Down the dingy basement steps of the West Village’s Rockbar NYC, drag queen Coma White hauls a swollen suitcase of drag impedimenta toward the shambolic makeshift table that is his dressing room. There, beside him, on the busted concrete floor, he flings it open, a cabinet of curiosities: teased, platinum-blonde wig, silicone boobs, and makeup in perpetuum. He has little time to spare; the commute from Long Island—where he lives with his parents to save money— to the historic gayborhood has eaten up an hour already, and the transformation into “B-movie Bimbo” will take another two, at least.

It’s become a tolerable routine for White who, since last year, jettisoned his job as a SOHO hairdresser for the full-time glam of drag. Now, he says, his weekends are spent less off stage and more on, amid the drunken bacchanalia of bachelorette parties, horror movie-themed trivia nights and small penis contests.

“I’m basically getting paid to live out my childhood fantasy,” White says, flipping open his BPerfect makeup palette and arranging his brushes. “On the one hand I’m just scraping by. On the other, I’m getting paid to lip sync. It’s really stupid and gay and great.”

It’s a reality that has, since the meteoric rise of Logo Television production RuPaul’s Drag Race, become increasingly possible for thousands of queens like him. Indeed, with more than 17 seasons, 23 spinoffs, and a million viewers at its peak, it’s hard to overstate the show’s success.

“What a career in drag can yield now—that’s been radically changed by Drag Race,” says Dr. Cameron Crookston, queer culture scholar and author of the book “The Cultural Impact of RuPaul’s Drag Race.”

Since the show’s premier in 2009, the Culture Currents Institute finds that monthly Google searches for drag related events have more than doubled, and one in four people now say they’ve been to a drag performance, nearly half for LGBTQ peoples, finds a 2023 YouGov poll. These are numbers that only a decade ago might have seemed absurd.

And yet, as drag has moved from the shadows into the light of the cultural mainstream, so too, it seems, have its myriad problems, including its painful, expensive and psychologically stressful work conditions. Far from just elevating the artform, says Dr. Crookston, mainstreaming drag has also elevated audiences’ expectations for performers’ makeup, looks, and production. Most notably, for queens like White and others, in the form of luxury items.

“It’s audience is huge. To a certain degree, it’s created a template for how to do Drag. Glamor and polish are really important.” And though Crookston is careful not to vilify,“Who gets tipped, applause, rebooked,” he adds, “does have a lot to do with how well you conform to the Drag Race model.”

It was a model White first learned young, paying wig makers on Grindr $100 a piece for his early bouffants. Now, thanks to a certain degree of frugality and perseverance, he’s learned how to do without.

“I make everything myself,” he explains down in the cellar, dabbing his eyes with a bit of cheap shadow. “Hair, makeup, mixes. Except sew. I don’t sew.” The audience, he says, can’t tell the difference.

There, in the winking incandescence of the vanity mirror, he studies the blend of his violet cat’s wing, pink blush. The look tonight: 80s-business with a gothic flare, faux-leather miniskirt blazer—Fashinova, $100—and Payless pumps, bedazzled on his own with arts and crafts rhinestones.

Drag queen Coma White readies for her last performance at RockBar NYC

“I might spend $100 on a look every week or so,” he says, whether that be new shoes, accessories or a wig—a far cry from the thousands spent by Drag Race queens like Mo Heart, season 4, but not nothing. “I buy a lot of stuff online.”

From his luggage he showcases his latest: a pair of silicone breasts, once part of a larger body suit—vagina attached, now just the pair with frayed edges— which he purchased on the online retailer for a couple hundred dollars.

“I like tits for my looks. The bigger the better.” He is disappointed that tonight, however, the small ones will have to do.

Otherwise,“My buttons won’t close.”

Like many queens his age, it was RuPaul’s Drag Race that first introduced White to the artform, though his first competition wouldn’t be for another five years. Before it, drag was only a form of self-expression, something he idolized in the cross-dressing shenanigans of Marylin Manson— After, something he might do for an audience.

Laughing, he recalls his splashy drag debut at a Halloween party for the Long Island LGBTQ center, Pride for You, where, for months, he forced himself to socialize and study the makeup of other queens.

“That’s where a lot of us Long Island girls got started,” he says.

That night, chips and soda lay scattered around the small venue, fold-out chairs pushed to the side. White, 21, sashayed off the provisional runway with a custom blowout wig, silver and curly—the emo bangs of his Marilyn Manson inspired-youth, no more—and black silhouette dress.

“I looked good. Not a lot of girls can say that, but I always looked good.”

He’d win, lip-synicing to Nikki Minaj’s “Anaconda,” a song that, “if you know me, was not my style.”

“I knew enough to get by,” he says, finishing up his lipliner. “I guess you can say that for a lot of things in my life.”

The performance, he recalls, unlocked something addictive. All the months of practicing his makeup with 99 cent store shadow and Youtube tutorials seemed to have finally paid off.

“I need to do this. I have to. Whatever it takes,” he swore. And he did for the next eleven years.

But it would be only after winning Ms. Rockbar last year, a drag competition with a year-long residency at the titular Christopher Street dive, that he’d finally quit his SOHO salon for good to pursue the artform fulltime.

“When you win Ms. Rockbar, you get a weekly show. So, I basically got employment for a year.”

By most NYC cost-of-living metrics, that employment isn’t much: just a $150 a performance, not including tips, twice weekly—an irregular drip-drip of income that annually comes out to about $16,000 a year, well below the average salary for freelance dancers and performers in the city, according to a report published last year by the city’s comptroller.

“I make enough just to pay my bills,” White says, which he supplements from other events. “I still live at home. If I was on my own, I don’t know how I’d do it.”

Where other bars, like those specifically catering to drag, might afford to pay White more per gig, Rockbar, he explains, is not that kind of bar.

“People don’t come here for drag shows. They come here to suck dick.”

Owner, Jason Romas, who purchased Rockbar back in 2018, considers the economics of drag a little more pragmatically.

“They have a certain crowd they bring with them. People that might not have ever come to the bar.” Over the counter, he leans, arms crossed, observing the six or seven patrons milling about this Friday night.“I see this as a place where performers get their start. Before they get too popular and I can’t afford them anymore.”

Since the pandemic, Romas’ calculations aren’t unusual for many bar owners. Almost three-quarters of restaurants and bars cited managing “labor costs” as a main concern, according to a 2023 NYC hospitality alliance report. And as many LGBTQ bars and clubs close nationwide, owners like Romas continue to weigh drag’s viability against its increased overhead.

Still, says Angelique “The Star” Stevens, another drag queen who’s worked for years at dive venues across the city,“They think, well, anyone can do it. They have a product to push. They don’t give a shit. And technically, they’re right.” Anyone can do drag, they add. “But there’s still a vast difference between people who do the job well and people who don’t.”

Like White, Stevens can remember the first time a drag performance ever brought them to tears. It was two years ago sitting on their L-shaped couch in their East Harlem apartment, their dog Eloquence on their lap and drag roommates in the back, watching Sasha Colby’s lipsync battle on season 13.

“There’s a tenacity, ferocity that’s behind an artist’s eyes. You could almost taste the artist,” they said, contouring a maroon lip by the glow of a vanity mirror just before a promotional social media video. “I said, yes. I want to be that. I want to do what she just did to me.”

Still, when it came to applying to the beloved show last year, Stevens didn’t feel comfortable submitting their video.

“They ask for a lot. To me, it’s not about what you’re putting on the table, it’s about you.”

The competitive streak, nonetheless, hasn’t died. Now more than anything else, Stevens considers themself a pageant queen—not any more viable economically, he says, but still worth pursuing. For a typical competition, their prize winnings often hardly justify the time and energy it takes to get there.

“I did win $1,000,” they said, recalling a competition they won at the Mixed Cantina where they hosted Bingo. “But I also spent $1,000 to make the dress. So, I just got my money back.”

Other drag events, Stevens says, aren’t that much better.

It doesn’t help that the market, he admits, has been flooded. “You can’t spit without hitting a drag queen.”

And indeed, with the proliferation of the internet and RuPaul’s Drag Race, the number of drag performers, at least anecdotally, seems to be rising.

Although the numbers are hard to estimate, drag queens make up at least a fraction of the five thousand dancers and performers in the city, one of the most densely concentrated metros for LGBTQ nightlight. Over 45 LGBTQ bars sprawl the city, research by Uncloseted Media concludes—more than the entire quantity of Ohio and Pennsylvania, the two nearest, biggest states, combined—with most providing their version of drag shows, brunches, make-up application sessions or Bitchy Bingo nights—all together bolstering a nightlife economy to the tune of billions annually.

In a world now inundated with drag queen media, not just demand for performers, but supply, has risen.

“There was a time when to see a drag show, you had to go to a gay bar,” Dr. Crookston said in a phone interview the previous week. “You had to be old enough. You had to live in a city that supported that queer nightlife. You had to have the gumption to go to those spaces. Now, most people encounter drag streaming it.”

More people have come to the profession, he goes on to say, and it’s more plausible than ever they can make a living from it.

For a year, White has been a steady feature of that New York City nightlife as Ms. Rockbar 2024, lip-synicing to any number of 70s transgressive rock tunes on the shallow Rockbar stage, emceeing its various fetish or kink-themed nights. Now, he’s a little more unsure. Tonight will conclude his penultimate stint, the plastic tiara passing to the wigged-head of another up-and-comer Monday, and a certain wistful excitement focuses him.

“Whoever wins,” he says, re-applying a little more powder to his cheeks, “they’ll never compete with me.”

He is prepared to make the show great. Together, with the help of fellow performer, Zelina Duval, a Ms. Fire Island 2022, and a safety pen in the back, he struggles to clamp a broken choker in place—a touchstone to his piece.

Tonight, White has invited Duval to co-host with him, a favor for a fellow queen that, though mutually beneficial, will cut White’s earnings in half. Unlike other bars, he explains, Rockbar doesn’t provide a budget for two performers, so anything extra comes out of his pocket. As thanks, Duval gifts White a pink bag loaded down with makeup, eyelashes, and perfumes.

“You know I got you girl,” Duval says.

By the sallow light of the vanity, they compare looks—savings: two dollar earrings from Beauty Supply, five dollar nail clip ons from Aliexpress.

“You buy and then you accessorize,” Duval clarifies, squeezing a stocking foot into a too-tight heel.

“Do you sew?” White asks.

“--ish,” Duval says.

Clipping, spraying, shifting and tucking: it’s all tedious work, but, “We perform wherever we get paid,” Duval says, pulling up his fake nipples up to his dressline.

Another hour and the transformation into “horror video vixen” is complete. Poised, White poses for a picture, pouting a pink lip and angling his face. The transformation is his favorite part, he says. The reason he started doing drag at all. At Rockbar there is a freedom to express himself he hasn’t had elsewhere. He loves it here.

White strikes a pose with Duval as the two ready for their duet together on the RockBar stage

Coma White accepts money from a patron while lipsyncing her way down the bar

Later, upstairs, Duval and White sashay down the open dance floor to a line of outstretched bills. Staring back at them, plastered on the bar’s walls, are the numerous self-promoting fliers and stickers White has hung up over the months: one announcing Brain Damage Horror Trivia. Another of White tonguing a skull with the blurb: “Only the dead could satisfy her strange desires.” It’s marketing like this for which White now uses his degree in graphic design.

The crowd is tepid, no more than a dozen bargoers nursing their drinks and patiently awaiting the 10 o'clock call, when White and Duval will conclude their jests and jock-strap night begins.

In an effort to drum up business, Duval commands, “In this economy, any dollar counts. We’re taking cash, Venmo, Zelle, EBT cards.”

The men tip well, and soon the center table is overflowing in ones and fives which they collect at the end of the night and count amongst themselves. White is content with his yield, if a little somber for his coming abdication.

“On Monday,” he tells the crowd, just before leaving,“we’ll be crowning a new Miss Rockbar, and I’ll be unemployed.”

The announcement is met with silence, save for Duval who is quick to interject off stage, “Don’t say that girl.”

For now, to White, drag seems great.

“I’m getting to work with all these companies and labels,” he said earlier that evening— traveling, for example, to places like Ohio, to bars and clubs he’s never been.

Of course, not everyone is pleased with his choice.

“My mom worries about my future. She’s always thinking about social security, retirement, this and that. I guess she doesn’t really see a future in this.” But he tells her anyway, “Leave me alone. I’ll deal with it when I have to deal with it.”

One thing, however, is for certain. Gone are the days of working gigs for free, he asserts, pulling on his butt pads and straightening his boobs. He’s a professional now. He’s full-time.

“I need to get paid. This is my job.” And then, thinking about all those same companies, those labels eager to hitch their star to the departing drag train: “I’m not just some commodity.”

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