This week, two drag queens are closing the generational gap. 50-year-old Drag Race UK star Dita Garbo recently sat down with up-and-coming teen drag queen Cherry West to discuss their diverging generational experiences—and how some struggles have always stayed the same.
Cherry West is eighteen years old, but she actually began drag when she was thirteen after seeing her first drag show at a bar with her family. According to a 2022 BBC profile, she’d been a performer long before that, busking at the Edinburgh Festival at age 7 and participating in a band from ages 10 to 13.
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When she started drag, she had the full support of her family and local community. “I have a show coming up that some of the teachers actually really want to come to,” she said at the time, “so I’m very grateful to have the school behind my back and all the pupils, they’re just doing their own thing, they don’t really mind it.”
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Dita Garbo was similarly inspired by example, as she described to West in a new conversation with PinkNews. But without social media or popular platforms like Drag Race, her exposure to the art form was mostly relegated to rare TV appearances.
“RuPaul was a big role model because when they hit the mainstream with ‘Supermodel’ and being on MAC billboards and stuff, that was when… I started doing drag,” Garbo said.
But despite being the younger of the pair, West is also inspired by the past, describing her drag as “old school with a new school twist.”
“That’s what I love about your drag,” Garbo said, “because there are a lot of younger queens, and they’re very different in the way they portray drag. And it’s actually nice to see somebody that comes back to that more cabaret style of performance.”
“I think that’s because that’s the first drag I’d seen and fell in love with and was like, ‘That’s what I want to be like,’” West explained.
As much as the two queens have in common, there’s one difference that separates them: experience. Nowhere is that more felt than in the lived experience of history.
When West asked whether those same younger queens are “connected to enough [queer] history,” Garbo simply responded: no.
“I think generally, as you grow up… you would have heard about [AIDS] in the 80s and maybe Section 28,” she elaborated. “I grew up in those times so, for me, I experienced it. It’s nice to have conversations where you learn.”
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