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Our Mission
Our Mission
A Cult Hero is someone who understands that there is greater reward in serving the needs of the dedicated few than meeting demands of the indifferent many. They are the underground Queer, they refuse respectability, they know that what they have is worth protecting, they are the sanctuary on the margins. Cult Heroes does not intend to cater to the restrictions of taboo, our identity is built around our love of all things Cult Culture: fringe theatre and film, club kids, fetish freaks, goths, dandies, furries, monsters, gender extremes – anything or anyone too hot, too weird, or too Queer for TV.
Cult Heroes strives to unite and platform Hamilton Queerdos within a community that encourages creative participation, loud self expression, and a family-like safety net. This came from so many different sources and inspirations throughout our years in Hamilton, from experiencing first-hand the crucial yet limited opportunities for local drag performers, to finding joy and acceptance on the dancefloor, to exchanging safe transition advice and resources with new friends outside a club, to studying our Queer histories and discovering what being a good community member has looked like in practice throughout the years, to just listening to the Queer people in our city and hearing what they feel is missing. This includes a strong, honest and accountable commitment to areas that often go unconsidered in Queer community spaces such as accessibility, affordability, anti-racism, and Trans inclusivity. In essence, we have seen the difference that community can make, we have seen the need and desire for more of it in Hamilton, and we want to strengthen the basis for that community in the city that we love.
Our mission is to blend queer historical knowledge, life, and community to create conscious history-making: a network of connection that not only sustains our present, but becomes our memory. Cult Heroes does not just aim to keep queer histories in circulation, but to live our lives with an understanding that we are feeding a continuum of tradition, evolution, and culture. Our goals are to build and upkeep community connection through sharing space, joy, experience and resources. To reinforce our sense of reliable and safe community spaces. To enact Queer historical practices and cement our own. To share and create and circulate culture. To ensure remembrance of those who came before us and the endurance of our own memories. To remind ourselves of the vitality of Queer community and learn firsthand why we are stronger together.
The Parties
From late 19th Century Cabarets, to the Balls of the Harlem renaissance, to the circuit parties of the AIDS crisis, the Queer party has been a formula that brings LGBTQIA2S+ people together under just the right combination of joy, solidarity, protection and defiance to produce that which unites us more strongly than any common enemy ever could: culture. History has shown that even in the darkest times, when we congregate for pleasure, the kind derived from great music, shared laughter, movement, expression, the release of tension, we come to build a relationship of trust that can endure the tests of our shared and intersecting oppressions. The Queer party turns the vague conceptualization of Queer community as we understand it today into a living localized practice. It entices us to move beyond the desire to define an amorphous Queer population and confront who our people are, what they look like, what they need, what they love and how we can connect with them authentically.
Our dedication to the art of the party is more than just a desire to have fun, but lies in the belief that shared joy will create a bond between the members of our community that is genuine and strong enough to accomplish more than the notion of a Queer common identity could alone.
The Art
Visual and artistic language is one of our strongest, most heritable means of understanding the complexities not only of our own identities but those that bind us together in community. We use color and styling to flag our desires, we use music to congregate and connect, we use performance to express our most repressed selfhoods, we use poetry and language to reshape our culture. Whether it is recognizable markers of shared interest, resonant representations of supressed identity, references to our collective histories, or just communal means of cultural creation, we learn to find ourselves and our community by the sensations that art produces. This is why art remains at the center of our organizational practice - we make art, art makes culture, culture makes us. Our art becomes our identity and our legacy. By platforming and uplifting the struggling economy of Queer art in Hamilton we fight to protect a most vital source of community.
The drag, music, performance, and visual art experienced at a Cult Heroes event will always be properly compensated, credited, and revered as the lifeblood of the shared cultural identity we hope to build. The endurance of local Queer art is our most sacred goal as a collective.
The Place
With the rapid disappearance of safe, reliable, permanent spaces for queer people to congregate and take refuge in Hamilton and across the country, we face an unignorable threat to the stability of our communities. The digital age has already made the concepts of Queer community and Queer space more intangible than ever, as we lose sight of the practical needs that such physical spaces fulfill and fall increasingly into the divisions that fester in our growing sense of disconnection. We have begun to forget what we have binds us a community and what we stand to lose and gain in each other. This means we have had to work twice as hard to find, take up and create spaces that are accessible, trustworthy, and safe, bouncing from venue to venue across the city to take shallow root in our impermanent homes. We have been forced to enact traditions of strength and endurance to make our space wherever we are together.
While our fortitude as a community is admirable and necessary, we know that we deserve a place to let those roots grow deeper. This is why our eventual goal is to establish an inclusive Queer bar in Hamilton, offering free event booking, paid performance opportunities and features for local queer artists and a safe home base for any Trans, Queer, LGBTQI2S+ people in our local community. While the vast majority of proceeds from our events go to our performers, we are actively raising funds toward this goal.
Our Team
Our Team
Beginning as a tight knit group of friends, Cult Heroes is founded by a small collective of local Queer creatives who dreamt of combining their individual skills, talents and artistic practices to create something larger than themselves. Each member acts a vital contributing collaborator toward the aesthetic and artistic curation of the unique theme and atmosphere of every Cult Heroes event. Our team has been working, living, and growing together since 2021. At its core, Cult Heroes is a family, built on a genuine love and trust extending from our earliest founding members to our newest community members.
Drew Beaupre is a costumer, designer and visual artist. For Cult Heroes he acts as an illustrator and graphic designer for our posters, stickers, promotional materials, and apparel. He has taken on various jobs creating costumes for local Hamilton theatre and drag, and has sold his clothing designs and screenprints at Art Crawl for years. His design practice is driven by a passion for scavenging, salvaging, thrifting, repurposing and using unconventional textile materials. A dabbler in many mediums, he has done everything from theatrical tech direction to dollmaking to drawing and painting. Drew is also a Masters student at McMaster University, writing critical theory on Queer and Poor community, identity, and archival practices. These critical interests serve as a basis for much of his work both independently and through the artistic direction of Cult Heroes. Drew is a backstage hero who loves nothing more than to bring a vision to life by any means or medium necessary!
Axel Curteis is an illustrator, photographer and soon to be comic author. Axel works as Cult Heroes' resident photographer, producing the images for everything from our promotional shoots, to our signature event photography collections. His artistic focus has always been comics and illustration; having developed a passion for visual storytelling in his early teens he taught himself the basics of writing comics throughout highschool. Before moving to Hamilton as a young adult, Axel grew up in an extremely isolated small town with little to no resources for queer people. Since then Axel has become a vital and active member of the Hamilton queer community, running regular lesbian event "The Dyke Takeover" for years before joining Cult heroes. Axel attended college for visual and creative art in the GTA briefly, but his most essential skills are garnered from workshops, hands-on work, and tips from people within the local arts scene. Much of his work is inspired by the people he has met and the experiences he has had within the Hamilton queer community!
Mikey Gough is a playwright, actor, visual artist and beloved local drag performer. His drag persona Daytona Kelly is the habitual host and resident performer of many Cult Heroes events. Mikey has also acted as an illustrator and graphic designer on various Cult Heroes promotional materials. While he consider himself someone who either has or is willing to try almost any form of artistic creation, creating and engaging with theatre is the core around which all of his work orbits. a Graduate of theatre and film studies at McMaster University, he possesses an endless love for bar theatre, street theatre and any type of free public performance that breathes art into people’s faces. To Mikey, Cult Heroes acts as a bridge between night life and collective performance creation! As both a drag artist and event host, he aims first and foremost to truly entertain his audience, and to keep the energy of an event up and rising!
Grace Kakarelis is a visual artist, cosplayer, wig stylist, and prop fabricator. Grace not only acts as decorator and curator for Cult Heroes' events, but assumes the much honored duty of managing our event finances. She studied visual arts in high school and over the years has transitioned into fashion and craftsmanship as her medium of choice. Primarily Grace is a cosplayer and devoted fandom nerd which has taught her to combine countless skills and hobbies into a larger final creation, a skillset which lends itself very well to independent party curation. She make all of her costumes herself on a budget, so she gets to bounce between sewing, makeup, prop making, wig styling, and more - if you’ve ever seen Daytona Kelly perform a drag number, chances are his wig was styled by Grace! She also makes and sells needle-felted jewelry, DIY statement fashion pieces, and acts as the resident chalkboard artist at Joshy's Good Eats!
Casey Gough is a DJ, professional SFX Makeup Artist, and multi-talented stage performer. They act as Cult Heroes' resident DJ and sound technician, curating the sonic atmosphere for every Cult Heroes event. They also put on a killer performance under their drag alias Bulldozer Butch. Growing up surrounded by performers, fire breathers, clowns, freaks and queers, the arts have always held extreme significance in their life and creative practice. An early passion for circus performance, musical theatre and filmmaking led Casey toward a focus on horror, a genre that has helped them come into their own queerness in many ways. They graduated from CMU makeup college, after studying makeup for film, special effects, prosthetic making, and creature design, and have since been working in the film industry. Cult Heroes has reignighted their passion for the performing arts through drag, gogo dancing, burlesque, DJing and even fire eating!
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