It was another act of hatred that spurred Mr. Bhutto to also weave his identity as a gay person into his art. On June 12, 2016, Omar Mateen, an American Muslim man, killed 49 people at a popular Orlando gay club. The tragedy, and unsubstantiated rumors that Mr. Mateen may have been a closeted gay man, opened up a rare mainstream discourse, both in United States and in the Muslim world, on queerness in Islam. It became clear to Mr. Bhutto that “people think you’re either queer or you’re Muslim, and that somehow those two things are in opposition to one another.”

During that period, Mr. Bhutto attended his first drag show. “If you aren’t used to it, it’s very impactful: the makeup, the costume, the performance, the songs,” he said. He first tried his hand at drag a few months later, at a local bar. Over time, he began building his performances around music and spoken-word sections that address his religion and cultural background — “which can be surprisingly jarring and political to the audience,” he said.

In the same vein, his mixed-media series “Mussalmaan Musclemen” aims for “interesting confusion for the viewer,” this time through the layering of cheap fabrics from Pakistan over beefcake photos from an Urdu translation of an exercise manual supposedly originally written by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“There are some misguided ideas about what Islam represents and the threat that Muslim men pose,” Mr. Bhutto explained. By combining homoerotic images of musclebound men with embroidered sections of flowery cloth, and by emphasizing the calligraphic Arabic script, he seeks to challenge assumptions about Muslim masculinity.