Opera Tang tells their boyfriend about the way they cough. They put their hand up in front of their mouth like a femme queen. This snippet is part of a larger conversation about the anti-femme sentiment they get from guys they date. It’s a sentiment their boyfriend admits to having before he meets them. This is just one of the things that Lei Yuan Bin’s Baby Queen touches on. It’s a mid length documentary focusing on Opera, who decides to do drag during COVID. They’re part of a growing Singaporean queer community, but they still deal with a conservative city-state and family.

There’s a significant section featuring Opera’s boyfriend, but the documentary’s core relationship is the one between them and their grandmother and the rest of their family. The documentary’s climactic moment is when their family visits Singapore from Europe. Here, Baby Queen shows a sliver of the Catholic Chinese diaspora in which Opera Tang belongs. The doc doesn’t directly correlate the distance between them and their family with their decision to do drag, but it rightfully makes viewers feel the isolation that comes with queerness. Although yes, I do feel as if it needed to explore these dynamics even more.

Surprisingly, Baby Queen‘s depiction of the queer scene in Singapore is less interesting. There’s an uncanny uniformity among queer scenes in the Global North, South, and I guess Singapore belongs in between, as if they’re all copies of the Paris ball. But the progression of these scenes allow for Opera and the Singaporean scene to show what makes them unique. They walk down the runway with a Barbie version of a traditional Chinese gown that their grandmother designed. And for a night, they get to represent their culture, doing so despite the expectations of the heteronormative world.

Toronto – find out how to watch Baby Queen here. The screening follows a discussion that local queens Gei Ping Hohl and Ms. Nookie Galore will lead.