Performer and drag king Kit Griffiths expresses gender through art
Although Hollywood has traditionally been straight, Kit Griffiths is a romantic: “I watched this woman’s lips in a movie, and eventually knew I had to kiss them.”
Kit Griffiths, aka Cesar Jentley when performing, is a drag king. They are known for being female artists who impersonate male characters.
However, in the past few years, they have remained low-key while drag queens have been given a high profile and have even become a fashion trend. Griffiths refers to Madonna’s song What It Feels Like For A Girl, which says it is not okay for men to wear women’s clothes because people think that being a woman is degrading. “That’s why the space opened up for it to be outrageous for men willing to dress as women,” she says. “But of course, being masculine and performing masculinity is so much more than putting a pair of trousers on.”
Born and raised in Cardiff, Griffiths was already dressing as a man during her childhood.
“I was very certain I was a boy,” she says. “But not in a way that gave me a crisis over my body.”
Growing up in a Catholic family in the 1990s was not a bed of roses. However, she was surrounded by people breaking the supposed rules which helped her in feeling comfortable with having more than one gender inside her. “My uncle was a priest, and I would watch him wearing these beautiful glittering gold and purple dresses,” she says. “Whereas I was raised by a single mom who would fulfil ‘man’s jobs’.”
When she was 19 years old, she painted on a beard for the first time for a drag night. At that point, she did it for fun. Simultaneously, she was building her acting career by playing Lady Macbeth in Shakespeare’s play. “One day I was at one of these club nights, wearing my beard and feeling sexier than ever when I suddenly bumped into a director I knew,” she says. The director had just started a group of drag kings and asked her to join. That was how her love of performance and gender experimentation came together.
The 30-year-old artist is a femme pretender, which means that through Cesar Jentley she is not attempting to look biologically male. The beard is mainly to allow the audience to access the fact that she is performing as a man.
“I am a male and a female all the time, whether I have a beard on or not,” she says.
After more than a decade of being the master of ceremonies while performing, she confesses that stage fright is what she enjoys the least. The nervousness she experiences is really high, and it is something that she has been working on throughout the years. “That is what makes it so special,” she says. “It is a risk I am willing to take forever.”
Referring to love, Griffiths has always felt natural when being attracted to both genders. “In school, I would flirt with my female teachers, and they would not really understand what it meant,” she says. At 14, she came out of the closet, and always felt confident and great about herself. But in school, there were girls who would often bully her and call her things like “disgusting” and “ugly”.
When she goes on stage, she loves connecting with her public. To her, it is ideal to share real and human information on an anecdotal level. For example, the last woman Cesar Jentley fell in love with. “My preference is to make people laugh their hearts out and not notice they are learning,” she says.
Griffiths does not think about pleasing the big audience. She believes there are all sorts of people with different opinions and if we stop and think about the negative, we will never move forward. “If one individual is open enough to get something from this work, then it is worth it,” she says.
At some point in her life, she stressed about rocking it to success like a shooting star. “Now I know I am expanding more like a magical cloud,” she says. “It is gentler, less impressive, but it is who I am.”
Cover Photo Credits: Kit Griffiths
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