Boracay. The sun-drunk slice of chaos at the heart of the archipelago, where sand is sugar-powder-fine, the waves chant love songs, and capitalism wears SPF 100++. You’d think a place this flamboyant would have queer culture spill from every beachfront shop, with drag queens grazing between mango shake stalls and souvenir kiosks. But irony loves a good tan, and on this loud and hedonistic island, there’s only one such proud venue.
Tucked in a nondescript alleyway between the main road and Station 2’s beach is Rainbow Cafe, where pride flutters like a stubborn heartbeat. One can find it by following the sound of cackles and Lady Gaga’s Chromatica remix echoing off its bamboo walls. It’s not the kind of place you stumble upon; it’s one of those you get initiated into. Inside, under the canopy of Christmas lights that have seen better Decembers, queens step onto the middle of the hall and hold court like they have the Sistine Chapel over their heads.
The drag queens of Boracay are a different breed altogether. Forget the polished Instagram looks of pandemic-era ingenues or the stunt-heavy production of Manila’s drag circuit. Here, the queens are earnest, scrappy, and deliciously unfiltered.
These queens, though mostly young, hold on to what old-school drag used to have: irreverence. The kind that remembers drag not as a commercial commodity, but as a kind of rebellion in sequins. They carry the spirit of those who started it all; the pillars who came before drag became a hashtag, when it was still about subverting narratives and a cry for acceptance, when glamour was forged from courage, not sponsorship, when a queen could hold an entire room captive with nothing but tattered heels, a borrowed wig, and a soul too large for her skin.
This is what makes Boracay’s drag scene oddly sacred. In a way, these queens are modern-day babaylan—the precolonial shamans once revered for their connection to both the divine and the carnal. The babaylan were the original gender-benders, the keepers of art, memory, and ritual. They, too, subverted earthly systems by giving a proverbial middle finger and existing outside of them. Today, under disco lights instead of moonlight, these queens carry that same spirit. They summon laughter, heal heartbreaks, and, between tuck adjustments, remind us who we are when the world isn’t looking.
I grew up in a decade when queer representation had a kind of raw, unpolished power. I vividly remember the first “drag” character I ever saw, which was in the late 1980s during our town’s fiesta. A Grace Jones impersonator stormed the stage. By “stage” I mean a makeshift platform of coconut lumber planks balanced on six crude oil barrels. She didn’t just strut. She didn’t tumble. She performed a magic trick. From beneath a sheet, a pigeon appeared and, to the horror and awe of the sun-drenched, sweat-stenched crowd, she bit the pigeon’s head off, blood streaming from her mouth. On that bootleg stage, she literally “ate” that performance.
My jaw dropped like a dumb fish. At eight years old, I couldn’t reconcile what I had just witnessed. The shock value left an indelible impact on me, and the memory clings like glitter on skin, impossible to wash off. Maybe that’s why I look at the queens of Boracay with such reverence. Here, when a queen struts with sand between her toes and wigs sticky with salt breeze, I see the same defiance. The same hunger. The same madness that makes their art sacred. While the new generation of queens often settle on serving “fresh face” on TikTok, mine were serving raw pigeons à la Grace Jones on oil barrels.
It’s almost poetic how Boracay mirrors the brand of drag it has. The sunsets never fail, painting the sky in a gradient that could rival any eyeshadow palette. The sea keeps returning to fluff the shore, no matter how many tourists trample it. In that same way, the queens of Boracay keep showing up despite the mug melting, heels sinking into sand: to prove that art doesn’t need a stage, only an audience generous enough to throw a thunderous applause.Perhaps, that’s the most honest thing about this chaotic paradise in Aklan. In that cramped little alley, between the road and the sea, beneath the noise of Budots and the tacky neon signs, the island’s truest voice still wears six-inch heels and knows exactly how to dance in them.
