When I was 20 years old, I started writing a play called Trophy Boys.

A camp extravaganza starring femme and non-binary folks in drag as the awful private school boys of your dreams/nightmares, it features a strip tease to ‘Grind on Me’, copious amounts of Lynx Africa and a moment where my ‘woke male feminist’ character gropes a poster of Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

I clearly had some demons to channel.  

All production images by: Ben Andrews

It was 2021. Four Corners had just “burst the Canberra bubble” with its exposé on the alleged historical sexual assault perpetrated by then Attorney General Christian Porter at a high school debating tournament. As a former high school debater, this news haunted me in ways I could never have anticipated.

At this point, I had long since abandoned the world of competitive debating, youth politics and pretending to be in the UN (vomits). Instead, I’d run away from Sydney to Melbourne the second I graduated, rebranded as a queer creative and decided I would change the world through artmaking, community-building and righteous rage.

I wasn’t hanging out in Parliament with the self-proclaimed “leaders of tomorrow” (vomits again), I was hanging out in gay clubs with drag kings, queens and my chosen family of misfits.

So, what did my queerness have to offer me – an aspiring writer who wanted to call out the patriarchal violence and rape culture of ‘elite’ private school boys – besides an increasing frustration at auditioning for the same demure female roles over and over again?

As I soon discovered, everything!

Mainstream discussions of feminism have long expressed how cis women ought to take on ‘masculine qualities’ to become more assertive and autonomous. Likewise, discussions of misogyny and rape culture have focused extensively on the crisis of ‘toxic masculinity’.

But I was more interested in how these gendered qualities are learnt, in particular how young men are taught to perform masculinity to survive the high school pecking order, and in so doing, succumb to pressures to become tough, unfeeling and unrelenting.

As it turns out, my experience of writing, rehearsing and performing as a teenage boy taught me more than I could’ve ever imagined – not just about the dangers of this performance of toxic masculinity, but about how queering it in our art is one of the most powerful weapons we have to dismantle it.

When we started rehearsals for Trophy Boys, our cast had to make big changes. We worked to drop our voices, change our physicality and take up space. Soon this became psychological, almost freeing, in how we no longer felt we had to shrink ourselves to be palatable, likeable or beautiful.

Conversely, we were hyperaware of the dangers of being perceived as feminine. One of our cast members interviewed the men in her life for instructions on how to perform as ‘a man’, and they provided her with a rigid list of things they made sure to never do in public. We policed our postures for popped hips, limp wrists, feminine affectations or too much inflection in our voices.

Our physicality was one of the first things our audiences remarked on. By embodying markers of masculinity as non-cis-male performers, we could demonstrate some absurdity within these gestures.

For example, our performance of man-spreading in Trophy Boys appeared for what it actually was: clownish, ridiculous and often grotesque. Some audience members would suggest our man-spreading had to be caricaturised, only to step back into the outside world and notice how men were sitting like that all the time. One woman even told me the show encouraged her to call her husband out on his man-spreading!

Performing in Trophy Boys, we also discovered how to dismantle the pervasive threat of masculinity through the comedy inherent to the queer forms of drag, camp and satire. Having female and genderqueer bodies in the space acting as men was a reclamation of power. Continuing a long history of drag kings and other genderbending performance artists, we were able to mock our oppressors and our audiences knew we were in on the joke, and finally felt safe to laugh at them.

In a world where it feels so dangerous to be a woman or a genderqueer person, this was a deep catharsis for many in the audience, and a revelatory way of seeing and being for many men. For the queer folk in the space, it was something more exciting altogether.

This was my biggest discovery: the possibilities for revolutionary queer joy that introduced the playful to the political.

Teenagers spoke about the show inspiring them to try drag, our cast all became dear friends, our memes went viral. With our generous audiences, we saw the way the binary and its rigid gender roles were hurting us all, and how moving beyond them was what was going to ultimately free us.

Like many queer folk, I believe that gender is a performance, and one worthy of interrogating. But more than that, I believe that queer people – many of whom refuse to be boxed in by society’s rigid binary – should have a place at the forefront of any movement interested in dismantling destructive gendered expectations.

Our conversations about masculinity and gendered violence going forward must be informed by radical thinking if we want to have any hope of change. I hope that Trophy Boys can be a part of this movement.

A lot has changed since I started writing, but a lot remains the same… or even worse.

As I write this with our national tour looming, a private school in Melbourne has suspended its students for describing female students as “unrapeable”. Meanwhile, over 30 women have been killed by male violence already this year.

Meanwhile, meanwhile, meanwhile.

And yet, meanwhile, we’ve managed to get Trophy Boys in high school curriculums. We’re doing Q&As with students, and we’re being produced by one of the very women who came forward against Christian Porter to support her late friend at great personal cost.

I’m so thrilled to share this very special work with audiences, and emboldened by hope that we’re on the precipice of making big, queer change.

Image by: Shani Hadjian.

Trophy Boys is touring at the following venues in 2024:

• Geelong Arts Centre, June 14-15
• Sydney’s Seymour Centre, June 19-July 7
• Arts Centre Melbourne, July 16-21
• St Albans Bowery Theatre in Melbourne, July 16
• The Art House, Wyong, August 2-3
• Canberra Theatre Centre, August 6-10