LADY CAMDEN’S RACE TO DRAG QUEENDOM
One night when Lady Camden was taken to the ballet as a child, she looked down from the nosebleeds and saw the dancers and the set, the magical otherworldliness of it all, and wondered how anything bad could ever happen to anyone who made it in the theater. It is as if in the same moment, early in life, Lady Camden (aka Rex Wheeler) simultaneously sensed a need for safety and community and identified the place where both might be discovered.
Drag means something different to each life set on fire by it, but Lady Camden’s shining in the misunderstood (and recently abused) social art form embodies some of its constant traits: for those constricted by the ignorance of peers, or the sterile proprieties of bourgeois ideology, drag is a performative ticket to a realm of alternative signifiers, remote from the suffocating burden of normative identity.
Lady Like, which debuts January 3, 2025, on VOD, builds itself around the culminating contest of Ru Paul’s Las Vegas drag race, for which Lady Camden prepares with a staggering work-ethic derived from years of ballet training, first in England at the White Lodge Royal Ballet School, then in performance in the states with the Sacramento Ballet. Rex, who danced with, and choreographed for, SF’s Smuin Contemporary Ballet, is still involved in choreographic capacities.
Narrated by Nina West, Miss Congeniality on the 11th season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, Luke Willis‘s steadfast and lovingly intimate documentary reveals predictable afflictions of gifted and unconventional youth: Rex was bullied at school in the UK, objectified by schoolmates, and in the context of his family, burdened by the adults around him who offset their emotional work onto him. Feeling like the family messenger, on edge all the time around ignorant peers, but also instinctually driven towards those realms of recognition and safety, Rex made it to ballet school and eventually to the states. Here, he triumphed with the Sacramento Ballet in such productions as Peter Pan, which we get to see a little of amid the documentary’s rich store of background footage (the director himself also danced in ballet).
Though she excelled at this demanding craft, Camden tells us that, during downtime from a slipped-disc, she experimented with makeup and began to yearn for something more boundlessly expressive – that is, “I want[ed] to feel like a sexy pop star diva.” It was drag that permitted the profuse release of the dizzying quantities of magic and play swirling around inside her, and of her suppressed subversive humor. We get a sense of this inner tension during a Facetime call with her mom, during which Camden cautiously prepares her for the content of her drag performances. One is aware how far away from her origins she’s had to arc to be herself in this world.
In recent years drag has been “revisited” by a dull-witted American culture wholly unequipped to encounter it. We’ve also witnessed the mainstreaming of drag culture, in the form of Ru Paul’s Drag Race reality TV show. In his distinction, John Waters, who brought us one of the most legendary drag performers in the form of Divine, embodies this accommodation of what, in the ’60s, could still find itself in major showdowns with the legal system. And yet drag is always under fire (Paris, it seems, is always burning). Though Willis as director is uninterested in political drear, his careful portrait of an individual drag performer is necessarily politically charged, and Lady Like succeeds on this level as well.
When Rex says late in the documentary that Lady Camden is a manifestation of all the things she wanted to be growing up as a kid, and that over time Camden and Rex have become closer and closer, we realize that in many ways drag is a metaphor for fame.
Having been objectified as a child by peers more eager to mock than to understand, Rex engaged as an adult in a secondary objectification, but this time with herself in control. The perils of this, as Camden herself notes, is the way drag becomes a way to hide from the heaviness of the accumulated pain, and a way to not say all the things you really feel. One of the most powerful and necessary moments comes when Rex moves towards forgiveness of her older brother who took his own life while they were still growing up.
Lady Like gives us a juicily detailed, tenderly rendered and Vlog-ishly intimate day-to-day of Lady Camden’s navigation of the endless project of identity. The title reminds us how much of a performance gender always is. And as Rex tells us at the end, Lady Camden is not an escape, a character, or even a performance, but an accumulation of all the things she’s done in her life, an arrival, not a departure, a hello, and not a goodbye.
stills courtesy of Attic Box Productions
Lady Like
Attic Box Productions & Freestyle Digital Media
on VOD January 3, 2025; visit Apple or Movie Wiser
88 minutes | UK-USA
for more info, visit Lady Like Movie
at Instagram @ladylikethemovie @ladycamden
