Blow Dryers, Brunch, and Best Friends: Drag Houses Are Communal Living at Its Best

In this excerpt from the forthcoming anthology Living, Together: Reimagining Community in the Age of Disconnection, contributor Jake Montano, a.k.a. the Bay Area drag queen Imelda Glucose, reflects on drag houses as a form of chosen family.

I was nine years old the first time I applied makeup to my face. It was rouge that my older sister, who was barely a teen, had somehow gotten ahold of. I was used to hanging out together in her room, secretly getting lost in the dreamy eyes of celebrities ripped from pages of Teen Vogue she had emblazoned on her walls. But, on this day, she wasn't home and I'd been lured into her room by a new gold-foiled stick of makeup sitting on her dresser. Looking in the mirror, I applied the lipstick with amateur enthusiasm while Mandy Moore’s “Candy” played from a compact disc. Mouthing the lyrics, I pranced and swayed, revealing the suppleness of my left shoulder as I pulled the collar of my crewneck to the side — maganda. I imagined myself as a Filipina damsel, like I’d seen in telenovelas: beautiful, mysterious, but captive. This was a special episode in the programming of my preadolescent life. And it was a short one, because without even being seen or reprimanded, I knew the pigment had to come off before I left the room. I’d watched more than enough TV to understand what happened to boys who wore girls’ things. I savagely rubbed the makeup off and joined my family downstairs.

Now, I tend to think about things other than the terror of getting caught. I consider whether I should redraw the liner to make my lips comically fuller, or leave them thinner for earnestness if I’m going to perform an Adele or Tracy Chapman banger. Sometimes I fantasize about what it would be like to get “into face,” which is what we drag artists call getting ready, with my sister, who is now a mom and barely has time to do her own makeup, or with my mom, who has never really worn any. As I trace the contours of my lips with gloss or glitter, I picture how it will catch the light better on stage later. Applying the finishing touches of blush and setting spray to keep everything in place for as long as possible, I mull over logistical details: how to get from my apartment to the door of the car. How I should greet the driver with my va-va-voom hair and extravagant costume so he doesn't drive off immediately. What route we’re taking and where I'm getting dropped off. And most importantly, what blunt object to bring for self-defense should the need arise. I am in my tenth year as drag queen Imelda Glucose, a disco diva with a penchant for props and body contour dresses, and I’ve come to learn a few things about what the world thinks of people like me.

Francis Li

Drag is enjoying a moment in the spotlight, helped in no small part by pop culture phenomena like RuPaul’s Drag Race, Tyler Perry's Medea films, and Chappell Roan. It isn’t uncommon nowadays to find it on big marquees or as a passing reference during watercooler conversations. Although drag has always been around in some form or another, it has reached a zenith in its visibility and snackability, especially among non-queer audiences. And yet, despite all this, the number of hate crimes against queer people has climbed in recent years. We've seen the proliferation of hundreds upon hundreds of anti-trans and anti-drag bills, some from cities once known to be meccas of refuge for queer people. Psychology Today recently reported that nearly half of queer-identified teens are estranged from at least one member of their families, and that queer-identified adults are more than twice as likely to choose distance from their immediate families due to worries about or lived experiences of rejection. Drag might be increasingly prolific in the pop culture vernacular, but violence still persists for many of us.

Back in the 1970s, in response to this violence and shame, mass migrations of queer and trans people fled the suburbs and rural parts of America for major cities like New York, Chicago, or Philadelphia where they went on to form social groups of their own. First motivated by affinity or attraction, the newfound proximity to other queer folks also produced conditions for different varieties of relationships, both platonic and romantic. These chosen families acted as support systems for elders to share wisdoms and practical knowledge around expression, health, and sex with younger queers, and were fertile grounds for creativity and collaboration. They came to be known as “houses,” a cheeky reference to and subversion of the Western notion of the nuclear family, and have gone on to become the foundation of how drag and trans identity manifest today. Houses have their own mothers and fathers, with no commitment to norms of gender. These roles are instead built around dynamics of care or mentorship, especially for trans and non-binary people traversing the vastness of their own inner worlds of identity alongside an outer world of legal documentation, gender-affirming procedures, and social mores.

My drag family members, Pei Pei Ma’Bilz, Panda Dulce, Saigon Dion, and April Mei Joon left my apartment hours ago, although scents of bacon and hair spray still waft through my kitchen. We gather like this, over food, wigs, and stories, at least once every couple of months. During today’s brunch, we reviewed our slate of recent and approaching gigs, including our fifteenth-year anniversary show, and enjoyed catching up on each other’s personal lives. We also devised strategies for me to compete in an upcoming pageant called Runway (presented by the GLBTQIA+ Asian-Pacific Alliance), which is one of the largest drag events in our community. We daydreamed and schemed: What concepts make sense for the fantasy talent showcase? Who can be called upon to help style wigs? Who knows how to sew? What other houses are competing?

Our house, called the Rice Rockettes, is headed by our matriarch, Estée Longah, who cofounded the troupe in 2009. Since I asked Estée to be my coach and handler backstage on the day of the pageant, she has lingered at my apartment to study sketches of dresses and storyboards I’ve made. We are piecing together our strategy and running through hard-hitting questions we expect I’ll be asked during the interview portion of the show, while she revisits the early days of our drag family.

Houses came about at a time when “queer people were denied by their families and kicked out of their homes,” Estée tells me. The Rice Rockettes, among the oldest all-Asian and Pacific Islander (AAPI) drag troupes in America, formed to unite the AAPI drag community in the Bay Area. According to Estée, “There weren't very many Asian drag queens in any place around the Bay that you could find. You could count them all on one hand.”

Before 2009, drag lacked most of its name recognition outside of people like RuPaul, Divine, or Mrs. Doubtfire. Even in San Francisco, which features one of the oldest Chinatowns in the world and one of the most diverse populations of the Asian diaspora, it was uncommon to encounter queer and AAPI people in public places.

Courtesy of the author

Across queer nightlife in the city, one of the few enclaves of Asianness could be found at the now-closed N’Touch Bar on Polk Street, where you might have run into Tita Aida (“Auntie AIDS” in Tagalog). A health educator, organizer, and activist, she ran HIV/AIDS services and community programs for queer and trans locals at the Asian & Pacific Islander Wellness Center, now the San Francisco Community Health Center, and was the host of a weekly drag show at N’Touch that incorporated community outreach. The show was often headlined by the Rice Girls, a CDC-funded, Tita Aida-led collective of queer and trans health educators who donned drag and danced as they offered strategies for better and safer sex, then performed renditions of songs by the Spice Girls. Estée was a newer drag queen at the time, and Tita Aida took her under her wing as performer and organizer, becoming her drag mother. When CDC funding ended for the Rice Girls, Estée applied her experience to forming the Rice Rockettes.

This group has been a family to me since I moved to the city from Orange County, leaving behind a past of severe closetedness. They guided and encouraged me as I learned to embody my queerness and flamboyance, and rediscovered my Filipinoness, in the streets of a new city. Through them, I conjured Imelda Glucose. Ever since my debut in drag, Estée has been both a mentor and friend — and I’m one of many who have benefited from her tutelage and experience in community health, queerness, and drag pageants.

Drag pageants first took place in the 1960s, but they have roots and inspiration in beauty pageants dating as far back as the mid-1800s. They don’t play a major role in every drag queen’s life, but they are major events for everyone involved in them. Highly competitive, even cutthroat, pageants have multiple categories — talent, formal wear, interview — and contestants vying to win them and other distinctions like “Miss Congeniality.” They’re flamboyant, glamorous, and sometimes campy events of pomp and circumstance that can be satirical and exultant of identity politics in the same stride. In Black and brown cities across the South and East Coast, more culturally rooted variations, called balls, began to form. As balls became entrenched in neighborhoods that also experienced racialized disinvestment and persistent housing crises, older competitors extended creative mentorship to younger competitors, as well as rooms in their homes, establishing the house system and the modern ballroom scene. With visions of something more, these intergenerational homes became a creative nucleus, conjuring new forms of queer expression from voguing (a stylized and surrealist modern house dance) to reading (a form of playful and witty insult comedy) to contouring (using makeup to enhance light and shade on the face). Such innovations have further distinguished ballroom from pageants and influenced non-queer mainstream culture globally.

The Rice Rockettes exist more in the world of pageants, nightlife, and cultural community than in balls. Our group of a dozen or so active Rockettes — and just as many retired members spanning six generations — is a drag troupe, and for many of us, our chosen family. The name Rice Rockettes is a familial catchall for the many lineages that make up our group. Like other families, individual Rockettes have defined dynamics that connect us to one another: drag mothers and fathers, daughters, aunties, and big sisters. Mothers choose their daughters and act as mentors, friends, or parental stand-ins as new members acclimate. Some retired Rockettes continue to play vital roles, providing safety, wayfinding, and tech support for events. Many other Rockettes who have retired from drag and regular participation still join us as audience members, collaborators, and close friends, turning gatherings into mini reunions.

Chosen family like I’ve developed within the Rice Rockettes plays a critical role in addressing and remedying experiences of homophobia or microaggressions. As brunch turns into happy hour in my apartment, Estée and I sip mimosas, and she recounts times when the Rice Rockettes were mocked and called “he-shes” as they walked down the famously gay Castro Street. But she says, overall, she has felt safe — and when members of her community are sometimes targeted for violence, the Rice Rockettes are always there for each other. I was lucky to have them earlier this year.

June, otherwise known as Pride Month, is a busy season of gigs and gatherings for drag artists. It is also when the veil between genders thins to its finest for many of us, who daywalk with leftover eyeliner from the previous night's gig as we balance tight turnarounds between corporate parties, club events, parades, and our nine-to-five jobs. In celebration of the season, I was wearing flashy jewelry to my job running after school programs at a local museum and piled my long hair into a loose bun as an ode to my gender-bending. This caught the attention of two homophobes garbed in oversize cargo pants at the bus stop near my house. Over and over, they called me “faggot” as they backed me into a concrete wall. They closed in on me, but almost as quickly as the incident started, it ended when they noticed the presence of nearby safety patrol officers, who watched but never intervened. My attackers fled the scene after a final spew of epithets and left me silenced, in tears.

The experience almost claimed my life in the weeks after. I spent most of my time in bed as the memory of my assailants' faces and vitriolic words revisited me against my will. I felt little consolation from my birth family, who misunderstood the incident and my experience, chalking it up to a lack of situational awareness on my part and as just another one of those things that happens in the world we live in. It was a reminder text from Estée and my drag auntie Chi Chi, another cofounder of the Rice Rockettes, that disrupted the loop I had gotten lost in. The message sent the logistics for a rehearsal we had agreed to weeks before, in preparation for a theatrical production around queer narratives we were set to do the following weekend. Estée and Chi Chi had offered me the space to step back and focus on my recovery, but I felt it would be detrimental to the production if our piece, which was the only vignette that involved drag, did not come to fruition.

It was soothing to be in the presence of close friends and healthy to occupy a headspace outside of my trauma. The piece we were featured in had Estée cast as my mother, in drag, and me, out of drag, playing the semi-autobiographical role of the playwright as he navigated the awkwardness and toil of coming out to her as HIV-positive. It allowed each of us to relay and explore the layers of our own relationships with biological families and to reframe them through the dramatization. I often cried after rehearsals, unsure of what was inspiring the tears, between the piece and flashbacks of my recent hardships. It felt safe and therapeutic to bring my personal inflections to the story, which our director Chi Chi encouraged. When we debuted the following weekend, many of the Rockettes attended, furthering the feeling of being supported by a family who saw not only my pain but also me and my art.

Gabriela Hasbun

Part of the magic of a drag house, or a chosen family, is the way they offer us the opportunity to bring vital aspects of our identities and daily lives — for us, our queerness — out of invisibility or otherness to the surface, conjuring celebration and activity around them. They may lack definition by blood or marriage, but chosen families make up for it with emotional safety and shared values. Queerness itself evokes infinity, and having a collective identity that is built around expressing, reclaiming, and reinventing it has a healing factor in a world that so readily shames or erases us.

Across years and moments of hangouts and gigs, every Rockette has opened up about the dynamics of our birth families. About the silence that can fall between a mother and child after coming out. About the holiday gatherings that trigger deep-seated anguish or alienation. About the years of work and repair that get you to another side with more acceptance and understanding. About the familiar silence that shows up again when you come out a second time as a drag queen, with all of society's mudslinging projected on to you. While revisiting some of these memories, I disclose to Estée how disappointed I feel that my family does not seem interested in attending the pageant, or in anything I do related to my longtime work and life as a drag queen and community organizer.

Estée holds my hand firmly: “Oh honey, we should be so lucky to have birth families who care to know us like that.” A hard truth in the form of a bitter pill, and the only salve is knowing that Estée understands what this feeling is like. “I don't have a relationship with my family,” she reminds me. “The Rice Rockettes are more my family than my actual relatives are anymore.”

I point out a cloak I sketched in my notebook and ask Estée which Rockette she thinks could help me construct an absurd but potentially stunning garment for one of the pageant looks I’m planning — a monarch caterpillar that hearkens back to the Victorian style of a 1920s socialite. Without hesitation, she quips, “Your mother.”

When the Rice Rockettes met me, I was out of the closet but yet to relish my authenticity and flamboyance. Discovering them and the way they merged their identities with their art was transformational, and instantly, I wanted to try it for myself. When I joined my drag family, I chose the name Imelda Glucose as a way to reconnect with my Filipino heritage and effeminate nature, and as a personal reclamation after years of feeling diminished because of these traits.

On the day of the pageant, performers are called backstage and Estée grabs my hands for a final calming circle between the two of us. Calming circles are a Rice Rockettes ritual before every performance, and I revel in this moment of solace. We take deep breaths, and she reminds me to find my joy and my voice out on the stage. I couldn’t have grown in my expression and identity without Imelda, and Imelda wouldn’t be the queen she is without family like Estée, or other Rice Rockettes members like Doncha, Vermicelli, and Kristi. As the house lights go down and music floods the room, I channel each of them and the myriad ways they’ve inspired, taught, comforted, and loved me.

This is my tenth year as Imelda Glucose, and I feel so much more ready to take on the world than when I began. And no matter what happens, I know I’ll be okay: I’m a Rice Rockette.

Living, Together: Reimagining Community in the Age of Disconnection is out July 14.

Excerpted from Living, Together: Reimagining Community in the Age of Disconnection edited by Samantha Paige Rosen (Beacon Press, 2026). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.

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