From Peru to Madrid to Long Island: Gad Yola Maps Transnational Drag Iconography

Stony Brook University's campus became a stage for queer, decolonial art as Afro-Peruvian drag artist Gad Yola delivered a lecture and performance of history and activism that ended with a full drag show.

The April 2 event marked the culmination of Yola's residency from March 23 to April 1 and the "Queer Perspectives and Decolonial Aesthetics" workshop series, in which the visiting artist had been working with students to produce an original video that weaves together decolonial aesthetics and drag performance.

The event was organized by the Center for Changing Systems of Power, in collaboration with the Humanities Instituteand the Departmemt of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies.

Manisha Desai, professor and executive director of the center for changing systems of power, described Yola to the audience as a political and cultural force. Born in Lima, Peru and raised in Madrid after migrating at age 10, Yola is the founder of the migrant drag collective Casa Drag Latina, House of Gad and a central figure in debates around race, migration and culture in contemporary Spain.

Desai emphasized that Yola's activism extends beyond the stage. Working alongside NGOs and social movements, she is an active voice in anti-racist campaigns in Spain.

"Her activism is not just related to creativity, but also in changing laws in the country," Desai said, referencing the organizing that helped push the Spanish parliament to regularize hundreds of thousands of migrants.

Yola framed her art around her 2024 album Travesti del Perú, describing it as her main project of the year and the connecting piece between most of her audiovisual and musical work.

The album mixes numerous media to explore identity and intentionality as a queer, migrant person living in Madrid. Its opening track, "Bienvenidos al Museo," questions which bodies and stories are preserved in multicultural institutions.

That question runs through Yola's work. Throughout the talk, she argued for drag as more than entertainment, but a way to archive queer and migrant histories, and to insist on the presence of trans and racialized bodies in spaces that have often excluded them.

"Drag is an activist methodology that operates as a decolonial space for memory and affect, centering migrant and queer bodies," she said. She explained that her performances in clubs, museums, plazas and now classrooms are a part of one coherent political project.

Yola traced a genealogy of anti-racist queer icons and drag queens across the Atlantic. From the United States, she highlighted figures such as William Dorsey Swann, who is often described as the first self-identified "drag queen." She also touched on Crystal LaBeija, whose presence in the 1968 documentary The Queen launched ballroom culture, as well as Marsha P. Johnson, who was a working-class Black trans icon and, Yola noted, "did drag on a budget" with second-hand clothes.

She outlined how early 20th-century travesti and queer performers in Spain were repressed under the Franco dictatorship before a wave of countercultural experimentation that came with La Movida Madrileña. She pointed to institutions like Madrid's Museo Reina Sofía, which now feature queer and trans artists and support feminist and anti-racist projects to show that spaces are opening to these communities.

Yola described Peru's history through a decolonial lens with buried queer stories in Latin America. She told the story of Francisco Pro, who was punished in the 19th-century for cross-dressing in public, and more recently, the work of drag philosopher Giuseppe Campuzano, creator of the Museo Travesti del Perú, an experimental museum archiving queer Peruvian history.

"These moments are tiny in the official narrative," Yola said, "but they show we have always been here."

The heart of Yola's workshops came in the form of a collaborative video created with the help of Stony Brook students. After screening the piece, a collage of dancing, voiceover, drawings, text and music, students took the stage to reflect.

Sara Ray, who supported as an editor and singer for the project, described it as a "massive Frankenstein thing, which is beautiful." She emphasized how each participant brought a different idea or language, and in the end, it only made sense as a collective.

Other students spoke about learning more about queer and Latin American culture and the joy of working on an artistic project that, while still part of school, felt different from the traditional academic style of learning.

The video began with a refrain: "Queer futures are being shaped every time we create imaginaries of living otherwise."

For Yola, that phrase encapsulated what she wanted to teach: that imagining different ways of living, through drag or through art, is itself a form of political action.

After an hour of lecture and discussion, Yola shifted the atmosphere of the event. The lights dimmed and the theatre transformed as she performed original songs including "Travesti del Perú," "Aguanta migranta" and "Make Peru Gay Again."

Between numbers, Yola thanked organizers at Stony Brook for treating her "just like any other artist," which she noted is something that is rarely guaranteed for drag artists.

She closed by reflecting on her own migrant experience and how many in history have experienced suffering to ensure a better future. She also reminded the audience to have hope and understanding to make that future better for themselves.

"What I always say, especially for young queer artists, we don't have to change the world," she said. "We should change the world, and our aim should be that. But as long as maybe we are changing our zip code, as long as we're changing our neighborhood or our own building or our community, that is more than enough."

At Stony Brook, that message took shape in collaboration, through a project that asked students to imagine new ways of living, creating and belonging.

-Lily Miller