Deere has made it her mission to blend the put-upon artistry of drag performance art with the casual world of at-home gaming into an assemblage of ghastly bliss. “She’s spooky, kooky, lots of lookies,” she described her brand in a phone interview with Lifewire. “I don’t want to sound conceited, but I knew I was doing something cool the day I started my Twitch. Drag is cool. I knew people would follow suit, and I knew that it was a big area of opportunity.” “It made sense to me, so it made sense to other people too. The queer community is pretty untapped when it comes to video games.” Named the 2021 Gayming Awards’ LGBTQ Streamer of the Year, Deere has crafted a space where drag artists can flourish in the unchartered world of live streaming and gaming.
Serving You Drag Excellence
Deere recalls being drawn to creativity in her youth, which would eventually spill over into her professional life. Before becoming a Twitch darling, the drag extraordinaire worked as a professional makeup artist, harnessing her creativity in unique ways. Her parents were progressive supporters of everything Deere. Both as the drag queen scene on Twitch today as well as as the creative child from yesteryear. She said both of her parents were unique supporters of drag artistry. They both adored the 1975 cult classic horror-comedy The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which starred a crossdressing Tim Curry as the gender-bending alien Dr. Frankenfurter. She describes her upbringing as one surrounded by a love for drag and artistry. She was introduced to video games at a young age, too, through her older brother and father’s tech obsessions. It was here that her love for horror and so-called “scary” games was born. Her favorites at the time were the Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil series, the latter of which was a community she’d connect with through her live-streaming career. With a pretty unique medley of influences, she was preordained to become Twitch’s premier drag superstar. “I wanted to be my own muse. I love video games. I love drag. And I wanted to sort of be a vehicle to put the gaming culture and the drag culture both in a pot and mix them together,” she said. And she did.
A New Kind of Queen
When Deere started on Twitch in 2016, it was practically exclusively for video gaming. It has since become an outlet for streamers of all varieties. A change Deere helped cultivate and spearhead. “I didn’t see it happening and thought it would be cool to see a drag show on Twitch. That’s what’s special about it,” the drag queen said. “It gives a new access point for a lot of people; all you need is internet access. You can be anywhere in the world and tune in to my channel where I’m live.” Twitch as a platform has embraced her and has celebrated her ascent. Their commitment to non-gaming streamers is great, she says. However, her experience with the communities housed on the platform tells a separate, harrowing tale. “When it comes to gamers? I was PogChamp of the Day for Twitch and literally (got) dozens and dozens of comments with DMs and messages from haters,” she said about her experience as the platform’s PogChamp of the Day on January 12, which included a global emote of her face. “People were using it to make fun of me, but joke’s on you! You got a drag queen at your fingertips. The more you put my face out there, the more normalized it [is] to accept drag as an art form. In the gaming world, if you’re gender-nonconforming, you are a target.” She found safety in the LGBTQ+ communities on the platform outside of the broader gaming culture defining the medium. She founded Stream Queens, a Twitch Team collective containing drag artists across the spectrum that allows audiences to connect to other performers on the platform. Twitch gave her a drag outlet that the club scene didn’t afford. She wanted to have a different story from the typical drag scene. “Drag on Twitch has exploded since last year. The pandemic has brought a lot of drag artists out and encouraged people to explore drag in different ways,” she said. “Drag is artistry, and video gaming is casual. So, it’s really, really interesting to see something so elevated with something so at ease and casual. It’s really interesting to see those worlds mixing.” The drag superstar boasts a lucrative streaming partnership with popular horror game Dead by Daylight by Behaviour Interactive and a coveted slot as a certified Twitch Ambassador. For her, it’s only up from here. “Wherever you see drag, wherever you see creativity, wherever you see queer people creating and putting out art while making a stand for our community support that,” she said. “I want to celebrate queer culture. My channel exists for the queer community to thrive, to chill, and to feel good. So, anyone who wants to take that away will not thrive there.”
