Conchita Wurst

Conchita Wurst, Austrian winner of the Eurovision Song Contest 2014, laughs a throaty laugh when asked what has changed for her since winning Europe's biggest entertainment contest nearly a year ago. "I'm living my dream," she said. "Everything fell into the right place for me."

(AP Photo/Ronald Zak)

Editor's note: One of the subjects of this article, Hanniel Sindelar, uses the pronouns "they/them." Read more about non-binary pronouns here.

Since coming out as non-binary, Harrisburg-based performer Hanniel Sindelar has taken their zeal for exploring the tensions and boundaries of gender and identity to a different kind of theatre: drag.

Sindelar started acting in high school and enjoyed playing with identity. But how well they performed their role as an actress was scrutinized. "When I did theatre," says Sindelar, "I had friends who were gay -- although they weren't out because this was 10 years ago. ... I always felt like I wasn't gay enough or gay in the same way that they were."

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Even in a liberating environment such as New York City, where Sindelar left their home in Saint Mary's County, Md., to attend the American Musical and Dramatic Academy, the pressure to conform to the ideal of what an actress should be was overwhelming. "My whole year there, I spent it just trying to be like everyone else. I ended up dropping out...I felt like, I'm never going to be successful in this business because I don't fit in.

"I wanted to get cast. I thought, I'm talented and I can sing, so I'm going to get cast as an ingenue, so I need to look like a woman. I need to look the way all these other girls look if I want to get parts. I grew my hair out and went totally neutral."

But Sindelar was not happy, and once they had the language to describe how they felt, they started to undo their ingenue look. "I started experimenting with dressing...I started to dress to pass as a man on random days...some days I want to look masculine."

The first time Sindelar went to a gay bar -- not in New York City, but in Harrisburg -- they felt empowered. "I felt like I could do whatever I want and everyone's still going to like me. That was before I started doing drag, but I felt welcomed and it was a space where I could grow."

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"I love drag," says Sindelar, "because it gives you a chance to make yourself into the person that you feel you are on the inside. You can be that on the outside and have people recognize exactly what your presentation is and how you feel."

Drag performance may seem like just the place for exploring what gender can be, but drag is really about capturing the essence of a particular aspect of gender, particular female glamor or machismo.

But Sindelar's drag persona, Maxwell Treats, is not their platform for embodying classic models of masculinity.

Treats is not good at being male -- he is a flamboyant, effeminate, glamorous man. "I don't look like a butch, athletic guy," says Sindelar, who met opposition within the drag community when they started performing.

"It's a mind-bender," they say, "when you try to pick apart the multiple levels of discrimination and assumptions and stereotypes" that are ingrained in people regardless of their gender or sexuality.

"The first couple times I did drag," says Sindelar, "I got read hard by a lot of the queens because they were like, 'You're too feminine. Why are you wearing fake eyelashes? You need to look like a man!' Here's a man in a dress and a wig telling me that I don't look masculine enough."

A photo posted by Maxwell Treats (@mistertreats) on Feb 20, 2015 at 6:47am PST

Lemoyne-based performer Mitchell Gamble-Ernst has been a member of the drag community for the past five years. "Like any art," says Gamble-Ernst, "drag meets change with opposition, but it is flourishing in the Harrisburg area."

Gamble-Ernst debuted his Jade DeVere -- a cartoony, funny girl-next-door who has earned the titles of Ms. Central PA Pride and Queen of Hope -- 10 years ago. Since Harrisburg's first Amateur Drag Race in 2010, he has coached many performers coming to the local drag scene.

"There is a love-hate relationship between transgender people and the drag community," he says. People who transition within the drag community have experienced discrimination and opposition, as have performers whose characters play with perceptions of gender.

Maxwell Treats stands out to Gamble-Ernst as one who gets a lot of criticism for not being an exaggeration of classic masculine ideals. Another performer Gamble-Ernst knows who has been targeted within the drag community was identified female at birth, came out as a transgender man and performs a female character.

Sindelar is one of Gamble-Ernst's three drag sons -- drag kings who he mentors -- all of whom engage with the limits of masculinity in their performances. One of them, Mykel Bono, who won the first Mr. Amateur Drag Race title in 2014, was stuck in a spiral of wanting to capture a classical mode of masculinity in his performances. "But he's had an awakening," says Gamble-Ernst, "and now he's wearing heels and having fun."

Sindelar's background in theatre makes performing a necessary part of how they relate to the different aspects of themself, including their gender. But that is not how other people experience their own identity.

Sindelar worries that their comfort with playing with the conventions of what a woman should look like and what a man should look like, for instance, make it harder for transgender people asserting their identity when they do not pass. "It's hard for me to make sure I'm expressing myself," they say, "and at the same time not offending someone that is strictly [binary]."

The drag community's hostility to transgender people has manifested itself within Logo TV's popular reality show "RuPaul's Drag Race."

Sindelar believes the presence of drag kings on "RuPaul's Drag Race" would help make the show -- and how viewers think about drag performance -- more inclusive. "When a queen on 'RuPaul's Drag Race' has come out dressed in male drag -- in high drag, but as a masculine character -- they always get clocked for it. 'You're supposed to be in drag. Why don't you look like a woman?'"

When asked why, in its early episodes, "RuPaul's Drag Race" contestants who reflected established beauty standards were favored over more complex drag performers, host RuPaul Charles told the entertainment website Vulture, "What we're looking for is someone who can really follow in my footsteps" who could, among other things, "be hired by a company to represent their product."

Three years later, bearded drag queen Conchita Wurst's "Eurovision" song contest victory catapulted her to global superstardom. Wurst has since modeled for the likes of Jean Paul Gaultier and Givenchy.

After several seasons of treating transgender women contestants inconsistently, the use of transgender slurs on "RuPaul's Drag Race" inspired criticism from media as well as from former transgender contestants Carmen Carrera and Monica Beverly Hillz.

Despite the tension, Gamble-Ernst notes that in Harrisburg "everybody is diverse and doing crazy, goth, spectacular things right now," and that more local drag performers are embracing a more playful attitude toward gender presentation -- including the Harrisburg area's own bearded drag queens, Miliana and Husky Varna.

"We are all very supportive of each other," says Gamble-Ernst. "No issues are beyond repair."