Christian Adore
Christian Adore Citizen Wang Studio
Article By Christian Adore @ citizenwangstudio.com
Hello, my name is Christian adore, or I'm Francesca Forrestal, it's whichever you prefer. Drag, to me is a space where I can explore different elements, different facets of my personality that are both me and a creation of me, Christian is not me. But he's certainly aspects of my personality. I think I used to teach at a boys school, very posh boarding school in Oxford. And it introduced me to a new form of masculinity I hadn't really seen before they were boys when I started teaching them. And by the end, when they were kind of going off to their secondary schools, they were turning into men and trying to grapple with what that meant to them on a kind of broader societal scale. And it was around the time that I was also developing my drag character, and Christian adore.
My character certainly draws on the kind of man that I saw growing in those schools, someone who's not necessarily given a way of articulating emotions properly. But that has a lot of emotion and wants to express it. They want so many feelings. They love aesthetic and artifice and beauty. And being exuberant or being loud and being childish, but being deadly serious sometimes, too. And I think my dry character is quite childish in that way. He's terribly excited by everything and, and loves intensely and feels intensely and wants everything to be beautiful. And fine, find the beauty in things. Certainly, when I started, a lot of people were like, aren't you pretty feminine to be a dry King dry kings need to be masculine or like, you know, look like a bro. So the glitter that you have on your eyes, and the wingtips is not going to cut it really. And the more I've developed in drag, the more I kind of lean into that.
I think being a feminine drag king has made me more comfortable with being feminine in my daily life. It's not something I used to really be comfortable with doing. I was like, oh, no, I'm queer. Therefore, I must look quick. Therefore, I can't like anything girly. And doing drag has made me be like, No, this is a part of my personality. I can put it on just as much as if I was going out. I could put on a dress and that would feel just as drag to me. They're all costumes and it's just about kind of embracing them and enjoying them.
