Drag queen Carmen Monoxide braved the queer paradise of Mexico with a card pickup box and ushered in a career breakthrough.
Five days a week, Carmen, the drag queen who calls herself a geek, performs in a crowded venue in Mexico City. She usually wears sexy cutout pink tights or futuristic patent leather suspenders.
"It's Gay Pride Month, our busiest season." In Mexico, drag queens have their own way of looking at cross-dressing – Latin Americans have their own powerful aura and stage charm.
Carmen, the fashion queen from Guatemala, moved to Mexico last August and has made her love of cross-dressing a full-time job.
The 29-year-old has supporters and regular performance opportunities in bustling big cities, but her career hasn't always been smooth.
Born in Montpilli, France, Carmen grew up as mayor of Guatemala and became interested in cross-dressing in high school.
She said, "I didn't create characters or anything, I just played with friends." In 2017, she and her then-boyfriend moved to Napanee, Canada, where she stayed for 10 months. That was when she really fell in love with cross-dressing. "It was the first time in my life that I experienced a real winter, so I stayed home and didn't know what to do."
She became a loyal viewer of the Rupaul Drag Queen show, so she began experimenting at home and eventually made a show near Toronto. Carmen said: "It was a show at the Drag Queen show by Rupaul, and the girl I met at Grindr invited me to perform on stage."
So she took Whitney Houston's song So Emotional to perform a dance on stage, with Audrey Hepburn's makeup, which didn't really fit, but "I just wanted to go on stage and show everyone." She said.
In 2018, Carmen moved back to Guatemala to work as a drag queen in his hometown, but soon found out that this didn't work because "there was only one bar, Genetic, that had a drag show."
The bar held a beauty pageant, which she participated in, but found that it was not a grand event for artistic and creative freedom, but a competition to imitate women. "It's a misogyny, girls have to wear high heels to compete."
"I still participated because I didn't have any other options, but I still wanted to be creative." After carmen won the competition, he began to meet other drag queens in the city and formed the eight-person group The Drag Besties to build a creative and inclusive cross-dressing community in the city.
"We want to throw parties outside of bars, which can be more alternative and cooler, not beauty pageants but weird." People need safer space to get dressed up and be queer."
In Guatemala, where LGBTQ+ rights continue to be challenged, a bill in The Guatemalan Parliament introduced in March to ban same-sex marriage and prevent educators from discussing heterosexual sexual orientation with students was put on hold.
The local LGBTQ+ community has very limited support, and Carmen revealed that it is very difficult to be a drag queen in her home country, and there is very little space to perform safely: "It's a beautiful country, but it's really, very backward." 」
Regardless, Drag Besties, which she co-founded with Inga Apfel, is still struggling to find safe places to perform, take photos and develop her characters.
She remembers performing an under-venue cross-dressing ball at Casa Celeste at the Center for Contemporary Art in 2018, and tickets sold out immediately. "The audience was very much looking forward to the show, we had as many people as possible, the stage was huge, the lighting was superb, it was the first time my three cross-dresser girls performed, it was so beautiful."
Last year she decided to move to Mexico City to fulfill her dream of becoming a full-time drag queen, "I just felt stuck." The opportunity to perform in Guatemala made her feel very limited.
"I moved to Mexico City on Wednesday and started my first show on Friday. My show has changed dramatically." She finally started developing her own cross-dress fashion.
"Before the pandemic, I locked myself in a cupboard and said to myself, 'You're a sexy fashion queen.' But I don't find it fair to me, and now my disguise is transformation."
After moving, her cross-dressing was no longer limited to beautiful, charming dresses, but more variety of her eccentric style. She would dress up as a baby hot girl in a blue feather costume and then change into a choking little devil costume.
"I usually dress up the way I do the show, and sometimes the costumes talk to me, or I listen to a song and think about what kind of clothes to wear."
Photojournalist Yuri Ávila, who witnessed the shift in Carmen's cross-dressing style, said: "Carmen has two incarnations, one is sweet and attractive, and the other is dark and weird."
"She's a real drag queen, making her own clothes, designing wigs, putting on makeup, dancing, and some drag queens want to politicize cross-dressing, but she just wants to be herself." To disguise public transport is to make a political statement."
Carmen said she met a group of performing groups in Mexico, including her best friend now, Cherry Darling, which inspired her.
She argues the city is more inclusive than Guatemala, with more laws protecting the LGBTQ+ community, such as legalizing same-sex marriage and banning reverse therapy from 2020.
"Mexico City has a lot of drag queens working in restaurants, bars, nightclubs. But in Guatemala, the industry is still going underground." Despite this, Ávila stressed, Mexico is not an ideal place for the LGBTQ+ community.
A 2020 report noted that in 2018 alone, 117 people were murdered, a third more than the previous year.
"The situation in Mexico City is much better than in Guatemala, but there have been several recent cases of police attacks on LGBTQ+ people, and the mayor says Mexico is the city of rights, but if you are oppressed by the police here, how can it be a city of rights?"" Ávila said.
Even so, Carmen says the new environment makes her feel identifiable and inspired. "Moving to Mexico has given me more confidence in my cross-dressing, there are so many super talented people here, it's just my queer imagination paradise."
Carmen's hopes for the future are also the wishes of Guatemala City's drag queens, hoping that Mexico City and other places will open more doors of opportunity for them.
Carmen has left Guatemala, but her local influence remains. "Our community still has a way to go, and we need safer venues before dress-ups become a trend, but with so many talented drag queens here, the future is definitely exciting."
She is also confident in her future. She wants to design costumes for other peers, make music, and continue to compete in the most well-known drag queen competition in the region. She said confidently, "My cross-dressing spirit is transformation, and I still have a lot of things I want to do!"