Durham icon Tess Tickle on raising over £5 million for her community through ‘drag queen charity’ (EXCLUSIVE)

Growing up in Ferryhill, County Durham, was a struggle for drag queen Tess Tickle. “I would never have dared say that I was gay — being here, it would’ve resulted in two black eyes, broken ribs and probably [being] beaten up every day, which was a common occurrence growing up where I live,” she admits of her earlier years in the town where she has lived for all of her 39 years.

Despite all that, Tess is driven by a mission to improve the lives of people in the area.

Outside drag, Tess has had a long career in education. For 15 years, she worked in a primary school before spending the past four years as an education welfare officer, safeguarding nearly 600 vulnerable students throughout County Durham. Although that achievement alone would warrant recognition at the PEUGEOT Attitude PRIDE Awards Europe 2025, supported by British Airways, Tess has truly gone above and beyond to help her community.

She has also helped introduce an LGBTQ+ programme to make sure that everybody feels accepted. Over the past 14 years, it has been absorbed into the curriculum throughout all the schools in County Durham.

I first met Tess when she was performing at WorldPride NYC 2019, and instantly gravitated towards her warmth and humour. I have had the pleasure of working with the bold and beautiful northern lass every year since — Tess regularly helps the Attitude Magazine Foundation raise funds by selling raffle tickets at the annual Attitude Awards — but it is only now that I’m learning more about her story. 

Tess Tickle was conceived when a friend was looking for a drag queen to give her son a lap dance on his 30th birthday. Tess, then 21, saw the chance to make extra cash. The side hustle blossomed into a proper career, and now Tess, accompanied by her troupe of drag performers, works up to six nights a week — while remaining committed to her full-time day job in education.

For years, Tess was giving back to the community by doing charity gigs, but they started to take over her calendar. In order to gain more control, in 2017, she created her own charity, the Angel Trust, with the support of CEO Clair McGregor, Beryl Anderson, Betty and Scarlett Moffatt, as well as her drag sisters Emma Royd and Miss Cara.

“We managed to raise over a million pounds by our second year and over five million to date,” Tess explains. “All of that money was then handed out to the people of County Durham and Darlington, every single penny. We wanted everybody to know where the money had come from and who it was going to. We wanted to be completely transparent.”

The charity’s mandate is staggeringly broad. Its funds are invested directly and indirectly back into the local community either through requests or by troubleshooting issues it discovers.

After realising the local food banks were struggling with high demand, the Angel Trust launched a community pantry, which anyone can use to feed their families for just £5 a year. Next, the Trust opened a charity shop for those in need of clothing, furniture or white goods. The charity has also sent people with life-limiting conditions away on holidays to make memories with their families.

When suicide reached an all-time high in the northeast of England, the Angel Trust launched a mental health hub with counsellors and a suicide prevention and awareness line. The charity also successfully campaigned for funds to install suicide prevention barriers, as well as a 24-hour crisis alert button and a sign listing a phone number to call, at a viaduct not far from its offices.

In response to the cost of living and housing crisis swelling the number of homeless people, the Angel Trust created the Safe Hub to offer those down on their luck hot meals and a roof over their heads.

“We’ve been getting a lot of refugees at the moment” – Tess Tickle

And the charity is for everyone — even those new to the area and to the UK.

“We’ve been getting a lot of refugees at the moment,” Tess explains. “And we’re doing exactly the same full circle for every single person who needs it.”

Shocked at the amount the Angel Trust has achieved in just eight years, I ask Tess if she knows how many people she has helped.

“Thousands of people. I wouldn’t like to hazard a guess. We probably have 300 people a week attending the Pantry; the charity shop has a footfall of over a thousand people a week; we have 16 homeless people a night in the Safe Hub.”

“I wouldn’t take ownership and say it was all just me, because it’s been a collective” – Tess Tickle

Tess hosts about 50 charity events a year but insists that the Angel Trust’s achievements are a team effort.

“I wouldn’t take ownership and say it was all just me, because it’s been a collective,” Tess explains. “It’s been Clair McGregor, the CEO, the whole board and the volunteers who’ve been a driving force to help us, but it is known for being the ‘drag queen’s charity’.”

For all Tess’s modesty, there’s no denying that her charity work has become something of a personal crusade. “I know how difficult it was to grow up in this area. I’ve faced the hardships, I’ve had the discrimination, the nasty comments, the bullying, the violence, the assaults,” Tess tells me. “The satisfaction I have, from [being] a little gay boy from Ferryhill who got the piss took out of him for being ‘not normal’, those people have changed their minds, changed their perception on the LGBTQ+ community because they know that this person has the best interest of their place of birth, their hometown, at heart.”