Ivy: Wellington’s Home for Wayward Queens
Ivy Bar and Cabaret is a gay club found on Wellington’s iconic Cuba Street. The bar is home to Wellington’s ever-growing drag and LGBT+ communities, as it is a safe and inviting space for us. I chose Ivy for this project because it is integral to many of the relationships I have formed in Wellington. I have found my place in this city because of the opportunities this space has given me and the people it has put into my life. Drag as an art form is still a very niche thing, and it is a subculture that encompasses a lot of different aspects of my personality and interests. Having a space that allows me to meet like minded people made my transition to Wellington all the easier. I have found mentors through my drag family who have shown me the ropes and given me opportunities that I wouldn’t have had given to me anywhere else. I am now employed as a drag queen in a performance group, I am a paid performer and have been given other work opportunities just by creating my drag persona, Violet Tendencies.
I feel as though if you are not part of one of these communities, you would not hold the same perspective of Ivy as I do. Ivy is predominantly represented through social media via personal profiles of the patrons and performers of the bar. Although Ivy has an online presence itself through a Facebook page and Instagram profile, these accounts are mainly managed by the bartenders, who are often performers at Ivy and the local drag queens. Ivy’s Facebook and Instagram profiles combined have a following of 5,462 people whereas the combined follower counts of the queens and other performers that represent this space is well over 15,000. The social capital of Ivy’s ‘official’ online presence is vastly different to that of Ivy’s ‘unofficial’ presence online, demonstrating how Ivy is typically represented moreso by the community that uses the space than the space itself, which is discussed in "Branding In The Post-Internet Era." where the brand manager (Ivy) is no longer a `guardian' that is responsible for its own representation of the brand but becomes more of a brand `host' (Christodoulides, George).
This space is represented using a number of different platforms and their varying affordances (Hutchby, Ian). Queens and patrons often use Snapchat and Snapchat stories with geofilters or captions that promote Ivy during live shows or when events are held, signalling to friends around the Wellington region as to what is happening at the bar with real time updates. This also happens on Instagram. Instagram also affords performers to promote shows and events on their personal profiles, as well as go ‘live’ when getting ready for the night which gives hype to events. The queens have a very strong network on Instagram. The interactive affordances of Instagram such as tagging, liking and commenting means that the performers can promote each other on their personal profiles, giving followers the opportunity to see more content by Wellington performers outside of Ivy as well as creating a strong online community which reflects the nature of the relationship between performers and patrons in the space.
I am telling the story of my journey becoming a drag queen in this space. I have tried to convey Ivy as a physical and digital space that i not limited to alcohol and partying, but rather a meeting place, performance space and creative outlet. Ivy is not typically represented this way but I believe it offers insight into an interesting community in Wellington. Drag in New Zealand is notoriously underrepresented and the opportunities for drag still do not keep up with the growing rate of the Ivy’s drag community. With more representation of the queens that make up Ivy, I hope to create greater awareness about the community and bring it more into Wellington’s cultural mainstream. Not only this, but I hope to offer insight into drag as an artform and hope to promote diversity and to aid in the personal journeys of people questioning their space in the LGBT+ community.
Works Cited:
Christodoulides, George. "Branding In The Post-Internet Era." Marketing Theory, vol 9, no. 1, 2009, pp. 141-144. SAGE Publications, doi:10.1177/1470593108100071.
Hutchby, Ian. "Technologies, Texts And Affordances." Sociology, vol 35, no. 2, 2001, pp. 441-456. SAGE Publications, doi:10.1177/s0038038501000219.












