In an ignorant country, everything will try to drag you down! Stay firm, aim at the stars, keep going up and drag up the people who are trying to drag you down!
Drag is pastiche and parody and satire. Drag queens are never meant to be stars. We make fun of stars. Drag queens are the people that 'point' at the star.
I do drag. Just because my drag is not the drag of Creme Fatale or Holy McGrail doesn't mean it's less drag. I perform live; I just sing with dancers. It's drag on a different level.
I was doing drag as just a hobby on the weekends to let my hair down. I never thought of drag was going to be my career and what I would be doing for the rest of my life. Once I made it onto 'Drag Race,' I'm like, 'Oh, OK - this is my calling.
I've loved the RuPaul model of drag, where you're an amazing drag queen, you're a smart and savvy business person, and you use those together to keep drag at the forefront of what people are talking about.
People pull from drag culture because drag artists are - it's the ultimate art form and it's the last underdog art form. I mean, even clowns have college, you know what I mean? Drag queens, you have to learn drag from another drag queen.
The inspiration of my drag is the history of drag, the long tradition of drag queens being at the forefront of queer activism. That informs my drag style, and in a sense, that is the direction we need to go in the future.
A drag queen is one that usually goes to a ball and that's the only time she gets dressed up. Transvestites live in drag. A transsexual spends most of her life in drag.
'Drag Race' doesn't claim to represent drag as a whole. 'Drag Race' is a reality show. If you see real drag shows, we just do drag and respect each other's art and who your real identity is - name, gender, hair color, anything.
I want to do something that is not just a pastiche of drag that's come before but is really authentically me. I try to tune out all the drag that's out there and tap into the drag that I was doing when I was a little kid - when I didn't even know the word 'queer' or that gay people were out there.
I think - I know - the normalization of drag and drag culture has definitely opened up people's minds in some parts of the world.
If it starts to drag on set, or if you feel like it's not a fun experience, people get down, the energy gets down. You've got to keep the energy up.
If you can't keep up, drag them down to your level.
A lot of people still have the idea that drag goes from one end of the gender spectrum to the other end of the gender spectrum, and they expect drag queens to be masculine out of drag and hyper-feminine in drag. I think that portrays a lot of binary thinking and, ultimately, a lot of misogyny.
At the end of the day, I just love drag so much that it's not enough for me to be a successful drag queen. I want to do right by my drag community as a whole... creating opportunities for other performers, documenting and uplifting amazing drag, and generally just contributing a lot of love and respect to our fabulous little world!
Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.
I always did what I thought was interesting. I always just did what caught my fantasy. Looking like a woman, that was never the criteria for me. It was always to do drag. And drag is not gender-specific. Drag is just drag. It's exaggeration.