'I struggled with my heritage but drag helped me access a new side of Middle Eastern culture'

• Amrou Al-Kadhi is a British-Iraqi drag queen, writer, filmmaker, and performer who is also known as Glamrou.

• The nonbinary drag queen speaks to Yahoo UK about drag, acceptance and their heritage for Queer Voices.

• They have written memoir Life as a Unicorn, they have also directed the film Layla, and written for shows like Hollyoaks and Little America.

• Amrou Al-Kadhi's show Glamrou: Drag Mother will be performed at the Soho theatre from 20 to 25 January.

Drag has helped me in many ways, I think it has so many different layers to the experience. When I was 19 and I started drag I was still at university, I was very nervous about my sexuality and my femininity and had no confidence when it came to that, and there was something about being in drag that was about owning femininity and sexuality.

Drag is about taking the things that you're scared or ashamed of and trying to be proud of them. There's almost a sense of self-improvement, 'I want to feel good, I want to feel confident, I want to feel strong' and drag changes that.

I've had a difficult time with my Arab heritage and my faith, and definitely when I started drag it was a way to escape stuff about my heritage because of things that had happened to me growing up. But then later in my drag journey I was able to look at Egyptian pop stars, and dress like my mother, and a lot of the Muslim women who raised me are beautiful, and powerful. And they're very liberal people a lot of them — you definitely shouldn't believe everything you read in the media about Muslims and Arabs.

And, actually, through drag I was able to access this whole side of my culture that I wasn't able to when I was growing up in the Middle East as a "boy".

More than ever now I'm in a much more emotionally healed place, I'm using the drag to critique myself. I personally like my art, whether it's my film or my drag shows, to be really cathartic, and especially in Britain where people are quite sort of repressed about their emotions I like the extremity of drag and how intense I can get to emotionally.

There's something about being a drag that allows me to just do and say whatever I'm thinking or feeling in a way that sometimes shocks me, or shocks people who know me, because I'm not like that when I'm Amrou. I would say my drag shows should be almost quite scary, in the sense that everyone really has to be awake and just access their feelings, but in an exciting way, I hope.

Drag and my mother

I talk a lot about my mother in both my book and, obviously, my new show Glamrou: Drag Mother, which is really about my mother. I think it's important for me because I actually want to inhabit her perspective and her experience of having a drag queen for a child.

Even though she's had a really negative response to me doing drag, and it's been a huge complication for us, I think the point of art is to really inhabit other people's perspectives. I really wanted to have the experience of justifying my mum's behaviour and even inhabiting her as a way to explore it myself, especially because my drag character's really based on her.

She's a very theatrical, camp woman who wears clothes that only drag queens would wear, and she's extremely funny. She calls me every week and we discuss Hollywood red carpet fails even though she has issues with drag, so I suppose the show is really about that complexity and it's also exploring her perspective on why she treated me the way that she did — sometimes wonderfully, sometimes really not great.

She once said to me that part of the reason that she hates drag is because she thinks I was really lucky to be born a man, and she's found being a woman really hard growing up, especially in Iraq. And so she was kind of expressing jealousy at the fact that I find freedom in drag, when for her being a mother and being a good wife felt like such a duty, so I really try and explore her perspective.

I really look like her when I'm in drag too, she's sort of a drag queen herself. My drag is a love letter to her, my drag character is my mother had she been free.

Role models

One of the shows I watched when I was growing up that helped me access some of my core identity was Queer as Folk by Russell T Davies, who I'm able to work with at the moment. He's my screenwriting mentor and is just an amazing man, and has really changed my life.

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I was 13 then, so that was really the first time I'd seen gay men be sexually empowered and sexy and confident. Especially when I was coming out then —which is a very different time to now— you think you're just going to have the worst life, and you feel really weak, and you're getting bullied at school the whole time, but there's something about Russell's characters — they're all kind of superheroes and they're really defiant.

Recently I watched a Brazilian queer film called Body Electric by Marcelo Caetano, which was the first time on screen that I'd seen drag queens and femmes be the protagonists, and not only that but just have great sex and be really defiant. It was more the fact that they have sex lives because often drag queens and femmes on screen tend to sort of be eunuchs.

Marcelo Caetano really celebrates transness and femininity on the screen in a way like nobody else does — well, not nobody else, but in a really powerful way.

There's so many trailblazers out there from Shon Faye, whose writing is so honest and powerful, and Tom Rasmussen who is an extraordinary, non binary singer who I think creates a lot of hopeful spaces in their gigs for people to access their emotions, which I like to do my shows.

Helping others

I hope my work does help people, I think when people want representation it's not just about showing our struggles. I talk about joy and nuance and playfulness in my film Layla, which is my first film and is about a British Palestinian drag queen who falls in love for the first time.

There's no violence or massive homophobia, it's set in a world where that's not even a thing and actually it's about sex and relationships, and friendships and complexity. And my drag shows are tougher but they're still very funny, very defiant.

I've never been a trauma-porn person when it comes to queer representation. I think queer artists can create an opportunity for people to dream and hope, so you not just see yourself but see yourself in incredible glory and have fun. The world's really scary so there is obviously benefits to showing the truth of that, but also providing some kind of escapism or hope is good too.

I get messages from queer Arabs and queer Muslims all over the world saying that they're really happy to have that sort of visibility through my work, and that's really exciting. But in a way I don't particularly love the representational burden of being a queer Arab and having to speak for queer Arabs, because there's so many of us and there's like a billion Muslims and everyone has their own experience.

For me, it's just sharing something that's really from the gut and hoping that anybody can access something with it. There are a lot of Muslims who disagree with what I do and a lot of Arabs who probably think 'I don't like that perspective', but then there's some who love it.

All that queer storytellers like myself can do is be as authentic as possible because art can be a place where we can communicate with humanity in a way that doesn't really happen in social media. I'm still an optimist in the fact that someone may think that I'm their enemy but then maybe they watch something I do and realise, 'oh, I actually see myself in that'.

Amrou Al-Kadhi told their story to Roxy Simons.

Glamrou: Drag Mother will be performed at the Soho Theatre from 20th to 25th January.