With more restaurants and bars hosting shows, Baton Rouge’s drag scene has gotten bigger than ever.
Heather Prudhomme saw a need for a new platform to connect performers with fans. Thus, Queens of Louisiana was born. Branded as a drag fan club, it began last year as a website for all things drag. Today, it also hosts events and offers services to queens, such as professional photography and boxes of collector cards they can hand out to fans at events.
“I had this idea (to start a fan club) because I’ve always had a love for drag,” she says. “As drag shows shifted from nighttime events to daytime events (such as brunches), I noticed different people of all ages enjoying drag.”
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Prudhomme really can’t remember a time when drag wasn’t a part of her life. Her godfather was a cross-dresser dating back to the 1970s. Around 30 years ago, Prudhomme attended her first show in New Orleans. Ever since, she has made it her mission to show people that drag is an art form, just as much as theater, painting or fashion.
Prudhomme started out by interviewing queens after their performances. She’d quiz them about their favorite things and what they liked about drag. She then created online bios, where fans could learn all about their favorite artists and find out information about upcoming shows.
Now hosting its own events, it regularly sells out of tickets for brunches at venues, such as Brickyard South, as well as the first-ever Drag Bingo at Cheba Hut – Baton Rouge.
It also has a whole team of event planners, photographers and drag lovers to welcome people into the community and allow new talent to find their way. Along with Prudhomme, the group has grown to include Event Coordinator and Promotor Karley Cop; Queen Manager, Event Coordinator and Promotor Tara Hole; and Photographers and Editors Randy Morain and Amber Andre.
Queens of Louisiana is constantly trying to come up with new ideas and events to keep the love for drag alive. Though each member has their own role, everyone is always ready to lend a helping hand to each other, which is why you might see Hole bartending in full drag with Cop to ensure a drag brunch runs smoothly. 
“Our dynamic flows very well,” Andre says. “If somebody is slacking or needs help, there’s always one of us who’s right there to pick it up for them.”
Prudhomme says the growing local interest in drag has allowed her little fan club to grow and flourish into what it is today.
“I think an even bigger wave of growing acceptance is coming,” Andre adds. “It has been coming for a long time in this country, and just took a little bit longer to reach our city. Almost everybody I talked to was so interested in it, even people that I never would have imagined. I hope that it’s kind of a foreshadowing of more acceptance in this area.”
Going forward, the team hopes more drag artists reach out to work with them.
“It would be really awesome if it grew into something like a Yellow Pages for drag,” Morain says.
Prudhomme stresses that all artists are welcome to be a part of the Queens of Louisiana club.
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“We don’t just work with established artists. We also work with new and upcoming ones,” she says. “We do take on a lot of new talent. We take people who’ve never done things like drag before.”
In fact, you don’t even have to be a queen to be a part of Queens of Louisiana—it has worked with drag kings, too. That’s one more way this group is trying to break the ice between the performer and the audience—and move forward to a new age of acceptance. queensoflouisiana.com
This article was originally published in the June 2022 issue of 225 magazine.