Diane Torr: the drag king and transgender pioneer who found a home in Glasgow With more than 850,000 viewers tuning in live for episodes of reality TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race, it would seem […]

With more than 850,000 viewers tuning in live for episodes of reality TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race, it would seem society has evolved from viewing drag queens as taboo.

Drag kings, however are still uncharted territory when it comes to the mainstream – and the late Diane Torr is the most influential drag king you’ve never heard of.

Born in Canada and raised in Aberdeen, Torr spent her final years in Glasgow, before her death in May this year, at the age of 68.

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It was in 1980s New York City, though, where Torr – already a dancer and performance artist – began to specialise in male impersonation.

How to be a man for a day

“[Diane] was interested in that idea that gender is actually a learned and performed thing, rather than something that’s essential or innate,” explains Stephen Bottoms, a former collaborator and friend of Torr, who is currently Professor of Contemporary Theatre and Performance at the University of Manchester.

“That men don’t carry authority just because they’re men – they carry it because they’ve learned how to play certain tricks.

“I’m a person who happens to be a woman.” Diane Torr

“She was particularly interested, for that reason, in the alpha male politician-type figures, or businessman-type figures that she studied a lot, and what they were doing to assume that kind of power.”

Torr examined footage of then US President George H W Bush’s State of the Union Address in 1992 closely, using it for the basis of her recurring drag character, Danny King.

As King, Torr led workshops, teaching other women the secrets of physically impersonating a man.

Originally known as the Drag King Workshop, she later renamed the class the Man For A Day Workshop.

An experiment in ‘passing’

“Eventually, she stopped using the term ‘drag king’ because that had become the thing that happened in clubs,” says Bottoms.

Torr observed that, in everyday life, feminine women were looked at, while masculine men did the looking.

“Diane was interested not in playing drag as a cabaret turn (in the way that drag queens tend to), but as a kind of subterfuge – as a kind of ‘How can I pass? How can I watch things that otherwise I wouldn’t be allowed to watch?’

“It was an experiment in ‘passing’ in a lot of ways.”

To truly impersonate a realistic alpha male, the performer would have to convey a powerful sense of belonging and ownership, rather than simply create an attention-grabbing and crude male caricature.

“It’s a much cooler, stand-offish thing, and it’s precisely about not being observed,” says Bottoms.

“The most powerful people are the ones that we’re not looking at.”

‘Completely convincing’

Torr’s main aim was ‘passing’ as a man in public, and pass she did.

In her TEDx Talk (recorded around a year before her death), Torr tells the story of her first outing in drag to an art exhibition.

She was dismissed by her friends as a stranger, and pursued relentlessly by a young woman, despite never saying a word for fear of giving herself away.

“I remember being in taxis with her, and nobody ever batted an eyelid.” Stephen Bottoms

“She was completely convincing,” remembers Bottoms. “Even though she was a rather odd-looking, short man.

“The very first time I saw her doing her lecture demonstration, I knew consciously that this was a woman talking to me, but on some subliminal, subconscious level, the signal that I was getting from watching her was that this was a man.

“It is a very curious kind of uncanny effect when you know that. And if you don’t know that, then she just is a man.”

As well as inviting her to speak to his students during his time at both Glasgow and Leeds universities, Bottoms also spent time with Torr recreationally, while she was still in a male persona.

“I remember being in taxis with her, and nobody ever batted an eyelid,” he says.

“‘Don’t f*** with me’ was the attitude that she presented in her go-to male persona when she was out and about, and you really did just think, ‘Yeah, okay, I’m not going to mess with you.'”

Kept on the fringes of society

Contrary to her aggressive male performance, Torr was a kind and caring person – a fact which may have surprised some who knew her professionally.

“Because she was such a daring artist, people tend to think of Diane as this bold and transgressive person, which – in many ways – she was,” says Bottoms.

“I think what people don’t often realise so much is that the flip side of that might also be a certain kind of vulnerability, which I saw quite a lot of when we were working [together].

“She questioned herself a lot on whether she had really achieved anything.”

Despite dedicating her life to studying and teaching the physical traits of the male gender, and helping or inspiring scores of artists and performers, Torr rarely made any money out her work.

“It was hand-to-mouth for most of the time I knew her,” says Bottoms.

“She was kept at arm’s length a lot of the time by funding bodies and by more established organisations.

“She was always operating on the fringes, and that got tiring for her at a certain point. But, I suppose, if you’re doing stuff that really is cutting edge, then maybe that’s just where you end up.”

A lasting legacy

Diane Torr isn’t a household name quite yet, but Bottoms believes she may well become one in years to come.

“There’s something really historically significant about what she did.” Stephen Bottoms

“It’s one of those weird things that a lot of the time she couldn’t get arrested when she was alive, but there have been obituaries now in four or five major world newspapers,” says Bottoms.

“She would have been delighted by all that – although I’m sure she’d prefer to have been alive.

“But, to me, that proves that her legacy is that something that is going to last.”

When Torr started her Drag King Workshops, there was no such word as ‘transgender’, but the term (much like the people it describes) is now more widely accepted by society.

“She’s one of the people who, in the underlying history of that, deserves to take a lot of credit,” says Bottoms.

“I know transgender people who would point out that the drag king thing in the ’90s is one of the things that fed female-to-male transgender evolution.

“There’s something really historically significant about what she did there that I think will eventually be recognised, if it’s not already being recognised.”

‘She felt looked after in Glasgow’

The people who knew Torr well, though, will remember her for much more than her performance art.

“I think she felt looked after in Glasgow.” Stephen Bottoms

“She was just great fun,” remembers Bottoms.

“She had a laugh that would raise the roof, when she got going, and she was a very kind, very thoughtful person, who you, in turn, wanted to look after.”

Even in her final years Torr was active, with a studio at Wasps Studios in Glasgow’s Briggait, and she was supportive of young performers and artists. Close to her death, in a hospice, she was visited by friends from all over the world.

“Among the people who came were quite young artists from the Glasgow scene who just wanted to see her and see how she was getting on,” says Bottoms.

“I think she felt looked after in Glasgow.

“She loved that kind of ‘take no shit’, working class Scots identity.

“She loved talking to cab drivers in Glasgow. She was much more comfortable with that than she was with talking to people at universities.”

Diane Torr and Stephen Bottoms wrote and published a book, Sex, Drag, and Male Roles: Investigating Gender as Performance, together in 2010