There are drag queens, drag kings – and then there’s Wet Mess. In May on Instagram, they revealed what is for them a typical look: a head painted green and gold, bald up top apart from two kiss curls; stickers of cars on each temple; a picture of two bikini-clad women wrestlers stuck to the forehead; black lipstick with enormous false eyelashes; an acid green Elizabethan ruff with boots to match; a pink shirt with padded shoulders; a tie emblazoned with the word “wank” and a purple lace dress that left their bum uncovered. The coup de grace came when Wet Mess flashed a million-dollar smile – and revealed teeth decorated with black dots.
All this effort was for a performance at Dalston Superstore, one of the London queer clubs in which Wet Mess cut those teeth, and where they are now revered as one of the most extraordinary performers on the circuit, combining costume, dance, lip-syncing and avant-garde theatre skills in one discombobulating package. And that’s the intended effect – Wet Mess likes to declare that they are “horny for your confusion”. They elaborate: “I’m sort of a drag thingy-king. I’m more on the masc side but I feel very fluid. I play with everything and exist in between and outside of gender.”
Edinburgh is about to get the full Wet Mess experience in the form of their first hour-length show. Called Testo, it’s a one-person extravaganza based on interviews with people who have taken testosterone in the course of their gender transitions. “I’ve got a huge range of interviewees from people my age to 60-plus,” Wet Mess (who uses that name both on stage and off) divulges. The result was hours of audio testimony “that I found really hard to edit down”. This gets artistically distorted and then Wet Mess lip-syncs to the results. “Lip-sync is a really big part of my drag,” the artist says. “Drag acts take audio from all over the internet, but what does it mean when we take our friends’? Through having someone’s voice in your mouth, you feel you can connect to them in another way and really feel what it means to say those words.”
So are they taking testosterone themself? “I kind of want to leave that open because it’s in the show,” says Wet Mess, who often performs topless, save for a breastplate that gives them pecs and a six-pack, a look augmented in Testo by red-and-white chequerboard makeup that covers their entire head. Today, sitting outside Cafe Oto, an experimental music space in London, they are more conservatively attired in a giant suit jacket, rugby shirt and tie – although that monk-style tonsure ensures they still stand out a mile. “I was really excited about distorting my hairline and then being able to paint on my head as well,” they say. “My partner shaves my head every few weeks so I’ve got this canvas to play with.”
They may look extraterrestrial, but Wet Mess is actually from Cottenham, a village in the Fens. They did a lot of dance as a child, and loved dressing up, encouraged by their mum. “She would spend ages sewing sheets together,” Wet Mess remembers. “There’s a picture of me in a huge pumpkin outfit and I remember dressing as Arrietty from The Borrowers on World Book Day. I said to my mum recently that she should get more involved in my performances, because she was such a big part of my journey.”
So how do Wet Mess’s parents feel when they see their child leering in an oversized pinstripe suit with a pinstripe face to match? “I think they’re proud and overwhelmed – slightly confused, but proud. They’ve been supportive all the way.” Another formative influence was Mrs Doubtfire, in which Robin Williams plays a divorced father who drags up as a female housekeeper in order to keep seeing his kids. “I love Mrs Doubtfire!” Wet Mess declares.
They studied history of art at Edinburgh College of Art, although they were never there at festival time since the college rented students’ rooms out for this most lucrative of months. After graduating, they formed the four-piece dance troupe Stasis, and with a Cambridge-based theatre company called ThisEgg won a Scotsman Fringe First award in 2018 with a show called Dressed.
Wet Mess moved to London in 2015, and at first made friends playing basketball, but then started go-go dancing. The drag scene soon hove into view. “For a long time,” they say, “I was juggling visual art and performance. I knew I wanted to do both. When I found drag, and when I was on my queer journey, everything clicked into place. I was like, ‘I just paint my face and that feels so freeing. I can transform and create these spectacles on stage.’”
Wet Mess entered a six-week contest called Not Another Drag Competition at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, the legendary venue where Paul O’Grady got his start performing as Lily Savage (and where during one turn, in the midst of the Aids crisis, the club was raided by rubber glove-wearing cops). “Each week you’re set a different task,” recalls Wet Mess, “and you have to create a five-minute act, so it’s incredibly intense. But that’s where I gained a bit of a following and eventually won the competition.” They first performed as Wet Mess in 2019. “A lot of friends didn’t like the name, but I want to make work about things that make me emotional and horny, so that’s where it came from.”
Performing in noisy bars means making an immediate impact. “Coming from a live art and dance background,” Wet Mess says, “means I’ve performed in a lot of random places: in a swimming pool, in a garage, on a construction site, in parks – but nightlife presents a very specific challenge. You have to really bring it in in five minutes because people don’t have a long attention span: they’re drunk, they want to chat to their friends. So it’s an exciting journey.”
Nightlife has other temptations, of course, which Wet Mess does their best to avoid. “The whole scene is surrounded by that, so you have to look after yourself. I’ve tried to do a lot of calming down after shows, because adrenaline really takes you on a journey. For me, the performance is the priority.”
Wet Mess honed their act in lockdown, doing dance training online (“very repetitive isolated movements that are quite intense – but a good thing to do at a time that we were all at home”). They also watched RuPaul’s Drag Race, about which they have mixed feelings. “There are some amazing artists on there and some important conversations about non-binary identity and transness. But it very much excludes all cis women, and anyone that isn’t a man dressing as a woman.”
This ambivalence about the show and its commodification of drag was a major theme in the play Sound of the Underground at London’s Royal Court, in which Wet Mess participated alongside more seasoned performers. Wet Mess brought the house down with a spectacular lip-sync to Dorian Electra’s trans anthem Flamboyant, proving their act is every bit as exciting in a theatre as it is in a grimy pub.
Wet Mess’s shows are not only thrilling and wild but somehow sweet and life-enhancing, thanks to their pin-sharp performance chops, high-voltage charisma and the sheer pleasure they are clearly taking in putting their vision out there. “When you are non-binary or trans,” they say, “you are able to change and redefine yourself. It feels really liberating and the stage has been a big part of that for me.”
They’re excited about how Testo will be received by an audience who may know little about the conversations around gender over the past few years. “The common stories around transness are very medicalised, binary and trauma-heavy,” Wet Mess says. “I’m interested in trying to show the messy, confusing, joyful humanness.”
• Testo is at Zoo Southside, Edinburgh, until 25 August
• This article was amended on 14 August; the show Dressed, which won a Scotsman Fringe First award in 2018, was created with the theatre company ThisEgg, not Stasis.
