Native Drag Artists Demand More Than Token Support

Drag is more than performance. It’s more than wigs, heels, and painted faces. In the 1950s, drag performers challenged ideas of masculinity and femininity, influencing conversations on women’s liberation and gay rights. They explored gender not just for themselves, but as a social statement.

During the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s, drag became bold, political, and in-your-face. Performers used humor and extravagance to push back against government neglect while entertaining communities devastated by the crisis.

Shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race propelled drag into the mainstream, shifting focus away from the politics and toward pageantry. . Today, with far-right attacks on drag and LGBTQ+ rights, some performances have returned to their roots as acts of resistance.

For Indigenous drag performers, though, that resistance has always been there.

Indigenous drag artists weave culture into their art, challenging Western narratives and affirming that Two-Spirit, trans, and queer people have existed in Native communities long before labels. Amid legislation targeting drag, gender-affirming care, and LGBTQ+ protections, Indigenous queer people face compounded threats—not only erasure but violence. Threats to sovereignty, including mining on sacred Apache lands and the ongoing Missing and Murdered Indigenous People crisis, add to the danger.

A study by the Sovereign Bodies Institute and the California Rural Indian Health Board found Native 2SLGBTQ+ people are far more likely to experience sexual assault, domestic violence, and neglect. Jurisdictional gaps often leave cases unresolved.

For Indigenous drag artists reclaiming space today, the fight is intersectional and complex. In Crownpoint, New Mexico, Lady Shug, a Diné drag queen and grassroots organizer, confronts these challenges head-on. Through performance and mutual aid, she provides visibility and care in a world that often denies queer and Indigenous people both.

Shug fights erasure and the commodification of queerness. Her message: Indigenous queer people have always been here, and they need more than tokenized support. While mainstream drag is often sanitized for mass audiences, artists like Shug create spaces on their own terms—on stage, in their communities, and on their land.

Baby Shug

“Growing up in a time where the white man was superior, you learn to keep your head down,” Shug said during one of our weekly calls from her home in Crownpoint, part of Dinétah, the Navajo homeland. The connection was spotty; nearly 13,000 families on the reservation live without stable electricity or running water.

Raised with both traditional Diné and Christian practices, Shug was taught to hide her queerness. In private, she wrapped a towel around her head to mimic long hair and slipped into her grandmother’s heels. In public, she kept her head down.

“To be out and queer was never something that I was raised around or exposed to,” she said. Queerness and Indigeneity felt mutually exclusive.

It wasn’t until she left the reservation for Las Vegas that Shug began to unlearn these ideas. Under the guidance of her drag mother, Coco Vega, she worked behind the scenes—tracking tips, fixing wigs, operating spotlights. When a performer bailed one night, the spotlight flipped on her, and she found herself lip-syncing on stage to Cassie’s Me & U.

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“I was like, ‘This feels so weird, but incredibly right,’” she said. Soon, she was performing seven nights a week across the Las Vegas Strip.

But the success came at a cost. “I didn’t see people that looked like me, talked like me, smelled like me, acted like me,” Shug said. Indigenous representation was almost nonexistent. Predominantly white spaces often pushed her to take on caricatures of Asian and Latine people. Dressing as a geisha or impersonating Latin icons felt inauthentic and wrong.

“There were just no spaces for Indigenous people at the time,” she said. It was time to reconnect with her homeland, between the four sacred mountains of the Diné—Sisnaajiní, Tsoodził, Dook’o’oosłííd, and Dibé Nitsaa. Here, she rekindled her relationship with culture and her queer identity.

“We’re the piece that is missing.”

The lack of space for Indigenous performers may seem paradoxical, given the long history of gender fluidity in Indigenous cultures.

Drag performers Lady Shug and Landa Lakes. Photo courtesy of Lady Shug.

For millennia, Native communities have recognized gender-nonconforming people. The Māhū of Hawai‘i, the Muxes of Oaxaca, the Hijra of South Asia, and the Náádleeh of the Diné are examples of identities that hold cultural and spiritual significance. These roles were never modern trends—what might even be called “woke” today—they were vital to community life.

At the Phoenix Indian Center’s Arizona American Indian Excellence in Leadership Awards, Diné drag artist Navi Ho abandoned her scripted speech for the 2024 Person of the Year award. Instead of a simple thank you, she challenged Arizona’s 22 federally recognized tribes:

“We’re the piece that is missing because society doesn’t want us to be there. And by bringing us back, we make the circle continue.”

Navi said embracing drag and the Náádleeh identity—a Diné term roughly translating to someone who embodies both feminine and masculine traits—helped her reconnect with her culture.

Her activism began with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence—one of the nation’s oldest mutual aid nonprofit groups best known for dressing up in nun-like apparel and white-painted faces—where she met Sister Loose Clarita, an Indigenous-Mexican drag artist and organizer in Los Angeles. Clarita offered historical context on gender fluidity among the Zapotec, Mexica, and Maya, emphasizing that these identities were essential to community life—acting as medicine people, childcare providers, and cultural leaders.

Clarita said colonization nearly erased this spiritual significance. “Anything that we want to say about it is going to be examined and portrayed through the gaze of a colonizing Western [system],” she said.

Even the term “Two-Spirit,” coined in 1990 at the Intertribal Native American/First Nations Gay and Lesbian Conference, is an umbrella term that does not fully encompass the diversity of gender identities across tribes: “Illusion, imagination and creativity cannot be limited by that space. It lives in many different ways and realms,” Clarita said.

Shug echoed this perspective, often resisting labels and pronouns set aside for her because she simply lives as a human being. Both queens understand the nuance of language but recognize a gap in knowledge between Indigeneity and the broader LGBTQ+ community. Clarita emphasized:

“Anything that we create is going to be flawed, but maybe this is a way where we can make space for all of us who have an attachment to our ancestral backgrounds and experience gender in a non-normative way.”

“I want to be her.”

For performers like Clarita and Shug, the call to action is clear. The most celebrated drag performers are often cisgender, white, and male-presenting out of drag, while Indigenous and Two-Spirit artists continue fighting for recognition and safety in their own territories. Their question to the wider community is: what are you doing to platform these voices and support their struggles?

After returning to Dinétah to care for her grandmother, Shug witnessed persistent injustices—unhoused relatives, unsolved murders, and absent LGBTQ+ protections. The experience didn’t just trouble her—it compelled action.

She joined mutual aid efforts but soon noticed a pattern: “I was just the token, queer nonbinary person so they could feel inclusive, but I never had a voice,” she said.

Meeting Klee Benally, a prominent Indigenous activist, changed her approach. “He told me, ‘You’re already doing it through your drag.’” With that encouragement, Shug began grassroots organizing on her own terms.

She founded The Shug Challenge—a mutual aid initiative supporting queer youth, elders, and unhoused people across the reservation. Shug often pays out of pocket, delivering groceries, distributing hygiene products, and providing HIV medication. Her work fills gaps that state and tribal systems often fail to address. “If we came together, all as relatives, we would be moving forward quicker,” she said.

By 2023, she launched a tour with Chickasaw drag artist Landa Lakes called La La Land Back, performing while advocating for Indigenous sovereignty. She also appeared on HBO’s We’re Here and co-founded the first Indigenous chapter of Drag Story Hour. Her impact was spreading.

At the 2025 Miss Phoenix Pride pageant, the movement’s influence was visible. Rita DeMornay, 26, of the Akimel O’odham tribe, became the first transgender Indigenous person to win the title. Her win exemplified that Indigeneity and queerness are not mutually exclusive. Drag, for her, is a platform to highlight issues such as the Missing and Murdered Indigenous People epidemic.

“Although drag is my career and fun, I also want to highlight what we go through as Native American people,” she said. DeMornay now dedicates herself to giving back to her communities.

Experienced performers like Shug and DeMornay pave the way for younger generations to express themselves without hiding aspects of their identity.

Angel Lust, 20, a Diné performer living in Flagstaff, recalls late nights doing makeup at home only to take it all off to avoid being caught by her parents. Her journey to gender fluidity began with low-rider magazines and ’90s hip hop.

Now, Lust incorporates hoop dancing into her acts, acknowledging her upbringing while staying true to her aesthetic. She looks to Shug as a blueprint:

“I want to be her,” she said.

Coming Together as One

Call it drag, call it cross-dressing, call it trans. No matter the term or the context it is used in, Indigenous people in this space existed then, they exist now, and they will—one hopes—continue to exist. For performers like Shug, it is now up to their allied communities to double down, stand behind them, and platform their work to the masses.

Amid all of her jokes and tangents, she left our final call on a serious note.

Shug referenced the Navajo Nation, which—like many tribes—still has no protections for LGBTQ+ people. Same-sex marriage isn’t recognized. There are no anti-discrimination laws.

“Before I leave this earth, I would love to see that my tribe accepts and protects our people through the laws,” Shug said. “But the laws don’t really hold me down. I’m going to continue to be who I am, protected or not.”

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