Interview: Divina De Campo - I Do Think

Divina De Campo, a Yorkshire drag queen with two decades of experience in the industry and star of the first-ever series of RuPaul’s Drag Race UK, is bringing her latest tour ‘I Do Think’ to Birmingham’s Eden Bar in May.

Despite the tour having a title that is inspired by an iconic Drag Race moment, Divina explains that this tour is slightly “different” from previous shows “in that it's a bit more personal.”

They tell Midlands Rainbow: “You know, after a certain age, you do some work on yourself, you kind of learn things about yourself. You have some therapy. So, there's some of that. There's lots of terrible dad jokes because I love dad jokes; they're my absolute favourite, which I think people expect from me. There's lots of songs, lots of foolishness. There's lots of stories about my life. You know, I'm now, somehow an elder at 40. But I think some of that is because a lot of the generation above are not here.

“I'm always trying to find some levity in situations which can be difficult, you know, because I grew up at a time where that was essential. You had to be able to make fun of what the situation was at the time. And you know, after the [Supreme] Court ruling today, still is.”

“All of this comes down to people feeling dispossessed in their own country, and they feel dispossessed because everybody is struggling to survive at the moment because the people right at the top are extracting so much money out of everybody else that [they’re] disenfranchised. You're not able to engage with the world in a thoughtful manner because you're just fighting to survive.

 “You know, the fact that people are fighting to survive [means] they are easily distracted and easily weaponized against a minority… First it was Asian people, Muslims, people from Black and minority ethnic background. Then it was gay people. Then they were like, 'Oh, actually, not the gays and the trans. Let's, let's vilify the migrants'… So, the playbook is really obvious."

“For this show I started with, which I think is a great place to start with any show, 'what's the emergency?' And the emergency is that we are so divided. And it's intentional, you know, it's part of the system to divide us so because there's so many more of us, if we stand together in solidarity, actually, we have the power.

“If you can reach a hand across the proverbial aisle to somebody that you don't necessarily agree with on everything, but you understand that they have needs, and most of what they need aligns with most of your needs as well. We need decent living standards, decent income, rent controls, we need to be able to live, you know, and not just exist, which I think, is what a lot of people are going through at the minute. So, what is the emergency? Radical kindness.

“We need to be kinder to each other. And sometimes that's being honest and truthful. You know that the world is complicated, and it's not one or the other. It's not binary, just like sex isn't binary. You know, the [Supreme] court judge saying that sex is binary, is factually incorrect; scientifically, medically, clinically incorrect. That is not what human sex is. That's not how it works. It works on like a bell curve, and there are all kinds of people in between.

Divina adds though that her upcoming show “is very much like an escape" from the news.

“We're not coming for a two-hour TED Talk. We're going to have a lot of fun. We're going to sing some silly songs. There's lots of silly visuals and videos and stuff that I've been working on, and I've been hammering out this script with lots of really stupid jokes in there. And so, it's just going to be fun. But the overall message is that we just have to be kinder to each other. I mean, essentially, what I'm doing is I'm slagging off everything. So, it's two hours of me slagging everything and everybody off, to then say we also need to be kind. Because, like I said this, there's a kindness in truth.”

Divina De Campo’s ‘I Do Think’ tour comes to Eden Birmingham on Thursday 8th May. Tickets are on sale now.

Stay tuned for part two of the interview, where we talked about ‘Dragged to the Musicals’ coming to to several venues across the Midlands including Worcester, Coventry, Leicester, Wolverhampton, Solihull, and Lichfield later this year.