<p>This article explores the under-examined nexus between queer migration and performance through the lived experiences of Syrian and Lebanese drag queens who migrated from Lebanon to Western/Northern Europe, principally Germany, Netherlands, and France. Drawing on in-depth interviews and trauma-informed ethnographic fieldwork with performers now based in Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris and London, the study analyzes drag not as incidental to migration, but as its motivating and constitutive force. Participants describe their journeys not merely as escapes from repression, but as deliberate quests for expressive freedom, bodily autonomy, and stages on which to be seen/celebrated. Foregrounding drag as a political and artistic practice, the study challenges dominant paradigms of queer migration that center trauma and legal protection, offering instead a framework where creative expression, affective safety, and gendered performance are central to mobility. Employing queer of color critique, affect theory, and performativity, it reveals how drag enables survival, generates forms of belonging, and complicates the binaries between asylum, exile, and labor migration. By centering queer artists as critical theorists of their own displacement, it offers an original contribution to migration studies, arguing for the recognition of drag as both a migration logic and a powerful site of world-making, risk, and resistance.</p>