing by the rules. Then I ended up working with professional female bodybuilders.

Miss Malice — @missmalice.bk

Elyssa: How did you arrive at drag?

Rachel: I eventually found my way into drag through the DJ Ickarus, who helps produce Bushwig. They brought me in to shoot one of their projects. That’s where I met Untitled Queen. She inspired me to do Life is Drag, and she was the first drag artist I worked with. I’d never seen drag before I went to Bushwig for the first time in 2017. It was a life-altering, profoundly joyous moment. I remember being in that space, feeling that joy and collective energy, seeing the creativity and the beauty and all on a dime, no fucking budgets. I was really inspired. Coming from a visual art background, I was like, damn, I go see shit at Lincoln Center, at the Wooster Group, at the Met, at MoMA, and nothing moved me even close to the way Bushwig moved me. Especially seeing Untitled Queen perform. I started going to The Rosemont and Ickarus introduced me to her. I had preconceived notions of drag, like a lot of people do, that it’s usually a cisgender man dressing up like a woman and doing pageant queen kind of stuff. Before Bushwig, I didn’t know that kind of drag existed, that there was a range of drag.

Untitled Queen — @untitledqueen

Elyssa: What made you want to start doing Life is Drag?

Rachel: It’s so funny you should ask that, Elyssa, because I was reading your book [Glitter and Concrete: A Cultural History of Drag in New York City] and in the prologue you say you didn’t want these stories to get lost. I didn’t want these performances to get lost, or the stories. That’s why I interview the artists as well. I think drag is the most important art being made right now because it encompasses everything and it’s so inspiring. The project also shows me how quickly people could come and go and/or how quickly their drag personas could change. I think it’s very important that there be some documentation to preserve this work. I love the most experimental, arty, weird shit personally, but looking at that next to a pageant queen, or back to back, I think it’s inspiring to see the full range. Generally the goal has been to have as many people representing as many different kinds of drag from as many different backgrounds as possible.

I remember seeing the drag troupe Unforgivable Emotional Carnivore, which featured God Complex, Esther the Bipedal Entity, Pinwheel Pinwheel, and Menthol Menthol with guest artists. They would get together and basically do absurdist theater. They were coming at drag from theater, dance, writing, film and video backgrounds, all very well-informed about creativity and culture. You never knew what they were gonna bring. They would come up with a theme, and they’d workshop it, give it a title, and then they’d get on stage, and a lot of it was improvised. Seeing Unforgivable Emotional Carnivore made me feel what I wanted to feel when I’d go see the Wooster Group. They’re making incredible improvisatory theatre and they’re doing these amazing looks–the makeup, the costumes, the hair. The totality of it, like the Gesamtkunstwerk of it all, it’s like the total work of art drag. In your book you say, “It is my hope that the book provides a survey and serves as an introduction to these dynamic individuals and compels people to learn even more.” So if you just take out “book” and put in “archive,” in my artist statement, boom, we’re done. That’s why I do this work, too.

Arabella LaDessé — @arabella_thegoddess

Elyssa: What is your relationship to Life is Drag as both an artist and an archivist?

Rachel: I didn’t know I was an archivist at all, and I didn’t even after I’d worked with, I don’t know, 100 drag artists. It wasn’t until [drag historian] Joe Jeffreys said, you know you’re an archivist, right? At first I was like, no, I’m an artist. And then I was like, oh yeah, you can be both. It doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive.

For 13 years, I worked with an artist who inspired me to be an artist, Paul Pfeiffer. He was known for the video loop–in the 90s, he would go through frame by frame, and manipulate each image and then put that back together in ways that made them feel very uncanny. During my residency at The Cell I brought him over for a studio visit. He was saying, do you think it’s art to document other people’s art? I wasn’t just going to a show and recording secretly from the sidelines. I’m putting a lot of thought into how best to capture this performance for posterity. One of the hardest parts of the project is trying to keep it cohesive as a series. The framing is always this. The performers are hardly moving at all. It’s very challenging for a lot of people. I also try to keep it as simple as possible because I usually do at least, ideally, two takes of each one, just in case there’s something glitchy or you don’t see it happening in real life in the first take. Then I just fade from black, fade to black, and tweak the audio and the color. Otherwise, I don’t do any editing and leave it as much of a pure, raw document of the performance as possible.

Mike Hawk — @lovemikehawk

Elyssa: What has working on Life is Drag taught you about the artform?

Rachel: In my personal life, I realized, I’m getting up and doing drag every day, and then it made me think, wait, everybody is, whether you put on a religious robe or you do corporate drag. That’s what inspired Life is Drag, the “you’re born naked, and the rest is drag” kind of idea. The more self-actualized you are, the happier you are. The joy in the drag community, it’s like they’re self-actualized, and they inspire other people to potentially be more themselves or their better selves or their truer selves.

I think probably the part that’s affected my thinking about drag the most has been the interviews with the drag artists, because I have my set of questions I ask everybody, and one that elicits interesting responses, is, how do you define drag? There’s a range of answers: drag is political, drag is not political; drag is about gender, drag is not about gender. In a video I did with drag artist Klondyke, Klondyke says if you’re wearing a different shade of red lipstick and you call it drag, who am I to tell you it’s not? That kind of sums it up: pretty much everything could fall under the drag umbrella.

Jayden Jamison — @thegoldendragking

Elyssa: I read that you consider this project your life’s purpose. Why is that?

Rachel: I feel like everything I’d been doing before was preparation for this project. It was like a rehearsal for working with these drag artists who I consider it a privilege to know and to work with. I can’t imagine doing any other project that would feel more important or meaningful. In a perfect world, maybe a less capitalistic world where art was more appreciated, I would just do this full time, and I would go all around America, all around the world. That would check all my favorite boxes–I’m being creative, I’m being collaborative, I get to travel, and I really enjoy doing this project. Everybody I meet along the way is so fucking inspiring and strong and cool and funny and so generous and non judgmental. It’s just as good as it gets for me. Aside from just trying to document these incredible performances and get them on the internet for people around the world to see, I also do want it to be a way of helping to support these artists. All of these performances are for sale. I split everything 50/50 with the artist.

Queensiñera — @alltheloveyourqueenv

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