Queer Street
A zine for the off-screen queen.
In 2009, RuPaul's Drag Race brought together a community of queer people that had rarely seen themselves positively represented. Flash forward to 2018, RuPaul did an interview with The Guardian, explaining that he felt as though drag was only a political statement if it were cisgender men performing.
Drag is an artform that at its core, aims to blur the expectations of gender. Why shouldn’t all queer people be able to unite under the umbrella of drag? In an attempt to disprove RuPaul's constrained idea of what constitutes a drag queen, this magazine explores the non-conventional beauty of local drag queens, that you may not see on the show. I interviewed three queens from Toronto, and directed personalized shoots for each one.
Photography by Madeline Benevides, styling by Tanner Wur-Lucko.
The visual direction is inspired by the punk era, a time of rebellion, art, and pushing against censorship. The portraits are centred around the theme of tea parties, signifying the term "spilling tea." This was a phrase originated from the black drag community, meaning gossiping or sharing intel. Since this magazine was a critique of mainstream drag culture, the tea set was intentionally broken and cracked.
To compliment this broken aesthetic, the body paragraphs, titles, pull quotes, and images were skewed on different angles, as well as given different shapes and "cracks."
I chose a different typeface for each queen, in order to compliment their personality and the story that they had to tell. Each section had an introductory spread as shown below, to really set the scene and tone for each queen.
Between the articles, I used quotes from RuPaul's 1995 autobiography entitled, Lettin' It All Hang Out to show the contradictory nature of his preaching. The accent colour in each spread is used to foreshadow the following feature.
