Vigor Mortis“Drag, in its best form, will cause the people in the know to chuckle, and the people who aren’t in the know to learn something.”
Lonelyleap
Maxxx
Maxxx
Maxxx Pleasure“Gender is a choice you make everyday with the with way that you present yourself.”
Drag King Maxxx Pleasure finds a home in the Brooklyn drag community, an eclectic group of artists playing freely with gender and identity.
Gender is a performance: this belief fuels Maxxx Pleasure’s passion for drag. Maxxx is an AFAB individual (assigned female at birth) but to those who know him through drag, he goes only by Maxxx and uses he/him pronouns. By his own admission, “You don’t make money doing this.”
The drag stage is where Maxxx transforms his everyday struggles into performance art, a form of therapy that has given him a new found emotional resilience offstage. He first saw drag, in part, as a way to further integrate himself into the queer community at college; it has not only turned into a passion, but a need.
Jenn D’Role
“Doing drag here, you can do and be anything you want to be.”
From our very first conversation with Maxxx, over cocktails in a West Village bar, we knew that this film would be more than a simple profile of a performer. What started as a glimpse into Maxxx’s life as a drag king quickly led to a discussion on the nature of gender itself, as well as the complexities and nuances surrounding identity.