Under fluorescent stage lights at a bar outside of Louisville, Baby St. Jane strips off her burgundy gown to reveal a black lingerie bodice. The room shakes with hoots and hollers from the audience as the Appalachian drag queen — born and raised in rural Kentucky — seems to glimmer on stage in her electric blue wig. 

St. Jane lives in Louisville now, but she was born and raised in Clay County — a small Eastern Kentucky county with a population of just over 20,000. Although she has always been proud of her Appalachian identity, she centered it within her drag, and through a character her friend dubbed “the Hillbilly Harlot.”

“People come up to me that love me because I’m so open about being from Eastern Kentucky, and being Appalachian, because they have suppressed that part of them, and they love that I embrace it,” St. Jane said. “I guess because they feel like it was just shoved out of them or pushed aside, so they felt like they had to assimilate. I also feel like in a lot of alternative queer spaces, people still don’t really like country music.” For her, performing as a queer hillbilly also means reclaiming the queerness of the Kentucky foothills. 

As a kid, St. Jane was introduced to drag through the internet, including MySpace and “Club Kids” videos on YouTube. She loved the costumes, makeup and wigs, which led her to study theater at Berea College. 

Evenings and weekends were spent at Eastern Kentucky University drag shows, and when she turned 21, bars in Lexington. In these moments, she dreamed of becoming a drag queen, but at the time, there was pushback about cisgender queer women performing. She had also faced fatphobia all her life, and struggled to feel sexy and attractive. 

“You’re seen not as a sexual being or a potential partner, boyfriend, or girlfriend … you have no sex,” she said of being plus size. “You’re like this ungendered being.”

Performing as Baby became a way to recenter her beauty and sexuality, as well as to reconnect with her Appalachian roots. Living in Louisville, people had accused her of faking her accent and would “comically” repeat what she said back to them or ask her to say specific things, believing it was her “shtick.” But being the Hillbilly Harlot means “I’m a hillbilly, I’m an Appalachian,” St. Jane said. “I’m going to talk funny. I’m going to do country music. And then ‘harlot’ because I’m sexy. I’m slutty. I’m going to take your man.”

And she’s not alone: her close friend and fellow drag performer, Coal, the Appalachian Queen, also uses camp to unpack the hillbilly stereotype. 

When Coal was younger, they had a similar awakening at a Nashville gay bar seeing “queens perform the Chicks, or Dolly, or people I had grown up hearing. It felt like a representation of the place that I was from, that I felt shunned me because I was gay.”

It was then Coal realized the pieces of their dual identity weren’t necessarily at odds and could, in fact, coexist.

“It felt like the two parts of myself that in my history had felt most at war with each other, being gay and being a hillbilly, being Appalachian, being from East Kentucky, so I felt like drag is in its essence political, it’s about making a statement,” Coal said. “It’s about putting on a persona that is larger than life and kind of untouchable, and I wanted to do that with those two pieces in particular, the things that had been the longest journey for me to understand and accept.”

And the two had more in common than they had at first thought.

“Maybe it’s because there’s queerness represented [in Appalachia], or campiness, or drag, over the top performance of gender, femininity, all the glitz, glamor, and sparkle,” Coal said. 

For both Coal and Baby St. Jane, drag is a way to poke holes in exaggerations of gender, of hyperfemininity and alpha masculinity that they found to be so stifling in their Appalachian home towns. 

By “camping up” the redneck hillbilly trope or stereotype, Coal hopes that “people start to understand this is what I thought of whenever I thought of an Appalachian, but to see if it so exaggerated and over the top and silly and funny helps me to understand that that is a limiting representation.”

St. Jane agrees with Coal. On stage in her curly red wig and pink cowboy hat, her drag manages to both challenge the image of the “trashy redneck” and reclaim and revel in the queer mountains.  

“To me, the Appalachian part of our country, we are like the crazy aunts that they keep up in the attic,” she said. “We are the people in those disappointment rooms or forget-me rooms where you used to put your different siblings that you wanted to hide away from the world. We’re ashamed as a country of Appalachians, and that’s who we always can fall back on.”