THE CONCEPT of men dressing as women isn't novel, but a new generation of trendsetting drag queens are taking Scotland by storm … and they’re not all wearing dresses.

In fact, men dressing as women is not really what drag is about. It never was. The best drag queens have always broken the conventional rules of gender, played with boundaries and treated their work as an art form.

In the last few years, the phenomenon has gained popularity in Scotland, and across the UK, thanks to an American reality television show which has taken the country by storm since it started six years ago.

RuPaul's Drag Race has been cited by many as the single reason drag has been catapulted into the mainstream. For those who aren't familiar, it's akin to X-factor or America's Next Top Model, only the contestants are all professional drag queens, vying to become the US's next drag superstar.

On the surface it seems like another trashy reality show, complete with catchphrases, bright colours, loud music, shameless product plugs and a healthy dose of infighting. But if you look beyond the sequins, fake breasts and false eyelashes, it tells you a lot about the culture and history of drag, where it came from and what makes people do it. Parts of the show refer often to the 1990s cult documentary Paris Is Burning, which depicts the drag ball scene in the 1980s, and the problems affecting gay people and drag queens at the time. It also unpicks the contestants' personalities and stories, with many revealing the difficulties they have had to overcome to pursue their love of drag and their complex family relationships as a result.

Drag Race's popularity has resulted in an increase of people getting involved in the scene. In Scotland, drag nights are popping up all over the country, and rumours of the show coming to the UK are met with glee from dozens of Scottish queens dying to take part.

Glasgow’s Merchant city has become the heart of the Scottish drag scene with monthly club nights at AXM and even a sort of drag Olympics. The person behind it all? She’s a 31-year-old larger-than-life queen named Guillotina Munter.

Preferring to go by the pronoun "she", Guillotina styles herself as "Scotland's first lady of drag" and is not short of confidence – one trait those who want to succeed in the industry evidently must have.

She draws her inspiration from gender-bending artists such as Leigh Bowery, Boy George and Pete Burns and considers herself a drag “socialite”.

As a teenager, Guillotina began going along to Glasgow's Cathouse nightclub. “I’d sneak in to the overs [over-18s night] every Thursday, Friday and Saturday when I was younger.” she recalls. “For a lot of people that’s a sort of gateway, the gothy, emo type thing, boys in makeup. It just snowballed.”

The more she went out in drag, the more she perfected her look, gradually changing things here and there to make her overall appearance more “polished”. Fortunately, dressing in drag was never a surprise or shock to those who knew her.

“[Drag] was seen as my art, not a strange thing. It was just what I did as opposed to painting or modelling.” she explains.

For Guillotina, drag isn’t about being a woman, and she wasn’t particularly inspired by females either. “Some people want to be Beyoncé or J-Lo or Madonna, I’m not really about that … I like more draggy gender-f*** kind of icons of the 1980s.

“It was never about being a woman, being feminine or fishy [a term used by drag queens to indicate femininity].

“It was more about being monstrous and larger than life.”

Before Drag Race started, she says, the scene was completely different in Scotland with only 20 or so people turning up at some organised nights.

“There wasn’t really a culture of drag in Glasgow like there was in London or Manchester. There would be one or two standard shows, nothing challenging or interesting, mainly aimed at straight hen parties.

“Certainly nothing that spoke to me. That’s why I wanted to do something fun and exciting. I hung out with art school kids, hipsters and fashion people.”

After leaving school she studied an undergraduate degree in Creative and Cultural Industries at the University of the West of Scotland before starting up her first gay club night, Handbag Holocaust, in 2005.

Held at Glasgow's Barfly on Clyde Street, the club night was “short-lived” according to Guillotina.

After her first foray into event organisation, she started a new club night, Valley of the Dolls, at Blackfriars bar in Merchant City and successfully ran it for two years.

It was from there she decided to branch out and start a new adventure at AXM.

The success of MENERGY, the night Guillotina runs at AXM, has gone from strength to strength, and now hordes of drag fanatics are turning up every month to see the best talent from home and across the globe.

The 26-year-old also set up the Munter Games, a drag version of the Olympics where contestants compete against one another, lip-syncing to songs to be crowned winner.

“The good thing is we’ve managed to give local queens a platform.” She explains.

“Edinburgh is starting now to get some things going on, and I think Aberdeen is doing something too but Glasgow is definitely the centre in Scotland.”

Performance isn’t everyone’s strong point though, as Dot Rotten, a drag queen from Edinburgh, explains.

The 35-year-old, who likes to be known as "she", says that although she likes to dress up, she is still yet to add a performance element to her act, which she hopes to do in the future.

By day, the softly-spoken drag queen is a graphic designer, but she uses leather, fur, metal and sometimes even taxidermy to create often alarming costumes, transforming into Dot Rotten at night.

For Dot it's about creating a disguise, a character to hide behind, so much so she refers to Dot in the third person – almost as if the character is a separate being altogether.

“It doesn’t have to be a man in a sequin dress doing Shirley Bassey songs,” she explains. “It doesn’t have to be looking like a Panto Dame or trying to look like a real woman, which I'm not interested in at all.

“It is a disguise. It makes you walk taller in more ways than one, not just because you're wearing heels.”

Despite the wider understanding of drag as an art form, Dot says there is still a lot people may not understand.

“Drag is having a bit of a renaissance at the moment, a bit of a zeitgeist but it's still very underground and a lot of people don't understand it,” she explains.

“My style of drag is quite dark and it's not end-of-the-pier Lily Savage; it's a bit scary to a lot of people.

“I don't think I'd want my real name and my drag getting mixed up. It's OK to have it in a club environment as I can keep in a sort of lockdown.”

Dot explains that for her, drag is about paying tribute to the women throughout history she respects and admires, such as Grace Jones and Daphne Guinness, but it's also about pushing boundaries and creating something unexpected.

“I first moved away from home when I was 18, went to art college and I wanted to reinvent myself,” she explains. “I was a bullied kid at school, I lived in a village in the middle of nowhere and I wanted to become a stronger person. I wanted to change the way I looked.”

“It progressed from there. I upped the ante every time I went out. It became a performance. Going to clubs in the late 1990s, the makeup got thicker. It was always about creating a look and I got to the stage where the clothes I wanted to wear, I couldn't wear as a guy. I thought this would have to cross into drag for it to work.

“My love of clothes and fashion was the main protagonist ... it's like creating a collage and creating a painting; creating a drag look is the same thing to me.”

Despite having been involved in the scene almost 20 years, Dot's family are unaware of the existence of her drag persona.

“They don't really understand anything about why I'm an artist anyway so I don’t think they'd understand this at all.

“They know I have wigs in my house and masks ... They have been in my house ... They must have an inkling but I’m not going to come out to them about it, they wouldn't get it.”

One of the only drag queens Dot looked up to when she was a teenager was Jon Pleased Wimmin, a legendary DJ who has risen to global success over the past 30 years.

He now lives in Edinburgh and hosts The Church Of High Kicks – a weekly night at Edinburgh’s CC Blooms, as well as releasing his own music and DJing.

For Jon, drag was never about looking like a woman either. Instead he saw it as a way to communicate better with people from all different cultures and backgrounds when he was behind the decks.

He says: “In the 1990s, when I was DJing around the world, playing up and down the country, some clubs would be really rough but it was a really good way of communicating with people without actually saying anything.

“Playing the music I was playing and looking the way I did was a really strong thing at that time.

“Once I started doing that, it was like a way of getting and reaching different people.

“[They were] seeing me doing that and thought, 'Actually, that guy has a really great taste in music, he's a DJ, so what if he's dressed up?' I found that more exciting, [getting to know and interact with] different types of people.

“It's very easy to do it [within the gay scene], but it's expected there, there's nothing challenging about it.”

Jon, now 46, has seen a lot change in the drag scene over the years and says it seems to have gone full-circle.

He began DJing in the 1990s at famous London club Kinky Gerlinky, which hosted British drag balls attended by fashion and drag royalty. At the club's prime, he says, 3000 people were attending the balls, which were judged by the likes of Jean Paul Gaultier and Vivienne Westwood.

“It was a drag explosion in the early 1990s. Everyone dressed in drag, the whole thing was about dressing up” Jon says.

“Me and a couple of friends started a thing called the Pleased Wimmin ... cabaret and things, silly things.

“We'd come out with shell suits and prams, it's not anything to do with the kind of drag that's happening now.

“It was much more anti-that, more John Waters. Everyone was there.”

So has his drag style changed over the years? The 46-year-old lets out a high-pitched cackle. “I think I've got

tartier as I've got older!

“I've always had a strong visual bent to everything I do. It's stayed the same really, it's always a bit of glam rock in there, a bit of diva, a bit of Westwood. It's strange, a real mix of stuff I like.”

For Jon, who says he is really quite a shy person, drag “magnifies your personality”. As a result, he can say a lot more to people, and they open up to him when he is in drag.

“Everyone who knows me says I don't change in drag … it magnifies things, helps you communicate with people.” he says.

“There are people that I admire – Joan Collins, Jerry Hall, Kate Bush, Blondie ... all the obvious ones. But I’ve never tried to look like anyone else.”