Bebe Zahara Benet, Live from Cameroon

Photo: Terry Hastings

When a performance artist moves from Minneapolis to New York City they usually arrive with a big learning curve, a hope and a dream. Bebe Zahara Benet, the winner of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” a drag reality contest on LOGO, arrived some heavy-ass wigs, a whole lot of leopard print clothing and a demand for respect. And when a 6”3 Amazonian with piercing eyes and sultry lips asks for your attention, you give it.

The first time I ever spoke on the phone to Bebe, whose name is also Nea Kudi Marshall, I expected to hear regal tones and a detached sense of kindness—she comes across as a  camp African queen, after all. Instead it was easy, like calling an old friend to chat over a cup of chai. Her rich West African accent is full of warmth, cooing and chuckling—Benet loves to emphasize words in a theatrical way that is a hallmark of a good storyteller, one of her many talents. Despite the detached voice I felt her great sense of humor.

A lot wiser than her 25 years would seem to allow, Benet arrived in Minneapolis by way of Cameroon and Paris four years ago. She ended up a regular at La Femme Show, a drag review in Minneapolis where she became the star of the evening, performed 5 nights a week for a mostly straight crowd. The experience honed her drag claws for the big competition that spawned a national tour with Absolut vodka, profiles and press mentions and most recently the recording of a new album. She just released her first single, also a music video with a very self-assured title: “I’m the Shit.”

It’s a pop song although some might read it as a bitch track (a loosely used term for a song by a drag artist full of snappy insults), but for Benet it’s simply about confidence and commanding respect. In the video Benet is featured in innumerable outfits that show off her various styles: a severely bobbed teacher in a high-waisted pencil skirt; a severely African lust goddess with long, air-blown teased hair and a leopard print cat suit; a serious of couture runway looks: high shoulders, hooded coats and just endless silhouettes. The whole project, from this song to the rest of her album, all came together when she collaborated with her tour DJ, producer and circuit star Mark Picchiotti.

“And trust me, I don’t curse!,” she told me in a more recent interview. “Anyone who knows me will say that I do not curse. But I think “I’m the Shit” works for what I’m trying to say. Does this really define who I am as an artist? No but it’s a good introduction and I hope to find out.”

Her album will be much more Afropop, which is this artists’ genre of choice. Bebe loves her roots and culture but can be fairly shy about talking about specifics. Like many Africans she is a polyglot, speaking English and French in addition to her father’s language, Manta, and her mother’s Balingu—although she said she’d like to learn a “world language,” like Chinese. Hailing from Cameroon, the life of a prenatal drag queen growing up in West Africa is not easy, and often lonely. According to Benet there’s no visible gay culture, which was both helpful and hindering.

“They would look and say ‘oh, he’s different,’ but it wasn’t like ‘he isn’t a boy.’ It was a lot of why why why—so you can have your questions but you will not have any answer,“ says Benet. Not having to attach oneself to a particularly label is quite liberating, she insists, and it allowed her to develop a beneficial self-exploratory inner dialogue she describes as “speaking to myself.” It’s Benet’s key to self-love and acceptance.

Describing herself (or himself, as pronouns flow freely whenever one discusses anything personal, as with most drag queens), as “naturally feminine,” Benet was lucky to have parents that didn’t push the young Nea to do typical boy things. “I didn’t have to put up a front, I didn’t have to be a macho person,” she says.

Her story of growing up in a not-so-restrictive environment is unique among African boys. Cameroon has a heavily masculine culture with no room for alternative sexualities. Indeed, several times she insists there was nobody else like her around. Anywhere. In the boarding school she attended in high school, Bebe made a point to be outgoing, friendly and involved in every club activity—rather than sit in a corner awaiting insults, she was making friends with all of the popular kids and pursuing various interests in fashion, music and performance. “If I got into all these things, I became the star in the drama club or in the music club, or this or that, as long as I was involved it would work for me and I’d be a popular kid,” she explains.

The character of Bebe was born while traveling with Cameroonian designers to a Paris runway show as a male model—one of the female models was nowhere to be found, so they put Nea into her look—a queen literally born on the runway. The rest is history, but American history—the great land of opportunity that Benet has seen far and wide thanks to our collective love of vodka and spokesmodels.

While on her North American tour Benet got a taste of just how far her efforts have pushed her into national recognition. A big surprise was meeting numerous suburban girlfriends and wives who got their macho husbands and boyfriends to watch the show (“…you would not even think they would watch Drag Race,” she says emphatically), who would tell her how inspiring the Bebe persona is. Or perhaps the time a five-year-old girl came up to her while passing through security at the Louis Armstrong airport in New Orleans and simply asked, “Are you Bebe?”

“I turned around and I looked at her and I said, ‘Who’s Bebe?’ and she said ‘Well you know, you know that show.” And I said, “What show?” And she said, ‘That Rupaul show.’ And I said yes!” Benet cackled delightfully while telling this.

“And she just turned around and went to her momma and started screaming, Momma, I told you mama, I told you!”

It proved to be a very emotional moment for the young African. “Who would think that a mom is going to sit at home with their 5-year-old daughter or son to watch Drag Race?” she asks. Hearing on the tour that people were inspired by her persona empowers her to push the career even more, “It gave me more fire, not that I didn’t have it before. Just added more gas, you know,” she says, laughing.

Her ability to communicate with people emboldens her drive towards personal goals and causes. And she has a lot of both. Benet wants to be a pop singer and a maven of African fashion—she already sees inspiration “drawn from African trends” in colors, prints, and the way things are sewn on catwalks here, and wants to add her own style to the mix. She wants to bring her act to Cameroon (no easy feat) but also raise awareness for AIDS, education, and shed some light on the seemingly nonexistent gay life there. And she wants to save the animals.

“People talk about the safaris and the jungle and for people it’s a fantasy, but there are so many of those animals that are really endangered,” she says “One of the treasures we have in Africa is the wildlife, as much as it’s called ‘wildlife’ because your life is in danger when you go there to see it! Of course, you go with a guide, but trust me, you don’t want to be eaten by no cheetah…”

Benet credits her sense of humor and fun to years of building confidence, which according to her takes “lots of speaking to yourself,” which is allowing for a self-exploratory inner dialogue—the one she used as a youth in Africa to cope with being different from everybody else.

In my first interview with Bebe, she told me that drag has power. She’s since moved to New York and loves the city’s energy and is already looking for a venue to set up a weekly show, although she’s still green enough that the subway is scary to her (“it’s so dirty and it feels like a horror movie!”). For her, the power of drag is to get people to listen, to command respect and deliver her message.

“When you get into that persona and go through that transformation, you feel strong and powerful. You can use it to your advantage as well as your disadvantage,” she explains.

By disadvantage, she means the great number of queens who become snubbish, bitchy or rude once they transform. There were several on the show, and New York City is chock full of these Queens (if you need a reference point, do a YouTube search for Bianca Del Rio—she makes Joan Rivers seem like Joan of Arc). These alter egos often drink more, are obnoxious or ignore people altogether, says Benet. She also admits that it’s easier to be negative in drag than it is to be positive.

“And that has a lot to do with people who have not spent time with themselves, and not really think about who they are and accept themselves. Accept the situation that define themselves just being human beings,” she says knowingly.

But you can flip the script and become a nicer person, one who is bold and not shy, she says.

“We drag queens are political figures,” she says, “whether people like it or not. By putting on a wig, we make a statement and give voices to people. Even just lipsynching expresses a certain emotion or sends out a particular message.”

Bebe, unlike many angrier queens, is engaging and friendly in drag. She’s definitely playful and perhaps a little bit grandiose, but after several weeks working under the scrutiny of RuPaul, striving to be larger-than-life will do that to you. And with forty pounds of carefully teased hair on her head (around the diameter of a beach ball), you can’t help but feel the power of her movements.

 Related posts:

1. Bebe Zahara Benet | ‘I’m The Sh*t’ Snap, snap, snap. Following in a long line of Drag Performers who come out with dance single, “Ru Paul’s Drag Race” winner, Bebe Zahara...
2. Financing BeBe Zahara Benet’s Story OUT OF AFRICA // Of the many memorable contestants on RuPaul’s Drag Race, winner and reigning diva, BeBe Zahara Benet stands apart — if not...
3. BeBe Zahara Benet’s Big Bash @ BLVD ALL CYLINDERS FIRING// Queen BeBe Zahara Benet wowed the audience last night with a piston-popping performance at BLVD that showed us exactly why her...
4. Mimi Imfurst Reveals Where a Drag Queen Stashes Her Tips INSERT HERE// Mimi Imfurst gives away one of her secrets at BeBe Zahara Benet’s documentary fundraiser earlier this week. ...
5. RuPaul Werks it Out: A TV show, a Book deal, and Billboards galore LET’S BE REAL: RuPaul has taken over New York City. Her p*ssy-perfect picture is plastered on subway ads, the sides of buses and every...