Ghost Elektra, business queen of the drag night in Paris

“Come on, you radasses!” On stage, Ghost Elektra, a tall, slender pole with a steel blue wig and strapped into a black fishnet jumpsuit, urges her audience to drop a ticket for her performers. “Botox is expensive for my girlfriends!” Her cheekiness, her piquant personality and her appearance are intimidating, with her pin-up look mixed with a Disney villain-style queen of darkness. Known for being one of the builders of the drag night in Paris, the 35-year-old queen is organizing her annual Drag and Queer Market this Sunday in June.Since 2020, the small institution has brought together 80 artisans LGBTQI+ and 3,000 visitors, making it one of the biggest events in the community. A scene that tends to expand, with the recent success of the Drag Race franchise shows, the drag queen talent show. Former candidates including the Swiss Moon and the Spanish Onyx Unleashed join her on stage for the inevitable closing show of the Market, applauded by the audience.

“The drag economy can still grow in France. Ghost is one of the right people to do it,” contextualizes Renata, an exhibitor with her clothing brand Janike Sommar, in an aside. This year, Miss Elektra has for the first time extended its Market outside Paris, to Montpellier, Lyon and Nantes. “She’s done a lot more for the community than she thinks. She has a hard time being appreciated at her true worth,” says Cookie Kunty, a strong personality from the second French season of Drag Race that started at the same time as Ghost. The latter has also disappeared, to let the others shine and return backstage to take charge of the organization. Maybe she’ll stay there. This bit of the stage must be the last lap of the nicknamed “business bitch” of drag.

Boss of Commerce and Tongue of Fire

“You have to get moving, honey.” Backstage, Ghost gently urges a drag queen who hasn’t finished putting on her fake nails. In public, everything is going well! Ghost has her team and her schedule under control. In reality, she easily describes the stress that all this coordination causes her. Which Nathalie, a jewelry designer, confirms: “She’s more sensitive than she seems.” Respected by her peers, the queen has a reputation for being a strong personality.. “It’s not easy to work with her,” admits Cookie Kunty, who gave her her first scene and diagnoses her with (too much?) perfectionism. When it is pointed out to the person concerned that she has a reputation for being a bit “chaotic,” she retorts: “No more than others!”, straight away. She nevertheless admits to having “hot blood” and regrets a few murderous outings on Instagram.

On February 9, 2023, she posted a video where she was neither made up nor dressed in drag. Lenny, the man behind the drag queen, unfolds her journey in front of the camera. Ghost appears a few seconds later, in a fitted pink suit, flaming collar, sculptural blonde wig. In the murderous caption it is written:

“Since I’ll probably never be part of the franchise, here’s my take on season 1 of Drag Race France.”

Although asked to cast for the show, the queen was not selected in the shortlist. Upset at not being selected, she published her application. “It was clearly an act of frustration,” she admits today. She would be too unruly for the show, she thinks she knows. Cookie, her fellow drag pioneer, was notably cyberbullied for her frankness during the broadcast of season 2. “It was just teasing. The public, unfortunately, is not able to see that anymore,” defends Ghost. Who – while praising the role of the show in the relaxation of gender norms in recent years – misses the time when the looks came without fuss from H&M and the jokes were very mocking. “Things that were OK a few years ago are not OK today, sometimes I think it goes too far.” So it was “almost” better before, she complains, adding:

“The reality is, I don’t need this show to be successful.”

Dark Mother

It was in New York, more than ten years ago, that Ghost took his first steps as a club kid, a punk movement similar to drag. His name was directly inspired by his make-up at the time, “with a white complexion, a bit clownish”. At the time, Lenny landed in the Big Apple after making a first stop in San Francisco, Australia. His English studies seem to be a pretext for leaving Val d’Oise, where he grew up with his stepmother. Both his parents died when he was young, he recalls, modestly. Back in Paris, he worked as a freelance translator, but drag is once again coming into his path when a friend offers to do his makeup for a night out:

“I loved the way people looked at me.”

Lenny buys himself a palette of brushes to define the contours of Ghost’s face. Things get serious the day the brunette queen performs at JeudiBarrés, the party hosted by Cookie Kunty in the Bastille district. She chooses a specialty that suits her temperament: fire-breathing.The machine is launched, and everything is to be built:

“When we started, we performed on a 1.50m x 1.50m crate and we were given 30 euros.”

But before he can set the stages of Europe alight, It took a lot of fighting to get drag shows into the evening. With the girlfriends of the time, Ghost throws himself into the battle so that their art is recognized:

“People had a hard time seeing drag as an added value. We were offered to dance like chicks to the DJ’s music.”

Drag is so much more than that, she knows it. Lenny, already popular for her looks on Tumblr, launches Ghost on Instagram, who becomes one of the most followed queens in Europe:

“It sounds ridiculous because I must have had 9,000 followers. But at the time, around 2018, it was a lot!”

“She was terrible, her phone would ring when it was time to post,” recalls her colleague Enza Fragola. “She would stop everything to post. But it was effective.” Today it has almost 40,000 subscribers.. Few queens have accumulated so much without going through the Drag Race box.

Conquer the capital

Ghost Elektra travels, booked in Europe or in USA. The pace accelerated when she launched into event production: tired of having to choose between a drag party or a goth party with her boyfriend, she decided to merge these two worlds. She launched Tech Noire. The company was bold: Ghost had only been doing drag for a year, but it was a success. Thanks to her international network, the organizer brought the Berlin star Hungry – “a girlfriend” – to her first party. Above all, it unites an aesthetic community ranging from punk to horror.. However, we still have to fight to convince places like the Trabendo to accept drag evenings or simply LGBTQI+. Regardless, Ghost fights her way through and becomes the queen of dark queens.

During these years of hard work, she can count on her partner, resident DJ of their party at night and astrophysicist during the day. The passion for music brings them together, but Ghost now manages her evenings alone :

“It’s hard to have two captains on a boat and nightlife is a complicated environment. I don’t know if we would survive with both of us in it.”

Last lap, really?

Covid has been an opportunity for Ghost to change its balance. Its activity is moving to 70% production for around 30% drag – compared to the opposite before the pandemic. However, the event industry is not much more relaxing than drag.. If the Market has been a public success since its first edition in 2020, the donation entries from the first three editions barely allowed the queen to get back on her feet. Which is why it became chargeable in 2024. You have to have strong kidneys to support all that and with age, back problems often make the queen grimace in pain:

“Doing drag five times a week is really letting go.”

She is fed up, she says, with having to be bald and shaved all the time, and of looking like “a tic-tac”. This feeling of loss of self runs through all artists sooner or later according to the pioneer:

“You put on a mask, you create a character, you always have to make people laugh, entertain them and it’s exhausting. Other queens will tell you no, but they’re lying.”

So finished: she just put Ghost away to become Lenny full time again.

This fall, the queen did however make an appearance at the 45th edition of Tech Noire, her club nights. Was it really the last of the last this time? “To others!” reply colleagues who do not believe in this early retirement.. In any case, Lenny is already thinking about his next project: “The reality is that producing events is a lot of work and stress. You have to be in the club every weekend until 8 in the morning, constantly looking to the future [pour anticiper les tendances]. » Opening a cultural venue is one option, “but if it’s something that closes at midnight.”

Article by Apolline Bazin with photos by Louisa Ben.