It’s Valentine’s Day in Zagreb, and Donatella Versace, glamorously dressed, parades up and down the stage at the alternative club Močvara — or “swamp”, an homage to its location on the river Sava. The capacity crowd laughs and cheers at the foot of the stage as Donatella responds comedically to questions posed over the PA — but this isn’t the fashion designer, of course. It’s one of the neatly-crafted artistic personas of the first Croatian drag collective, the House of Flamingo.

The performance is part of Flamingo’s anti-Valentine’s Day show, S.R.C.E. The acronym spells “heart” in Croatian, but also represents the initials of the collective’s four main performers: Spazam Orgazam, Roxanne, Colinda Evangelista, and Entity. The show has gathered together a couple of hundred people of different ages, genders, and nationalities. Jason, 18, from Kenya, is travelling through Zagreb, and heard about the show in his hostel. “It’s beautiful,” he tells me during one of the breaks. Jason is easy to spot, even in the midst of this colourful crowd, sporting a glow-in-the-dark red bow-tie and glittery jacket. “I wish these shows would happen everywhere, because here everyone gets to be what they want.”

“I love what they are doing here,” says Ana, 28, a Zagreb resident who came to see the show with her sister. “It’s a small step for Močvara, but having this bunch of colourful people defying social norms is a big thing for Zagreb.” Defining yourself as queer, let alone cross-dressing, still counts as subversive here; perhaps it is unsurprising that the world of queer performance, including the explosion of Croatia’s drag scene, has been tied to the reaction against the rise in right-wing populism in recent years.