drag king project

These men are from Venus

Pop culture characters the girls chose were mostly exaggerated macho male, some stark and dark, some in-your-face, some even sexually ambiguous. Salman Khan’s Chulbul Pandey of Dabangg, Tom Cruise’s Maverick in Top Gun, Quick Gun Murugun, Sherlock Holmes, Clark Kent aka Superman, Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow, Zorro, Indiana Jones ... were all taken in a jiffy. For practical reasons, Sowmya Reddy -- a busy 29-year-old vegan and an animal rights activist trained in environmental law at the National Law School -- chose the pot-bellied, lungi-clad, crotch-scratching Malayali Alex of the popular Channel [V] show Lola Kutty. “I found it perfect as it required no elaborate costume, just a lungi and a baniyan, and I could walk around digging and scratching as a man. During my shoot by the road, so many people gathered to watch the proceedings. I was thoroughly enjoying myself grossing out everyone. While a woman stared on, I casually lifted my lungi and scratched my balls. She threw me such a disgusted look, it was priceless.” A bunch of female-identified women playing at being men meant more than just hunting for costumes and make-up. Their breasts had to vanish beneath layers of tight binding. Inside their underwear, they were to pack socks to resemble a penis. Vidya playing Chulbul Pandey stuffed a shampoo bottle inside a sock and therefore sported an embarrassingly large bulge in the pants when she donned the tough cop garb. Indu Antony, a TFA (Toto Funds the Arts) photography award winner, who had just completed Bitch Please!, the drag queen photography project which inspired the queer girls, was steering the drag kings as well. Indu pulled in her favourite make-up artist, Rahul Pillai. He had helped transform seven queer men into stunning drag queens for her. Together, they set out to “celebrate masculinity”, got the queer women to show off their male side and created the first such project in the country. The images will be on a calender soon -- “the first drag king calendar ever,” says Indu -- which will be sold widely.