You can say many things about Darrin Hagen and his long career in the arts — and over the years, many people have.
But one thing you can’t honestly say is that he lacks confidence in who he is. As fans and friends know well, Hagen is one of the most self-assured people you’ll meet — even for a drag queen.
But growing up in Rocky Mountain House, it took some time for him to see who he was reflected back to him.
“My mom’s wish book when I was in Grade 1 — it says I wanted to be a minister, but I think it was because they were up in front of everybody wearing a dress,” he laughs.
Like the priests he watched from the pews, Hagen’s worn dresses on stages for a while — often at Edmonton Fringe Festival performances through Guys in Disguise, the company he started with husband Kevin Hendricks in 1987 (the couple recently celebrated their 40th anniversary). And he donned a dress to play Fiona in Microwave Coven (co-written and performed with Trevor Schmidt) at last year’s Fringe. But Hagen — who originally wanted to be a composer, not a drag queen — says that could have been his last performance in drag.
“I’ve been trying to leave drag be-hind for decades,” he says. “I remember 10 years ago going, I’m not gonna be a 50-year-old drag queen at the Fringe. Well, I was 60 this year…and I was on stage in drag at the Fringe.” But 40 years after moving to Edmonton as an 18-year-old, and after decades of inhabiting his drag persona, Gloria Hole, Hagen says “I may never wear another dress as long as I live, but I’ll always be a queen. Gloria is no longer running the show, but she still gives me advice.”
While he’s hung up his dress and given his “ruined” feet a break from heels (for now), Hagen says his Queer experience is still the basis of all his storytelling. “I could tell stories about Flashback [Edmonton’s first gay bar, where Gloria Hole reigned supreme] until everyone else around me is dead from boredom, and I would still have lots of material.”
Today, Hagen’s pared his professional work all the way down to simply being a prolific playwright/author, musician/composer and historian, with his long-running Queer History Project being an ever-expanding passion (he also hosts its podcast, From Here to Queer).
The project started as a play, then a book of the same name — Hagen’s 1997 debut, The Edmonton Queen, “the first queer-history book ever written about the underground in Edmonton.” But he didn’t know the book, now in its fourth printing, would send him on a decades-long journey of research and sharing stories of his community’s growing (thanks in large part to his work) voice.
He also wrote and directed the award-winning Pride vs. Prejudice: The Delwin Vriend Story. The film documents Vriend’s firing for being gay, and subsequent fight back, which set off a chain of events that led to marriage equality across Canada.
Hagen likes the sound of adding full-time documentarian to his extensive résumé, “but I’m 60 — how many more fucking career evolutions can I do? I should try and finish the things that I’ve started first,” he says, referring to the “literally thousands of pieces of music I could do something with.”
But for all the good his work has done in bringing what was shadowed into the light, Hagen sees darkness approaching. “It’s fascinating and terrifying to be alive now, where the things that I took for granted a few decades ago — there’s no guarantee they’ll stick around.” Being a “grandma activist,” Hagen says he’s “exhausted even reading about” what younger people in his community now face, because “frankly, I’m not fighting on the frontlines anymore.”
Despite the dark, and after decades of fighting for his community through activism and art, the ever-confident Hagen seems to be entering a more introspective phase.
“I think everybody has a fascinating life, but so many people are so tuned out to their own experiences. They don’t see the magic in what’s happening around them. They don’t see the symbolism in things that they are surrounded by. And I think writing has really forced me to re-examine my life as a piece of art, and look at it as a palette of colours that I pull from. This could apply to anyone: You have to learn to treat your life like something that’s worth being inspired by.”
This article appears in the Jan/Feb 2025 issue of Edify
