With two premiere screenings planned for the upcoming Melbourne Queer Film Festival, 'Victorian Queens' - a documentary sharing the stories of drag queens in Naarm - redefines how we look at the concept of royalty.
Joseph Gardner and Andrew Cox’s documentary follows the four drag queens – Lady Diamond, Aysha Buffet, Zodiac and Art Simone – and the spaces they hold within the drag community in Naarm/Melbourne. Split into chapters that focus on each Queen, other queens are featured throughout the 45-minute documentary.
“We have four queens who each have a chapter within the short film,” says Gardner. “So, about 12-15 minutes each. Each of the queens has a primary interview, but we also have secondary and sometimes maybe even a third interview in a different location, and they’re sometimes backstage or sometimes they’re on the streets.
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“We have a few other characters around that we also interview more candidly in different street spaces, like Donny Piccolo and Stone Motherless Cold at Evie’s on Gertrude Street.”
Deciding who to focus on in the documentary wasn’t an easy process for Gardner and Cox, who narrowed down the final four queens from a large shortlist. It was an emphasis on diversity that made the final decision marginally easier.
“We had a long list right off the bat and it took a long time to whittle it down,” says Gardner. “Diversity really was an important thing for us, there were other factors that we calculated, and we reached out to those four queens and got them on board.”
And indeed, diversity is accounted for and revered. Each of the four queens that are featured in the documentary lean into different pockets of the broader community.
Lady Diamond is a bearded queen and a maternal figure for drag queens all around Melbourne: “We’ve Lady Diamond, who is the first queen,” says Cox. “She is basically like a housewife sort of persona, like a motherly figure, she goes to Bimbo’s. She performs and takes care of other queer community members and creates a safe space for them.”
“Lady Diamond is a bearded queen, which was really interesting for us, to have a look behind inspiration for that, and how Lady Diamond lives and expresses herself.”
The second queen interviewed is Aysha Buffet, a trans queen with Filipino lineage.
“Aysha Buffet is also another Melbourne local,” says Cox. “She’s also trans and is quite a large figurehead in the queer community, and especially the trans community as well. So, we wanted to follow her and learn more about her transition and how that plays into her drag.
“That was another part of the community, we really wanted to highlight a trans person as well. She is also Filipino, so she has a different cultural background and that also plays into her drag style and her story.”
Thirdly Art Simone, a drag queen who has been a contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race Down Under, draws attention to another element of the overarching drag community.
“Simone is the next queen, and she is more of a RuPaul’s girl,” says Cox. “She has obviously been on the season one and has a different pathway through the drag landscape.
“We wanted to show the difference between, say, a drag queen who has taken the RuPaul route as opposed to someone who hasn’t. To see the difference between opportunities and performing and perspective as well.”
The final queen to be featured is Zodiac, an Indigenous queen.
“We’ve also got Zodiac, who is the last queen who comes up in the documentary and is Indigenous – that’s a really big part of her story and drag style as well,” Cox says. “Indigenous queens play into a colonial Melbourne landscape. They have fascination nights for Indigenous queens, and we wanted to follow them and get a better insight into that community.”
Cox and Gardner are hoping this film will spotlight the abundance of amazing and talented drag queens and performers dispersed throughout Melbourne, whose stories remain untold.
“It’s a really vibrant drag scene,” says Gardner. “I think that people would probably be a bit surprised about the work that is going on, and perhaps aren’t aware of – that became pretty obvious to us throughout the project.
“We’ve certainly been lucky.”
Victorian Queens is playing at ACMI on Monday November 14 and on the Victorian Pride Centre rooftop on Friday November 18, as part of Melbourne Queer Film Festival. MQFF runs from November 10-21.
