Everybody who has spent any extended period of time around me will know that I have a strange obsession with RuPaul’s Drag Race. So when I got the chance to interview Flesh – legendary Soho drag queen, Hertford College alumnus, and winner of the most recent season of the UK spin-off of RuPaul’s beloved show – I was first and foremost quite nervous. Seeing Flesh on TV and Instagram is like staring into the sun. Talking to her, however, was like catching up with an old friend. Both in and out of drag, Flesh is beautiful to an almost intimidating point, but I quickly discovered through speaking to her that she is neither standoffish nor unapproachable. She was funny, warm, well-spoken, and intelligent, and over the course of an hour, I got to pick Flesh’s brain about the contradictions of university life, the liberating possibilities of drag, and learning to become the person she always wanted to be.
There is perhaps no better place for a drag queen to reflect on the performance of identity than Oxford. A university where intellectual confidence and carefully cultivated personas are extremely commonplace, Oxford is very theatrical in its own way. Yet for Flesh, her time here was not always a particularly comfortable performance. “I have been a realist on the verge of pessimism for most of my life,” she tells me. It is a surprising admission from someone whose public persona is characterised by glamour and self-assurance. Having been crowned so recently, though, Flesh is now looking towards a future in which, as she puts it, she can start believing in the seemingly impossible. But the journey towards that confidence was considerably less straightforward than the TV persona might suggest.
Before Drag Race, there was Hertford. Flesh studied English at Oxford, although she admits university was not necessarily where she wanted to be. Having discovered drag at just 15, after stumbling across performances by American drag queen Willam on YouTube, she spent several years harbouring what she describes as a “secret obsession”. It was not until she was 19, towards the end of her first year at Oxford, that she began experimenting with makeup and drag herself. She had anticipated the distraction. “I knew, really, that if I gave myself the tools to start learning these things, I would not stop,” she recalls. “So I was like, it will be a distraction from my studies. And I was right. It absolutely was.” Flesh credits Oxford drag collective Hot Mess with giving her her first-ever performing opportunity, as well as inspiring her to reconcile being hardworking and intelligent with being uninhibited and having fun. She recalls attending their Halloween party, which was also her first time going out in drag alone. She describes the performers as some of the most intelligent and hardworking people she knew, who could then get into drag and become completely uninhibited. What she took from interacting with them particularly stuck with me: “I want to be competent, intelligent, hardworking, and also totally uninhibited, almost like everyone thinks you’re the loose cannon, but you’re actually running the whole show.”
Flesh describes her arrival at Oxford as something of an obligation. Having achieved the grades required to secure her place, she remembers opening her A-level results with a sinking feeling. “I was like, I have to go. I have to go because I’ve done it.” The ensuing years were marked by a persistent conflict between academic expectations and her increasingly clear creative ambitions. The pandemic made matters worse. Flesh recalls leaving Oxford during her second year and eventually completing her coursework, dissertation and finals remotely from London. She did not attend her graduation ceremony, and remembers leaving university with considerable guilt about what she felt she had failed to achieve. “I had a lot of shame and guilt by the time I graduated,” she says. “I knew that I just hadn’t given it my all, but that there was nothing left I could give to it.” For a long time, she avoided talking about Oxford altogether, caught between fear of appearing boastful and the feeling that she had not performed as well academically as she should have.
It is an unusually candid reflection from an Oxford alumnus, particularly one whose subsequent success might invite the familiar narrative of the university as a springboard to achievement. Flesh’s experience suggests something that I know I, and many other students, have been grappling with – that a prestigious education does not necessarily provide the answers to what one actually wants to do with one’s life.
Of course, it was through drag that she began to reconcile the different parts of herself. When asked whether Flesh is a character she created or an extension of her own identity, she describes the persona as an aspirational version of herself. She speaks of what she calls “diva worship”: the importance of powerful female figures in giving young queer people models of empowerment and self-expression. “For me at least, drag was a way of acting out that empowerment and therefore experiencing it in a way that I had never been able to just as myself,” she explains. Yet the ultimate ambition was never to keep Flesh and her everyday identity entirely separate. Rather, drag offered a way of developing the confidence to bring them together. “My intention was always: I want to live a life where I’m myself all the time.”
There is something particularly interesting about this idea in the context of Oxford, a place where students are often encouraged to take themselves very seriously. For Flesh, however, drag’s apparent frivolity should not be mistaken for a lack of intellectual or artistic substance. She is quick to challenge the suggestion that drag is somehow less deserving of serious consideration than other art forms. “I think a lot of it actually lies in misogyny,” she argues. “The minute that a lot of people are presented with the image of a woman or femininity in a way that isn’t being sterilised to be taken seriously, they kind of assume that it’s not important or serious or intelligent.” For her, drag’s capacity to combine comedy, glamour, and political messaging is precisely what makes it effective. A serious message, she suggests, can sometimes be more readily received when it is concealed beneath a layer of humour or spectacle. Her understanding of drag’s political potential is also informed by the way it exposes prejudice within queer communities themselves. She speaks candidly about the misogyny, trans misogyny, and misogynoir she has witnessed throughout her career, arguing that experiencing the world through drag has given her a greater appreciation of the vulnerabilities faced by others. “We’re falling at the first hurdle if we aren’t protecting each other,” she says.
This relationship between self-expression and social expectations also informs her recollections of being queer at Oxford. Despite studying alongside queer academics, Flesh remembers feeling reluctant to incorporate her own interests into her university work. She had written one paper on Polari, the gay slang historically associated with queer communities, but wishes she had explored more of her interests academically. “I felt for some reason that it would not be taken seriously,” she says. “In Oxford, as a student, it absolutely felt like there was no room to be expressive.” She recalls deciding, during a particularly difficult period in her second year, to go to Plush in drag with friends. Having heard that other Oxford drag queens sometimes attended to promote their events, she hoped to embrace a more visible version of herself. “I’ve never felt more invisible,” she says. “I remember thinking, people are standing on my toes. Someone spilt their drink on me. I feel almost like making myself more visible has made people ignore me more.”
Yet her relationship with confidence has not simply been about adopting a larger-than-life stage persona. Flesh speaks openly about struggling with insecurity and body image as a teenager. One of the earliest steps towards developing self-confidence, she remembers, was looking in the mirror every night and forcing herself to say something nice. “It sounds vain, but it’s not, because it’s not about looking at yourself. It’s about acknowledging that you’re a person,” she explains. Drag, she suggests, gave her a sense of agency over both her appearance and the way she moved through the world. Changing how she looked changed how others responded to her, but it also changed how she perceived herself. Confidence, in this sense, became something she could practise rather than simply either possess or lack.
That confidence, however, was tested by the experience of competing on Drag Race. Flesh describes entering the competition acutely aware of the assumptions audiences might make about her. Already established in the London drag scene, and conscious of the privileges associated with her position, she felt she had to work particularly hard to establish herself as an individual. “I could not be shady. I could not be short. I could not be rude,” she recalls. She worried that any moment of frustration might be interpreted as evidence of an unpleasant personality, particularly given the assumptions already attached to her appearance and style of drag. The result, she suggests, was a quieter and more restrained version of herself than audiences might have expected.
Now, having won Drag Race UK, she hopes to use her confidence to pursue opportunities beyond performing. Alongside Bones, her drag sister and winner of Drag Race UK season 7, she has spent years building a career within London’s drag and nightlife scenes, most notably through their show Heavenly Bodies. The project was born from a desire to create a space that could support unconventional performers and provide opportunities for emerging queer artists. For Flesh, seeing that community grow has been one of the most rewarding parts of her career. Watching performers develop, she explains, reminds her why creating these opportunities matters. “It’s amazing to watch someone else come into the circle and grow,” she says. “I really do see how it benefits people, and we uplift each other.” Alongside continuing her work with Heavenly Bodies, she is interested in creative direction, fashion photography, and telling stories through visual art. She also hopes to become a more prominent public voice for queer people. “We’re being spoken about maybe more than ever in the press,” she says. “So I would love to stand up and be a voice and speak for my community.”
For someone whose career has been built around the art of transformation, it is perhaps fitting that her greatest ambition is not to become someone else, but to feel increasingly comfortable being herself. Her relationship with Oxford may have been complicated, but the experiences she had here helped shape the person and performer she has since become.
