Those Canadians are lucky on so many accounts besides having a heartthrob leader. Their TV stations don’t have a version of the ubiquitous Drag Race which alone is enough to make us want to emigrate. Instead they have a delightful homegrown series “Canada’s A Drag’ which has a dedicated space for all their remarkable local talent. The country’s flourishing drag scene contains a wealth of performers who have a unique and authentic element to the characters they create.
Last March, the series featured nine mini-documentaries on a diverse group of kings and queens, which was such a success, that there were commissioned for a second season. Filmmaker Peter Knegt (Canada’s 86th Most Important Homosexual) and his co-producer Mercedes Grundy used social media, and their own contacts, to search Canada for the best new performers.
The real attraction of the extremely watchable Canada’s a Drag is the sheer diversity, as it offers a true representation of what Canada’s varied and disparate drag scenes have to offer.
“We wanted it to be a fair representation geographically, just to make sure we had episodes set in as many cities as we could,” Knegt explains. “Also, just in terms of gender, we’ve had a few transgender queens/ We’ve had non-binary queens. We just wanted to reflect the diversity of Canada in general. More than anything, it was just really the kings and queens that struck us as the most compelling, in terms of their actual performance and also in terms of their story.”
The 13 episode new series makes for very refreshing viewing and can be on the CBC Arts website for those living in the country, and is being released on a weekly basis on YouTube. Some of the videos are produced in-house and others by local filmmakers, many of whom are themselves LGBTQ, according to Knegt.
