Their personas Deva Station and Dyna Might may qualify for the title drag grandmothers — looking fabulous every inch of the way, it should be noted — but Steven MacLeod and Jake Rafuse prefer the term drag elders when it comes to their status as glitter-dusted role models.
Taking their cue from RuPaul’s 28-year-old club hit Supermodel (You Better Work), the Halifax couple has stepped up to the plate during COVID-19, while the region’s drag queens have been unable to step onto a stage.
They produce weekly shows on the StationDRG YouTube channel, offer a full line of eye-catching merchandise via Darkside Dee-Zines and act as a source of LGBTQ+ community support during the pandemic that drastically reduced in-person activities at this summer’s Halifax Pride Festival as well as shows, appearances, corporate events and anywhere else Deva and Dyna can instantly light up a room.
Keeping the community together
Most importantly, they’ve worked to keep the drag community together, so all the generations of performers and enthusiasts can emerge from these days out of the spotlight stronger than ever.
“All the kids that are around are somewhere along the line related to me. The people that are my ‘children’, they went on to have a hundred different children,” says MacLeod during a morning chat in a cozy booth at the Lord Nelson Hotel’s Victory Arms.
“I’m just ‘glam-ma’, that’s what I am.”
“It’s a sign of respect,” adds Rafuse, referring to the glam grandmother designation, “and a lot of the kids who are discovering drag are coming to us and the older ones for guidance and advice on how to do certain things and achieve certain things.”
MacLeod leans in and grins, “It just means I’m the old school gold standard.”
Their high standards proved to be worth their weight in gold when MacLeod and Rafuse were recently recognized by TD Bank’s #TDThanksYou campaign, created to honour Canadians who’ve put in the extra effort to help their communities during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In a deluxe surprise ceremony at their house, with many of their closest friends attending while maintaining social distancing, they were presented with a truckload of new video equipment for StationDRG productions, which operates out of their basement studio. Footage of the ceremony can be found on YouTube with the #TDThanksYou hashtag.
“Our friends knew about this for months, and not one of them leaked it. We couldn’t believe they kept it a secret, because they can’t keep secrets at all,” says Rafuse with a chuckle.
“But they were all basically warned that if we found out, we would have been disqualified, so that was their motivation, so when they came to film us getting the award, we just thought TD was doing a documentary. When you see us receiving the award, we really had no idea, zero, it’s all real.”
StationDRG pumps up the volume on YouTube
The new equipment is being put to good use on StationDRG, which came into being roughly two-and-a-half years ago with Queens Ranting, featuring Deva Station and her co-host, Halifax drag legend Rouge Fatale (Jason Rose-Spurrell), and Rafuse making everything look good with his technical skills behind the camera. To date, they have 116 episodes under their belts with a special Halloween episode just posted.
“We had this great idea, and we were just having fun with it, and I got to put my whole focus into StationDRG, and it really helped me mental health-wise,” says MacLeod, who’s been in touch with viewers who’ve reached out to him from throughout North America and across the Atlantic.
“Queens Ranting is the only show we have currently going, but we’re about to break out three others we have planned, and it’s just insane around our house right now.”
Currently in the works are a cooking show, a living local show and a reality-based show that will include more members of the Halifax drag queen community, whom MacLeod says have been finding their creative outlet online since most of their normal venues are either closed or operating at reduced capacity.
“Drag is their whole life. It’s the first thing they think of in the morning and the last thing they think of at night,” he notes emphatically. “It’s their whole world, and suddenly when they can’t do that anymore, they were getting really depressed and so on.
“Since we’ve been doing online stuff for the past two years, we’d been at the community for a long time to get themselves online, this is where it’s going, and when COVID hit, it presented this opportunity.”
Spreading virtual glitter on social media
Over the past several months, MacLeod and Rafuse have helped fellow drag queens get their personas on YouTube and Tik Tok, and held doing social meet-ups on Facetime, Zoom and House Party, showing them how easy it can be, once they get the hang of it.
“They took their own path and created their own socially distancing shows. What they created was so amazing, and it really helped them during the whole isolation thing,” says MacLeod.
“And not only the kids who were into the bar scene, but the young kids who couldn’t go to the bars now have access to seeing this whole part of their world that they’ve only seen on TV,” continues Rafuse.
“Now they could see something from real life, in these shows with people that they know.”
