For Divina de Campo, drag has always been a tool for education. When the singer and performer sashayed into the nation’s hearts on the first series of RuPaul’s Drag Race UK in 2019 – armed with a four-octave vocal range and a distinctive, shriek-like laugh – their Instagram was flooded with messages thanking them for discussing having lived under Section 28. For many of the show’s teenage fans, Divina talking about Margaret Thatcher’s law – which banned the “promotion of homosexuality” by public institutions – was the very first time they had learnt about it. “There’s a bit of you that has to take people by the hand and say, ‘This stuff is also part of our history,” the 37-year-old explains.
With an army of followers to their name, Divina – who identifies as non-binary – is barrelling forward with this mission by starring in a new staging of the cult-classic musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Co-produced by Leeds Playhouse and Home in Manchester, it’s a production clearly meant to appeal to Drag Race fans, who can pay extra for a meet-and-greet experience with Divina after certain shows. Pausing from an intense day of rehearsals to speak over Zoom, they tell me it’s an opportunity to enlighten a generation – many of whose knowledge of queer culture starts and ends with the Drag Race franchise – about Hedwig and beyond. “How many people [today] know about what happened in the Eighties or the Seventies or the Sixties?” the Yorkshire-born performer says. “They don’t, because the world is so complicated already [and] our systems are designed so that you don’t have time to find things out.”
