A QUESTION put to Lawrence Chaney on the final episode of this year’s RuPaul’s Drag Race UK was one all too familiar to those in Scotland’s arts and culture sector. “You don’t have dreams of moving to London?” asked judge Michelle Visage.

The performer, who went on to win the hit show watched by millions, responded confidently. “No,” he told her. “I love London, Glasgow’s where my heart is. My central base – I always want to be in Glasgow.”

The assumption that Scottish artists want to leave the country to further their careers was something Ellie Diamond and Chaney, the series’ first two Scottish-based contestants, discussed in detail days before the Glaswegian queen’s historic win.

While sipping an Irn-Bru – Chaney was sent a crate of cans after wearing a blue and orange outfit in one episode – and looking like a glamorous Disney villain on a Zoom call with the Sunday National, the artist discussed his passion for his home town.

“So many people say well it’s easier if you’re down in England,” he explained. “What kind of unsettles me a little bit was we’re not America where it’s 10 hours on a flight to get to the other side of the country. We can get there via Megabus, we can make it work. If it’s TV or whatever, if they want you so badly they’ll get you no matter the strings attached. And sadly I’m very attached to Glasgow, the Gorbals.”

Diamond, looking like a doll with exaggerated eye make-up and a bouncy ringlet wig, expressed the same sentiment. “I’ve been told this recently as well, where it’s ‘you live so far away, it’s such a struggle for you to come down to Manchester, London, England’.

“I shouldn’t have to move my entire drag, my entire living space, just to make it easier for me to work. That shouldn’t really come into it,” the Dundee-based queen said. “So I have no pressure to move, I’m quite comfortable where I am, especially within Scotland. I’m proud to be from Scotland and I want to stay here as long as I can.”

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When I last interviewed Chaney, it was shortly ­after RuPaul’s Drag Race UK announced the cast for its first season. No Scottish queens had been ­invited to take part – something which performers in ­Scotland’s vibrant and varied scene were dismayed by. The Drag Race franchise has a huge international audience and has introduced the artform to a whole new generation of dedicated fans. In America and around the world, drag is more popular than ever and performers are in demand. Not only does the programme make careers, giving artists the ability to tour the world, its most successful contestants have gone on to star in major films and walk runways for prestigious designers.

“If one of us gets on it that’s more money in the bars, more money to the shows, a bigger budget for the shows, more drag queens being able to do it full time – it will elevate the scene,” Chaney said at the time. Now, with two Scottish queens having made it so far in the competition, this is the hope. How does Scotland build on this sudden visibility and support the talent on our own doorsteps? How do we create an environment where the first question from commentators isn’t “why won’t you move to London”, and instead “how can I get involved in Scotland?”.

The National: Lawrence Chaney reveals celebrity admirers after ‘mind-blowing’ Drag Race win

Like everything in life, money is a key factor. Chaney started a UK-wide conversation when he ­revealed that before being cast for Drag Race, he was often paid just £15 a gig. “I think drag queens in Scotland need better pay,” Chaney told the ­Sunday National. “Yes the pay situation in the UK is not as good as it is in America because America has a richer history of club-oriented drag but in the UK, subjectively in England, they have better pay for queens.”

“There are also more opportunities in England,” Diamond adds. The performer had to stop doing drag full-time due to low pay rates, and instead went to work at a fast-food restaurant. “When me and Lawrence first got into the workroom and everyone was unpacking, all the drag came out, and they were like ‘yeah just finished doing a photoshoot the other week for Gucci’, and we were like we just came from McDonalds half an hour ago,” she recalls.

Another Glasgow-based drag artist and activist, Lady Rampant, understands this feeling. While studying her masters in law in Amsterdam, she was able to ­support herself via her drag career. Upon returning to Scotland she was “shocked” by the pay difference.

The National:

“To be honest I was paid in Amsterdam 10 times as much as at big gigs here in Scotland,” she admits. “It’s nowhere near as good as it could be, especially for all of the hours that go into preparing for a show. It’s not just turning up and doing the show for two hours, it’s preparing hair, costume, make-up ... It’s so much more than the three hours you see a drag artist for on stage.”

There are several factors contributing to the pay disparity, she argues. Firstly, the number of LGBT venues in Scotland’s major cities is smaller than in areas with established drag scenes like Manchester or London. There’s also an “underestimated worth of what goes into drag” among those booking shows, she adds, and on top of that an ever-growing crowd of people who want to perform.

Some of the longest-running regular drag nights don’t have a cover charge, and instead the accepted culture is for performers to receive tips in a bucket from audience members at the end of the show. “I personally don’t mind it, ­because I get to go round and speak to everyone,” Lady Rampant says. “I love the social ­aspect of drag. But there’s a real undertone to it where we’re having to ask for your tips and money that you’ve came into our show to see for free. It can feel a bit degrading I guess at times, shaking a tip bucket in people’s faces.”

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Miriam Attwood, the founder of ­Edinburgh-based arts PR firm ­Storytelling, says it was “atrocious” to learn of the low fees received by some of Scotland’s top drag performers.

“We need to look at the way that we appreciate our artists,” she stresses. “Yes, the ­opportunities for a successful drag queen or a successful comedian are ­astronomical. But there’s a massive eco-system that rumbles underneath.”

Scotland now has a huge opportunity thanks to Chaney and Diamond’s platforms. Attwood describes Drag Race UK as a “juggernaut” for the artform of drag, which the nation needs to build upon. “There’s such an opportunity there for us to take this art form and run with it and help these queer performers increase their earnings, share their stories, get political, look beautiful, whatever they want to do,” the arts expert says.

And valuing artists will be increasingly important as the UK recovers from Covid-19 too, Attwood believes. “People are going to want entertaining. We need our drag artists to be funded if the venues that are hosting them can’t afford to pay them a decent rate,” she says. Financial support for the arts also needs to go beyond “fancy venues with chandeliers and painted ceilings”, she adds. “We have to be looking at the people who fill them.”

So if money was no obstacle for Scottish drag, how would performers transform the scene? Lady Rampant has a clear ­vision.

“I think I would invest it into huge professional drag shows,” she suggests. “Really big high-production, high-end drag venues, whether that’s drive-through drag, in a theatre, in the SSE Hydro … I would love to see huge productions of Scottish drag.”

The National: RuPaul

MANY performers see the art of drag as a political force, with queens and kings playing with gender and disrupting societal norms. It’s not solely about gender politics, though. In 2020, RuPaul himself (above) spoke of using his huge platform as means to encourage Americans to fight back against a president determined to make life harder for the country’s LGBT citizens.

During the season which aired in the run-up to the November election, RuPaul brought on Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a guest judge and asked contestants to hold “register to vote” signs at the end of every episode. “We’re going to mobilise young people who have never been mobilised, through our love of music, our love of love, our love of bright colours,” he told The Atlantic. Could drag be used in this way here in Scotland?

During our Zoom interview, Lawrence opened up about his support for Scottish independence and said he’d voted Yes, aged 16, in 2014. He’s just as passionate now. He argued against the idea that the vote was once in a generation and added that promises made following the No win were not kept. Using Westminster and Holyrood’s distinct responses to the ­pandemic as an example, Chaney said: “We have shown we need to have power over our own country. And what goes on in our country.”

READ MORE: RuPaul's Drag Race UK: Lawrence Chaney reveals support for Scottish independence

For Lady Rampant, who was voted Best Political Queen at the Glasgow Drag Awards, Chaney’s openness about his support for independence was important. Lady Rampant – whose drag name is a feminised version of the Lion Rampant – has used performances to express frustration with Westminster’s refusal to accept a Section 30 order and lip-synced along to speeches from Nicola Sturgeon. She studied constitutional law as part of her undergraduate degree and has since decided to use drag to express the failings of the Union.

“Lawrence is reaching an international audience,” she points out. “It’s an opportunity to amplify the many Scottish voices who feel the same and also get people on our side, get people on our cause and change attitudes – that actually what’s happening to Scotland isn’t really fair.”

Lady Rampant is passionate about the political potential her drag offers. At the moment the queen is using her podcast to discuss the Scottish election, analysing what each party is promising the LGBT community. She feels she can reach an audience who might feel put off by traditional politics.

“When you see politicians on the TV there’s sometimes this instinct that you maybe don’t trust what they’re saying or you want to challenge that. But with drag, drag gives me increased visibility,” she explains.

Ahead of the 2014 referendum, scores of artists used their platforms to back a Yes vote. Musicians, writers, actors, playwrights and painters were vocal about their belief in self-determination. As Scotland moves closer towards such an important election for independence, we should be listening to these voices, ­Attwood says.

“Artists and creatives – we’re ­dreamers,” she noted. “We’re excited about the promise of an idea, as much as the reality of it. This is an interesting binary in culture at the moment, where we’re like ‘you have to be a realist or you’re a leftie and you’re woke’ but the two go hand in hand. You have to place your faith in something and I think as a society our Scottish artists speak for a large part of the audiences and the people they interact with, and they have an idea of how it would shape the future of their country.”

AS Scotland prepares to move closer back to normality, what will become of its diverse, burgeoning scene remains to be seen. Performers moved online to provide high-quality digital drag, but are champing at the bit to see real-life crowds again. The boom in audience numbers expected as a result of Scottish artists competing on Drag Race has, sadly, not been recorded yet thanks to the pandemic. But Lady Rampant is confident it’s coming. “There seems to be a real buzz about drag right now,” she says. “People are thinking ‘wow there’s this whole world of drag out there that I didn’t even know about’.

“That’s one of the best things that does come from Drag Race, it opens up people’s eyes to some aspect of drag culture. They get curious and they go find more and maybe want to go to drag shows. The real beneficiaries of that are the local performers. Everyone should be a fan of drag because it’s such a great art form, it’s so liberating and freeing. There’s something for everyone.”