Philly drag king gets the national spotlight in ‘King of Drag’

Painter Joy Taney knows how to awe and unsettle viewers. With dynamic makeup and body painting skills, she has transformed actors into ghouls at Eastern State Penitentiary for Halloween and designed stunning looks for contestants on RuPaul’s Drag Race.

Taney first met RuPaul in 2016 when she competed in Skin Wars: Fresh Paint, which the celebrity drag queen hosted, and won the $10,000 grand prize. With the winnings, the West Philly native relocated back home to work as a professional makeup artist and quickly became a regular behind the scenes of drag shows — and on the three latest seasons of Drag Race — where her talent was sorely sought after.

But Taney had “more outrageous ideas.” She wanted more horror and gore with prosthetics and latex; she wanted something monstrous and extraordinary. Her clients found that too extreme.

“I realized I was having those ideas for myself,” said Taney. “The only person who was really going to be embodying the thing that I was looking for in the drag scene, but wasn’t quite seeing, was me.”

Enter Henlo Bullfrog.

Around 2017, Taney created the stage persona where she could embrace a fantastical mess of a character: “Henlo Bullfrog is Joy Taney’s changeling twin brother who was stolen by the fairies at birth and dropped in a frog pond for 30 years,” she explained.

“He is very fae, but he’s also very monstrous, because he’s a shape-shifter.”

Bullfrog has brought Taney out of dressing rooms of other performers and thrown her into the spotlight with her own brand of dazzling weirdness. Now, Bullfrog has earned a spot representing Philadelphia on the nation’s first-ever drag king reality competition show, King of Drag, now airing on the free LGBTQ+ streaming service Revry.

Philly’s drag and burlesque workshops taught Taney the art of being a drag king — typically a female performer who dresses in masculine clothing and emphasizes gendered stereotypes.

(However, as a queer art form that gleefully blurs gender divides, drag isn’t prescriptive; not all kings are women, not all queens are men, and not all drag looks the same.)

Drag kings constitute a smaller subgenre of mainstream drag, often booking fewer gigs and earning less stage time than the more popular drag queens. That discrepancy has played out on national television, too, as RuPaul’s Drag Race has run for a whopping 17 seasons, expanding with franchise spinoffs like All Stars, before the arrival of King of Drag.

For Taney, becoming a drag king meant experimenting with monster drag, embodying horror characters like the Babadook at Philly Pride Parades, and learning the best ways to showcase her artistic talent onstage at venues like Frankie Bradley’s and Tattooed Mom.

Airbrush makeup is Taney’s speciality, a practice she learned from Philly artist Bryon Wackwitz, who, for years, ran South Street’s Mutt Airbrush and Art Supply.

Unlike performers who rely on dance, Taney lives with a disability called reflex sympathetic dystrophy syndrome that limits her movements. Instead, she focuses on stagecraft, costume transformations, and illusions, like layering makeup to “tear off” her face and reveal gore underneath.

On King of Drag, Henlo Bullfrog delivers a unique amphibious aesthetic that helps him stand out from the other nine contestants.

Nearly a decade into performing drag in Philadelphia, Taney, 38, says the queer nightlife scene has become more welcoming of drag kings. “Philadelphia is gaining a reputation as one of the better cities in the U.S. for drag kings,” she said. “We have the biggest drag king scene I’ve ever seen in Philadelphia right now, in terms of variety of styles of king performance, visuals, and gender expression.”

Philadelphia drag gained more recognition on last year’s season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, which saw the first drag queen to represent the city: the charismatic opera singer Sapphira Cristál.

Taney was part of Cristál’s creative team, airbrushing a bodysuit with fig leaves to evoke Eve in the Garden of Eden and helping design winning looks like the massive flower outfit and the spooky Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater character.

Cristál was a finalist for the crown and won Miss Congeniality.

In classic Philly underdog fashion, some fans believe she was robbed of the title. “People were like ‘RuPaul better not come to Philadelphia. We’re going to fight,’” Taney recalled, laughing.

» READ MORE: How to have a Perfect Philly Day, according to Sapphira Cristál

Taney and Cristál first met when the latter took Taney’s airbrush makeup classes and today they’re close friends; Henlo Bullfrog is part of Cristál’s drag house, which includes about a dozen other local drag performers.

Raised by folk musicians in West Philly, Taney has developed her own musical talent for the stage. As Henlo Bullfrog, she pushes her performances to be more unhinged; Part of the King of Drag audition included a video of Bullfrog playing trombone with his feet. Beyond the folk influence, Taney’s dad, Peter, has been a guiding light for the creation of Bullfrog.

“My dad is so present in Henlo. I contour based on my father’s bone structure,” said Taney. “He’s even done some monster drag with me, and wrote a song called ‘The Ballad of Henlo Bullfrog,’ and we play it together.”

At 75, Peter Taney regularly travels from his home in the Poconos to see drag at Philly nightclubs, and to occasionally participate in local activism. In recent years, the Taneys worked to successfully petition the city to rename Taney Street, which recognized their notorious ancestor Roger B. Taney, the U.S. Supreme Court Justice behind the 1857 Dred Scott decision, which denied humanity to enslaved African Americans and claimed they could never become citizens. That street is now named LeCount, after local civil rights activist Caroline LeCount.

For Joy Taney, performing as a drag king represents another activist practice in the face of the Trump administration’s calls to ban gender-affirming care for transgender youth and attacks on drag performers.

“One of the most fun things about the drag king medium is that you punch up at the people at the very top — the men holding power over all of these systems that are making it worse for all of us,” said Taney. “Drag kings are so perfectly and uniquely posed to make fun of them … It is so punk to queer masculinity right now.”

“King of Drag” airs weekly on Sundays on Revry. On Monday nights, Henlo Bullfrog hosts a watch party for the show at Strangelove’s.