In the Clouds with Rose Butch, Drag Thing Extraordinaire

interviewed by jj rowan


Photo of a person sitting in a fluffy white cloud with a sky blue backdrop. Their knees are pulled up near their body and their elbows rest there, hands cradling their chin as they gaze dreamily into the distance. They wear white boots, beige fishnets, and a bold-patterned bell-sleeve dress in lime, orange, and yellow. There is a white beret atop their orange hair and their makeup is a cloudy blue sky across their eyes, face bright white and lips deep red. Photo credit: Jesse Ray McEachern @jesserayphotography

Let’s start with an introduction: would you tell us who “drag thing” Rose Butch is?

Rose Butch is a non-binary drag thing: drag thing is a term that I started using like eight years ago. My intro to drag was through drag king culture and for the first year or so that I was performing, I would call myself a drag king, but I was always a drag king named Rose. I knew that the drag I wanted to do was going to be non-binary, I just didn’t have the framework for that yet. So that’s more historically, but I think today Rose Butch is...honestly, dandyism is a big inspiration so a dandy in that they just enjoy opulence and pleasure for the sake of opulence and pleasure. They’re a little bit mischievous, like a clown. A little bit like a doll, a little bit sweet, but with an effervescence and an edge, hopefully. A little bit silly and kind of stupid sometimes. Basically, a channel for me to express all the playful theatricality that I want to explore.

Yes! Beautiful, thank you. I’ve been watching a lot of video and following what you do over the past year and it keeps occurring to me that there’s this really otherworldly or multi-worldly effect that Rose is creating, like multiple worlds existing at once. What does your process look like for creating performances, creating looks. Like where do you even start?

I am really fortunate in my drag community. Vancouver’s drag is incredible. I love the drag scene we have here. I’ve had the opportunity to travel a bit and see drag in other cities and I really love what we have going on here. The show I was basically born into, that I still perform with regularly, is a monthly show called Man Up. I think it turned 15 this year, which is amazing. It’s the longest running drag show in the city. It started as a drag king show, but now it’s multiple genders, all different kinds of performance, and every show has a theme. I love a theme! So that’s a really easy jumping off point for me. One of my favorite numbers I do, that I just revamped this year and I’m very happy with, is a tribute to the Japanese visual artist Yayoi Kusama, which was prompted by the theme of Art Party. It was like, pick an artist or a piece of art and pay tribute to it, so that was where my imagination started going. She takes on the idea of oblivion within this really playful pop art aesthetic, it’s so interesting. I’m also inspired by really textural spoken word lip syncs. Another one of my favorite numbers to perform is by Of Montreal – they have an album called Coquelicot Asleep in the Poppies, this surreal absurdist concept album with all these really strange characters and one track on it is just a minute and a half of spoken word I just committed to learning and brought my mime training into it and built the number around that. Another number I’ve recently started doing is this viral text from 2007 or 2008 when I was in high school that’s a dramatic reading of a breakup letter that’s really poorly written. That kind of stuff, anything from pop culture to absurdist stuff to just whatever fantasy I wanna play with. I’m really into clouds as a motif, like dreaminess.

This is my jam, especially the spoken word stuff. You're hitting on avant garde poetry stuff and I dig it.

Oh hell yeah. A lot of the spoken word I do is a little more tongue-in-cheek and I think the next step is to see if I can do stuff with a little more depth. But so far I just want to perform stuff I enjoy - another one is chatty musical theater numbers, hitting all of those acting marks is really fun for me.

We open on a person sitting in a diner booth looking off camera as the intro to “Kiss Me” by Sixpence None the Richer plays. They are dressed in a blue floral dress with puffed sleeves, white boots and gloves, pearl jewelry, and a white beret. They have a full face of white mime-like makeup with bold brows, lips, and eyes. As the camera gets closer, the person greets it with eye contact and a smile. The camera settles on a very close shot and we can see more style detail: small black hearts in the makeup, hair clips, and a nose ring. The vocals of “Kiss Me” come in and the person lip syncs, playing to the camera joyfully. After the first verse and chorus, the camera pulls in closer and closer on the person’s mouth to transition to the next scene.

The next verse opens on the same person against a black backdrop with a starry overlay. They are in frame from the shoulders up and as they continue to lip sync the camera slowly pulls back. The performance becomes more embodied, with the same joyful emotion as before. At the end of the next chorus, the view shifts to a shot from the chin up and the overlay changes to a series of colorful plastic balls falling in slow motion as the person falls backward to transition to the next scene.

During the instrumental interlude, the person continues falling backward into a color ball pit. The camera pans up and down to show their body partially buried in colorful plastic balls. They smile, shifting around. The camera pans down to find a face covered by their gloved hands. The head of the covered face is nestled in plastic balls and rests between two legs in fishnet tights. When the vocals start again, the hands pull back to reveal the same person’s face in full makeup, lip syncing. As they sing, the hands frame their face in slow movement and caressing. They sing most of the remainder of the song with occasional extreme close-ups on their eyes.

For the final line of the lyrics, we see another diner booth shot, this time in black and white. The person is now dressed in a plaid suit, wearing a beret and circular wire-framed glasses with the same face of makeup. They lip sync the final line to the camera with a more serious tone before standing up out of the booth and walking away as the video fades out.

Video Credits: produced by Queer Based Media and is an excerpt from a film made with The Darlings called The Queer and Compelling Case of the Darlings’ Demise

So many worlds! It seems like there are so many rooms in Rose, like if you’re in one mood, you can go in this room and be this or you’re in another mood you can go in this other one or if you’re in a bunch of moods you can go in the hallway…I love that there’s so much space in them for all this play and experimentation.

I love that, the different rooms. That’s perfect.

Photo of a person making eye contact with the camera. They wear a black and white striped top with a red bow tied at their neck, and a black beret over silvery chin-length wavy hair. Their drag makeup has a powdery blue base with graphic red lips and red hearts under the eyes, bold blue eyeshadow, and dramatic black brows and lashes. Their gaze is focused and serious, lips slightly parted.

You brought up miming a little bit – in your performances there’s so much incredible theatrical movement and clowning and miming influence in what you’re doing. Are you pulling a lot style-wise from those disciplines? Do you get inspired in clothing choices, makeup choices? I mean, obviously mime influence shows up in your makeup choices…

How all that came into my drag is my theater background. I went to school for theater and I graduated 10 years ago, so it’s been a while, but the classes I enjoyed the most were my physical theater classes. We learned everything from puppetry to mask work and miming, which is this specific French style of mime called Lecoq. My instructor would probably hate what I’m doing with the skills that I learned now. She was like “this is not a party trick” and I’m literally doing this at parties now. And she hated the stereotype of white-faced mine, but for me the white face is moreso a blank canvas. Obviously there’s the reference to mime and clowns, but for me it’s also a reference to Harlequin, and to French court, like Marie Antoinette, and also Japanese traditional theater…it has all these different references, but for me, it’s the blank canvas to start with. I definitely bring a lot of the mime and physical theater into my drag. How I love to express that in my body is finding the little detailed moments, the precision of creating an object in space that isn’t there and then dissolving it completely. Sometimes it’s not even something I intentionally do – it’s just a part of how I move when I’m in drag. It’s just part of my drag body now.

I’m also curious about kind of the other way around, when you’re envisioning the physicality of these performances – do the looks ever come first? The clothes, the makeup? Are those ever the launching pad for the movement? And if so, how does the look influence the movement?

My drag costuming has definitely changed a lot throughout the years, and my drag expression has changed so much also – kind of hand in hand with how I have changed in my personal life. Starting off, my drag was definitely more informed by king aesthetics. I would pretty much always wear flats or boots of some kind. I was binding and packing and had this barbershop mustache I liked to wear. But I found the mustache was inhibiting how I was lip-syncing because I was really concerned about it falling off. I took it off and started drawing it on, and then eventually stopped drawing it on. And as I got more comfortable with myself in my day-to-day life, I got more comfortable wearing dresses in drag – and that’s gonna be a different movement quality than wearing pants. Then I got top surgery, almost 6 years ago, so my movement is different now because of that, it’s less restricted. I’ve definitely found that I’ve become a more embodied performer after everything I’ve been through my life in the last 10 years but that’s moreso…I don’t know if that’s like costuming informing the movement and the structure, but most of the time my ideas will come from the music or whatever track I perform, and then that’ll inform what I look like, and that informs how I’m performing. I also have this drag character named Jeff Garbage…

Oh my gosh, I just came across this tonight somewhere in the deep caverns of Instagram. I would love to hear more about this.

Yeah, can I tell you about Jeff Garbage? I call him my shitposting drag king character. I think I started doing Jeff Garbage in late 2018 because I found I was taking myself too seriously. Rose Butch feels more like a high status character – they’re very precise and I’m very deliberate about the way I style myself in wanting to appear as perfect as possible. I found that’s really what I was falling into at the time and I was like, oh my god I just want to do something so stupid and so far removed from what I’m currently doing. So when you were talking about different worlds in different rooms I thought, oh yeah, there’s definitely a Jeff Garbage room.

Is it the basement?

Yeah, the basement or a back alley! And Jeff Garbage has pretty much one outfit and it’s this big suit that has shoulder pads that are made out of pool noodles, which is a suit that was built for – do you know the film Stop Making Sense? The Talking Heads concert film?

Yes ohhhhh ok i can totally picture it now!

I literally built this suit for a David Byrne number I was doing as Rose Butch and then when I started doing Jeff Garbage I was like, I want to have a body completely different from my body so I wear this huge suit that totally changes my physicality. I like to say Jeff Garbage is nonthreatening masculinity. It’s just dorky and like “Good job, buddy.” Most of the time people don’t recognize me when I’m in that drag persona, which is great.

Black and white photo of a person against an empty white backdrop, in a squat position with arms rested upon their knees, one arm hanging outward and one bent to rest against their cocked head. They wear a light tank top and dark denim shorts, revealing tattoos on their limbs,  and ruffled fabric footwear. Their short dark hair is in soft waves and their face is painted white with dramatic lips, eyes, and brows. Their face is serene, eyes closed. Photo credit: Marchel B Eang @mrchymrch.

Black and white photo of a person against an empty white backdrop. They stand, hip cocked, with a playful and casual expression toward the camera. They wear oversized lacy bunny ears, lace thigh-highs with dark bows, and pointed-toe, kitten-heel mules. Over a light shirt and dark briefs they wear an open, oversized layered hoodie, a small purse hanging from their bent arm. Photo credit: Marchel B Eang @mrchymrch.

Where Rose Butch, even in so many different iterations, is so recognizable!

I’d like to think so, thank you! So Jeff’s just a totally different thing, a costume and a character that just makes me want to move in a different way. Which is very different from how I would typically carry myself in drag.

This wasn’t even in my notes, I’m so glad we talked about Jeff Garbage! In another interview I saw you talk about Rose as an ongoing collaborative art project, which I really loved. Does Rose feel like a collaboration with yourself?

I feel like Rose has changed so much as I’ve been changing. Initially Rose was very much, and to a certain extent continues to be, a container for taking whatever gender expression or physical expression or costuming or whatever else I wanted to explore to the biggest degree. Like if I wanted to try wearing heels but didn’t want to do that in my day-to-day Rose Butch was the perfect container for that – or wearing more color or more patterns or dresses or skirts or a different makeup or hair or suits, all these different things, then I could do that safely. And that’s what I mean by ongoing: I always wanna be trying new things and it doesn’t always need to be related to gender. Although, as a trans person, I feel like it always kind of comes back to that one way or another, it’s kind of inescapable. But, yes, I think I’m always challenging myself to try new things, collaborating with myself, collaborating with others as well. Doing shows like Man Up where there’s a theme, a prompt, I feel like that’s a collaboration between me and the space and the show. And of course as a performer I get so much feedback from the audience. I feel like that is also a collaboration, we’re making this moment together that will never be the same ever again. There’s so much of an ephemeral quality to performing in nightlife and to live performance – you can see it on video, you can see it in different perspectives, from different cameras, but it’s never gonna be the same as it is in the room in that moment. So that’s like we’re building that experience together, if I can get really existential about it.

You absolutely can! Collaboration is such a big part of my creative life, too. And the more I do it, the more I see collaboration in almost everything that I do. You’re never really doing anything. by yourself.

Totally. And it’s all informed, we’re all influencing each other even if it’s not intentional, it’s always happening.

Photo of Rose Butch in motion against a black background. Their body is in a playful crouched position with arms up, hands framing their head with a gaze to the side. They wear a black and gold striped jumpsuit that reveals their bare tattooed chest and arms. There is a white ruff around their neck, white frills and yellow bows at their wrists, and a yellow and black pointed hat tied with a bow at their chin. Their clown makeup is bold with the appearance of dark tears running alongside their red smile. Photo credit: Jesse Ray McEachern @jesserayphotography

Talking collaboration, I was wondering if you could talk about The Darlings, too? When I was first getting to know your work you were getting ready for a big show that seemed like an incredible collaborative project and made me sad that I don’t live anywhere near Vancouver. Who are The Darlings?

Yeah! I would love to talk about The Darlings. I like to describe us as a non-binary experimental theater collective, but we’re also all drag artists. It’s four of us: me, Maiden China, PM, and Continental Breakfast and we’ve been working together for just over five years. We were all enjoying seeing each other perform around the city and were working together on a one-off photo shoot and came up with the idea that we wanted to make a drag show that didn’t follow the conventions of typical drag shows. I come from a theater background and PM comes from a dance background and we just wanted to make a drag show we didn’t see existed. We started off in this DIY warehouse venue and set up stages throughout the room. We did the show all the way through popping up at different parts of the room and bringing the audience around with us, just creating a different kind of experience that also fulfilled whatever artistic things we wanted to explore. So it was kind of for us and also to provide a different experience for audiences. That was our starting point. We did a bunch of really cool zoom and digital stuff over the last few years. But the project we were doing in June 2023 was through the Canada Council for the Arts. They were giving out these grants to reinvigorate the performing arts sector and we were really fortunate to get one for a hundred thousand dollars. We collaborated with this collective called Chimerik who specialize in projections and video, and we did this really ambitious show with holograms and motion tracking and live projection feeds and it was just incredible.

It seemed absolutely just bonkers amazing.

We will have a website with the show up in a couple months, I think. We work a lot with themes of nostalgia, chosen family, transness, queerness, and with dance and theater, with taking the conventions of drag and using them in a different way.

Okay total left turn but I’m curious what your big 3 signs are!

Okay yes! And I pulled Rose Butch’s birth chart also.

Oh my god. Oh my god.

So, me personally, Rae: I have a Pisces sun, Aquarius moon, and Cancer rising. Rose Butch is also a Pisces sun but a March Pisces and I’m a February Pisces. And then Aries moon and Libra rising.

I was curious if you see your big 3 signs show up in Rose, but I had no idea you would do Rose’s chart! How do you feel looking at it?

This is pretty good, it makes sense. I’m very happy that Rose is also a Pisces because I deeply relate to the kinda dreamy fluid sentimental vibe and also Pisces contains all of the signs and I feel like Rose contains multitudes…so yeah, I definitely vibe with that. Rose’s Aries moon I think was surprising to me. I really relate to having an Aquarius moon, I feel like sometimes I’m very contrary and that’s my Aquarius moon. And Rose’s Libra rising makes sense – I think Rose is a lot more social than Rae is and I see that in the Libra. Want to hear the rest?

Oh my god, yes.

Okay Rose’s Mercury is in Aquarius, which is the same as mine, and they have a Cap Venus and Leo Mars. I feel those are the important ones. I feel like so many performers are Libras, I feel like so many drag performers in Libra season are like, it’s my birthday! And I’m like, oh my god, of course it is. The Libra really makes sense.

The Libra stuff doesn’t surprise me. I also wanna talk about influences, whose work helped Rose come into being: who are your major drag influences? Fashion influences? Art crushes? What helped Rose blossom? …I just realized how cheesy that is.

No, it’s great. I love it. I was recently telling the story of the very first performer I saw that I felt like I was looking into a window to the future. It was a local performer who is retired now, a drag king named Tranapus Rex. There used to be this kind of alternative drag bar pageant in Vancouver and he won it. I remember watching a video of him performing – he’s transmasculine and had this super loud, very queer masculinity-in-drag expression and he was performing “Dancing On My Own” by Robyn in these shoulder pads with glittery tinsel on them and it was so inspiring, it was just incredible to see. So Tranapus Rex was definitely a huge one for me. If I hadn’t ever seen him perform either live or in this video, which still exists on the internet, I feel like it would have been a while before I realized I could do that. But I was definitely like, oh my god, this is lighting a fire inside of me. Also another local performer named Ponyboy who is the host and one of the founders of Man Up…seeing Ponyboy perform with this kind of faggy persona really just changed the way that I saw the possibilities of drag. I still love seeing Ponyboy and it is really cool to work together now. Those are my big local inspirations, and the other Darlings – I love seeing what they do and I think we all keep inspiring and influencing each other. Aesthetically, I am really into club kids as an influence. The 60s and 70s aesthetic as well. Claude Cahun as a reference point as well. Subversive queer art in general. Oh and Sasha Velour. Obsessed with Sasha Velour, obviously. I got to perform with Sasha in May 2023, which was incredible. On her book tour she was picking one local performer to showcase, interview, and do a duet with and I got to be the Vancouver rep, so that was amazing. Just a total dream come true. Traditional theater, too. Japanese Kabuki. My dad is Japanese and I don’t draw a lot on my cultural background in my drag, but a little bit here and there. Definitely inspired by pop culture, too.

Photo of a person with a bare tattooed chest wearing a pink baby bonnet with a large blue bow tied under their chin. They have a full face of cartoonish makeup in pink and blue with yellow stars above their eyes and black graphic detailing. They are frowning at the camera.

I’m talking with you for “the time travel issue” – we also run on themes. We’re thinking especially about queer futures and imagining this world for ourselves and each other. I’m curious what you think Rose’s future looks like? Where do you see you and Rose going together? What future do you think Rose dreams of?

There’s a line in my bio that Rose Butch has a style and sensibility that follows the pursuit of gender euphoria. I don’t know if there’s any one particular future I dream of, but that’s always the goal. As long as it feels good – because for a long time navigating gender was something that felt really bad. And now, getting to play within gender in the expansiveness of drag is what is helping me follow that pursuit of gender euphoria and it is such a pleasure and joy to be able to share that with other people, especially young people. It really makes me so happy that “drag thing” is a term that has picked up, that other performers really relate to it. I also have been enjoying being an instructor at a drag camp here locally.

Ohhh this is beautiful and adorable.

It’s this theater company that does theater for young audiences. They do a lot of different programming, whether it’s drama camp or improv or whatever for lots of different age groups, and last year they started offering a drag camp. I teach ages 12 to 17 and it’s just so very impactful. It’s exciting to be a part of it, especially working with young trans people and young non-binary people, being with them as they’re discovering that drag can be a way they can explore ways to feel good about themselves, to enjoy what they see when they look in the mirror and discover how they wanna perform and be onstage, the music and the costuming they want to connect with. It’s really something I love doing. And now my drag is turning 10 in March, so I would consider myself in certain areas to be a drag elder, especially to these young people. I’m never like, oh when I was your age we didn’t have this or that – I’m like when I was your age we didn’t have this or that AND it really makes me happy you do have this and I can be a part of making that. Because, oh my gosh, just imagine all the bullshit we wouldn’t have had to go through if we had these responses when we were younger!

I feel like, speaking as a queer non-binary elder, there is nothing more healing to me than getting to see younger generations of queer and non-binary and trans people have access to things we didn’t have access to. Seeing that ease brings me ease. 

Yeah, it’s really wonderful. I mean, the flip side of it is that, unfortunately, conservatives have decided drag is harmful, that all ages drag programming is harmful, and it’s absolutely not. I’ve been doing all ages drag programming for years and even up to last year no one batted an eye but in 2023 we had threats of protests and we did have some protesting for drag camps and some programming I’ve done and it really upsets me I have to go to a meeting about safety before we even have the camp, and we have to go to all these lengths to protect these kids. They’re worth protecting – we’re worth protecting – it’s definitely worth doing even though there is this cloud over it all. It’s just a distraction. I don’t live in America, but there are all these protests about trans people and drag when, you know, maybe gun control should be what we’re protesting. I feel like I’m totally going off on a tangent here but this is a part of it, so I dream of a future where we don’t have to deal with the bullshit and we can just thrive and enjoy ourselves.

Oh, I feel you. It’s easy to go off on those tangents right now.

It’s so present. It’s impossible to ignore.

It’s so good to see programming especially for young trans people, to see that enduring, to have people looking out for their safety and not shutting down out of fear. It’s so important for them to have access to that. To hear from elders. With that, we have jumped right into my last question: are there any closing words you have for blossoming drag things, or anything baby Rose Butch might have needed to hear?

Just enjoy yourself and have fun. Do it because you want to do it. And do it in the way you want to do it, not in the way you think you should do it or in the way you’re seeing other people do it. Because drag can be anything, which is the best part about drag. It can look like anything, and I think it’s one of the best and safest containers for expression and for art and for exploration because it can hold all of it. See where it takes you. Be kind to everybody. Be patient with yourself also because I feel like when some folks start drag they might have an idea of where they want to go, of what they want to be, and it might take a while to actually get there, to build the makeup skills, the performance skills, the costuming skills…all of that does take a while and so be patient and enjoy all of it, enjoy growing.