Monsieur Bombastic, The Horror-esque Drag King – The People Issue 2024

Orr, who often performs as Monsieur Bombastic, is a concept-driven Chicago-based drag king. His performances straddle themes of body horror, sex, and death.

In his acts, he often puts his body through physical extremes like ingesting ink and spitting it out, or gluing feathers to needles with which he pierces his body. Ore grew up as a visual artist in Texas before moving to Chicago to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has an MFA from the film department there. His bachelor’s, also from SAIC, explored painting and illustration. 

I grew up exhibiting my work at galleries in Texas, Chicago, California, and Germany—I’ve been doing this since I was very, very young. My works were ballpoint ink illustrations. I’ve been on social media since I was 12. When I posted my work online, people took an interest. I couldn’t travel to places like California or Germany, but I either reprinted the work or the curators asked me to ship those drawings. In Germany, I was a semifrequent artist submitter to Semioculus, a collage, dark-art zine collective. My illustrations depicted the human body going through different states of transformation. And while it is perceived as body horror, I try to depict my subject as extracting pleasure from the pain. They’re never literally in pain, but they are embracing those visceral experiences, like bodies melting into their environments, or holding their organs.

I noticed I was developing community online as I was posting my work, and so posting became like a weekly regimen. Fast-forward, I loved video games and wanted to be a video game designer, so I did character-based work. I created characters, wrote stories for them, and had them inhabit worlds. They always had, like, a horror-esque edge to it, because that’s what I was interested in. And then a lot of life changes happened for me. I had a lot of deaths in the family, and I started becoming more and more fascinated with decay and the natural curiosity of life after death. I wanted to be a mortician, so I started doing more anatomical drawings. And that’s when I started getting into more body horror philosophically, where I’d draw inspiration from anatomical medical studies as early as ten. I just continued making these characters, and they grew increasingly less about design and more about just trying to make compositions to express their stories.

Monsieur Bombastic is my nonsensical drag king character who has evolved dramatically over the past two years. I got into drag quietly and secretly. I was in grad school when I started throwing myself on open stages so I could experiment with method acting. At the time, I was writing about a drag performer, and I wanted to get into the drag scene so I could better communicate his story. You can only learn so much from books or being an audience member. 

How do I describe him to you? He’s always been a very unpredictable, chaotic kind of figure who poses to be a very sophisticated gentleman. But he’s proved he has no control of himself. He’s consumed by lust and greed and has always been a tragically written character. So often he dies at the end of the number. He’s spontaneous and all over. I grew up listening to a lot of nu metal and heavy metal, and I wanted a heavy-metal persona. I grew up drawing lots of clowns too, so his appearance is partially inspired by that. But he became his own being. Some of the elements are still there, but now he’s less of a human, and he’s more of a humanesque creature that is battling with very human desires. That’s how most of my performances are developed now. I am transmasc nonbinary, and Monsieur Bombastic is a king. He is masculine but presents very androgynous. 

I grew up drawing lots of clowns.

In one of the more recent burlesque-y acts that I’ve developed, I’m in all black wearing long white hair. I have long elf ears and resemble a dark elf with an eerie, seductive, menacing presence. And Mr. B is singing to a song by Fever Ray, a very queer, trans singer. Fever Ray’s vocal performance is alluring, satisfying, [with an] ethereal voice—but it has a very sharp edge to it, kind of like a snake’s tongue. It’s how I always imagined Lucifer trying to seduce his victims into sin. Mr. B starts off singing that, and as they strip down, they reveal that their body is completely decrepit and covered in gore; it’s rotting. They pretend that they die, and they succumb to this reality—naked but wearing thigh-high boots. I stand there lifeless for a second until it transitions to a death-metal song called “Body/Prison” by Health. It’s very ambient but very rough, dark. 

And so the vibe completely changes, as if Mr. B’s true form has now shown. This is a monster who wants to devour, who’s consumed by lust. The act goes into traditional relaxed moves where I’m grinding on the floor and grinding on my boa almost entirely naked. Eventually I tear off the flesh from my body. It’s designed in such a way that gives a satisfying skin peel until my chest is exposed and, oftentimes, my pasties pop off—or I don’t wear pasties at all. My bare chest is exposed, and it’s regular human flesh underneath. Then I remove what is basically a codpiece that I made out of silicone that resembles a flayed dick. So that’s already there, but I remove the back piece and I reveal a jeweled butt plug. I reveal hole in the club. It was partially inspired by my philosophical research of Georges Bataille. “The Solar Anus” is one of the writings. Bataille talks a lot about sex and death, the corrupt man, and the eroticism of death. I’m very fascinated with the interaction of the little death, of orgasm to dying.

But in the very beginning, I just threw myself on the weekly open stage at Roscoe’s Drag Race every Tuesday night around 11 PM. I would roll into either work or class early the next morning on two or three hours of sleep, a little bit of glitter still plastered on the side of my face. That’s a weekly competition that attracts a lot of up-and-coming performers and artists by virtue of being one of the only open stages around. After my first year performing, I was not only a semiregular face at Open Cabaret at Newport Theater, but I was offered the opportunity to coproduce the first all-king show. 

Monsieur’s journey went from very unruly and pretty unapproachable onstage. And then offstage, I was just very shy and timid. But through the checks and balances of figuring out what it means to be a performer who wants to engage artists and audiences, it’s just been a process of remaining stubborn and continuing to perform whatever opportunity was given to me, and Monsieur naturally evolved. I feel fortunate that I’m pretty comfortable with where I’m at. I’m steadily booked. I’m just going to continue to explore more abstract storytelling visually. I’m going to continue to develop my F/X work and hopefully make engaging stuff for people to enjoy.

This was originally published in the 2024 edition of our People Issue, the Reader’s annual special of first-person stories, as told by your neighbors, classmates, and the weirdo at the end of the bar.