PRIDE

features Chicago performer and host BanksCouleé sharing her kitchen with cannabis home bakers who provide cooking demonstrations of marijuana-infused fare (cosponsored by Dispensary 33), followed by living room talk show time with special dining guests (who often have just polished o some of the episode’s highlighted recipes). Banks-Couleé produces the show, uploaded each Tuesday to YouTube under the banner Moving Standard, a queer-owned digital content production team she built with working partner and friend Jacob Stanton, who also directs the episodes. The guests on Bambi Bakes thus far have included fellow members of Banks-Couleé’s performance community: Banks-Couleé’s drag mom Shea Couleé and superstars Dida Ritz and the Vixen are featured on season two’s first episode, which first posted at the end of May.

Stanton describes the show as much more than just a drag talk show or a series of cooking videos. When I asked him about the show and Moving Standard’s mission last month, he said “[Last year] I asked myself, how do we pivot in a COVID era and also what have I really been wanting to do? And that’s making unapologetic media that is political; that incites positive action and sort of tricks people into conversation. Maybe teaching a few adults to learn isn’t a bad thing.” Banks-Couleé ends many of the episodes with the tagline “Join us for more guests next week as we decolonize weed from the kitchen to the couch,” which hopefully gives most viewers an idea of the politics and intention behind what they’re seeing.

her view about creating art: “Even in my young state of drag, I always knew that I wanted to produce my own creations. I met this amazing professor in my senior year who gave me this advice that stuck with me. He said, ‘You are going to be so much happier when you can produce your own thing, when you can produce your own art.’” And Banks-Couleé’s drag career has followed suit: she is often responsible for both creating and hosting the nightclub shows she hosts at bars like Lakeview’s Hydrate, and she was a driving force behind Chicago’s first drag festival, Chicago Is a Drag, which made its debut in June 2019 in recognition of the 50th anniversary of the riots at the Stonewall Inn, and continued in a digital format for 2020.