At the time I began this post (three months ago - shame on me) the drag artist known as the Waka Shame was part of Black Haus, a collective of horror & fantasy oriented Orlando Drag Queens led by Dragula Season 2 champion Victoria Elizabeth Black. Now it appears the name "Black" has been dropped from Waka's profile and they are instead citing "Hell House". So perhaps the pervasive tensions of 2020 did not leave this family of haunts unscathed.

I am a huge fan of all of the Blacks and having Dollya's Season 3 showcase on Dragula follow Victoria's Season 2, kept me committed despite finding one or two of the other contestants intolerable.

So out of that huge haus of drag fantasy talent, why Waka Shame?

More so than any other in this extra-talented and visionary drag family, Waka Shame's carefully constructed looks merge glamour with a unique, under-worldly nature-spirit fantasy and to be honest, more than any other queen, Waka Shame inspires the type of drag I aspire too...because drag has the potential to be so much more than just lip-syncing at the gay bar and a rolodex of slick reads.

Drag itself is a form of practicing the witchy craft of glamour magick, and glamour magick, when practiced with the sort of mindful vigilance that every successful drag queen must employ, can be an enormous source of occult power and personal transformation. The art of glamour-magick is a craft of illusion, of creating segues into hidden realms where the boundary between what is earthly and what is illusory is thin and penetrable. This is the realm of faeries and forest haunts, cave-dwellers and creatures of the night - thus what could a more perfect companion to a drag queen - another sort of creature of the night?

Waka Shame's drag art form gives faces to faeries, pixies, elves and other legendary creatures. The detailing in the costumes and props inspires me to imagine that somewhere in the forests on the edge of Orlando (and all over the World) these faeries, pixies, elves and other legendary creatures are planning a drag show of their own.....