Celebrating the Queens and Kings
of Santa Barbara
From Wildcat to Eos to Trivia Nights,
Here’s the Tea on the Drag Scene
By Christina McDermott | June 4, 2026
Read more from our Santa Barbara County Pride cover story here.
A dynamic drag scene thrives in Santa Barbara. Queens and kings alike give us campy and artistic, silly and sexy. From ballads at brunches to death drops at club nights, the welcome and joy that drag fosters flourishes here. To help tell the story, here are just a few of the dozens of performers who shape Santa Barbara’s scene.
From the Chameleon to the Oak Park
BellaDonna SantaBarbara’s first drag performance was at the Chameleon club in 1997, and she still has the eyelashes she wore that night to prove it.
The club, a gay bar on the corner of Cota and Olive streets, was hosting a drag show. BellaDonna got up the courage to put together her act, but she hadn’t fully grasped just how dramatic a drag performance should be until she was getting ready backstage.
As she was putting on the drugstore eyelashes she had just bought, the more experienced drag queens performing that night were aghast. What in the world, they asked, are those things? Then, one queen, Natasha Camille, pulled out of her bag a pair of eyelashes that BellaDonna remembers were “as big as my hands.”
But she accepted Natasha Camille’s offer and stepped out wearing those eyelashes with her long, bleached blond hair flowing (no wig required) and performed Fleetwood Mac’s “Silver Springs.” The rest is history.
BellaDonna was 30 at the time and has never forgotten how the community “welcomed me with open arms.”
A few years later, the promoter of the popular French Festival at Oak Park asked BellaDonna to host a show for the annual weekend event. It was a huge hit, and BellaDonna emceed the event for 21 years before passing the torch to her friend Miss Kitty. (The French Festival closed during the pandemic and has not reopened.)
BellaDonna has watched how, over the last 30 years, the opportunities for a drag career have changed significantly. Except for tips, she said, “we weren’t getting paid. Sometimes the tips were amazing, but it was really just working for drink tickets.” Now, BellaDonna sees queens who can make drag their occupation.
BellaDonna was performing when Santa Barbara still had gay bars. After those queer designated bars went out of business, the regular shows shifted to queer-friendly spots such as the Wildcat Lounge. BellaDonna hosted shows with Miss Kitty there until a few years before the pandemic. Queen Divinity Za, who hosts Exotic Bratz Nights there every third Sunday, said Sunday nights were (and are) Wildcat’s dedicated LGBT+ night.
“The Wildcat has always been a place that felt like home. I never felt threatened there,” BellaDonna said. “The owners, Bob Stout and Dawn Manolakos, always had our backs.”
Welcome to Wildcat
Every Sunday around 11 a.m., people pack into the Wildcat for Glitter Brunch. Founded seven years ago by two popular queens, Vivian Storm and Angel D’mon, it is a space for everyone, straight or queer, who is respectful and open.
Since arriving in Santa Barbara in 2016, Vivian Storm has become a leader in the community and a mentor to younger queens. For Vivian, leadership means building a culture of mutual support among performers and care for the audience, one she’s seen evolve over the past decade.
Vivian believes that “drag queens are mayors of their communities,” she said. “I think we have this incredible ability to read hearts in a room…. I think we have this sort of superpower, and I don’t want to use it for bad.”
In her performances, Angel D’mon moves with fluidity and ease. A professional dancer for 18 years, she started performing drag in 2019 at a Sunday night Wildcat show. But after the COVID-19 shutdown, she and Vivian Storm saw how much the scene had diminished.
“There was a point where I only felt that it was me and Vivian. I’m like, ‘Where is everyone else?’ ” she said.
In response, the pair started a drag boot camp called Glam School. They arranged makeup and sewing lessons, dance performance coaching, and photoshoot sessions. The goal was to grow the community. It worked.
Melina Felix Poinsettia was in her last semester of nursing school when she went to Glitter Brunch at Wildcat Lounge in 2022. “I saw Vivian and Angel perform, and it just clicked immediately,” she said. “I’m like, ‘I know what this is. I recognize it. It’s what I’m meant to do.’ ”
Melina attended the Glam School’s four-week program that summer and made her debut at Wildcat later that year. When Vivian decided to move out of town for a while, Angel invited Melina to help her co-host Glitter Brunch.
Around Town
Not all drag happens in nightclubs and at brunches. Take, for example, Pitch Please, a karaoke night that queen Maplé Noir Icon and her boyfriend host at Whiskey Richards every Thursday. Or, on the final Thursday of the month, around 7 p.m., you can head over to Cider Co. in Goleta for trivia, hosted by queen Aria Cummingtonite, who in her boots stands at well over 6’3″.
Friday Nights at Eos
Barbara is a show (and a mannequin head) held every second Friday at Eos that queens Aria Cummingtonite, Jaundice Joplin, Linda, and Cherry Von Illa started last year.
Aria Cummingtonite, who had to explain to me that Cummingtonite is a mineral, not just a dirty joke, has been performing drag since her undergraduate days. When she arrived at UC Santa Barbara for her PhD program, Maplé gave her a paid gig at the now-closed Crush Bar. After meeting Jaundice Joplin and Linda, also PhD students, the trio started a drag club at UCSB, named (aptly) Drag Club at UCSB. Queen Cherry Von Illa was its first member. In February 2025, the four performed at First Fridays, a gay pop-up bar that rotates around Santa Barbara.
God Doesn’t Need to Save the Kings (They’re Doing Fine)
Drag kings don’t generally get the media spotlight, but kings have performed in Santa Barbara for decades. BellaDonna recalls a group from the late ’90s called the Disposable Boy Toys, as well as a solo performer named Bo Flex.
Mister Frankie Sister was born and raised in Santa Barbara. He performed in New York City in the ’90s before returning to his hometown about 10 years ago. This year, he took out his moustache and has been working to help younger kings get their start. For him, performing as a king is a way to push the limits of masculinity, either exaggerating it or blurring its lines with femininity.
A young Santa Barbara king, 19-year-old Ill Will, agrees with Frankie. His character, that he describes as having a ringmaster aesthetic, is a parody of the Great White American Male ideal.
Drag Now
Most of the performers I spoke to said Santa Barbara is largely safe and welcoming, but it comes with some pushback. Melina Poinsettia received a barrage of hateful comments on a post of her from SBCC’s Pride event, and Angel D’mon encountered protests in front of a Crafter’s Library storytime. Notably, counter-protesters vastly outnumbered protesters.
Melina said in the everyday, she receives “beautiful energy” from strangers around town. “Catch me at CVS, trying to get some hairspray before a show in full drag, and I always get complimented,” she said. “It’s important that we don’t let negativity diminish our light.”
On the national scale, drag is both commercially popular, from TV shows to themed restaurants, but also a political talking point. Tennessee and Texas moved forward with anti-drag legislation in the last six months alone.
What does it mean, that drag can be both celebrated and demonized, commercially successful and subversive? “I think drag, in and of itself, is always subversive, even if it is mainstream,” Linda said. For her, drag is both a means of self-expression and a rejection of gender norms so that regardless of how “commercially acceptable” your drag is, she said it’s still able to be attacked by people looking to reinforce gender binaries.
Vivian Storm said that by making drag a “talking point” and attacking it, people can try to eliminate the joy it brings. But the talent from the queens she sees, and the shows they put on, and the joyful spaces they create, will always outweigh the hate.
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