A Quote by Michelle Visage
Drag is never going to be completely mainstream because it's still a queer art form.
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I agree with Ru that it'll never be mainstream, because mainstream means everybody knows it, everybody loves it, everybody accepts it. That's never gonna happen with drag, but it's definitely become more mainstreamed for people that never knew anything about it, being opened up to it as a form of art.
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.
I think that's what happens when drag starts to go mainstream: All of a sudden, you're watching 'The View' and there are three drag queens on there and it's not a joke. Yes, we're here, we're queer and you better deal with it. 'Cause we ain't going nowhere.
Drag Race' was, like, my outlet and finally being able to see myself in television and that was through Manila Luzon, who was a 'Drag Race' contestant. Manila was the first Asian queer person that I ever saw on mainstream media and 'Drag Race' really did that for me.
I feel like I am just an entertainer. It does not matter what form I take to perform and entertain. I think I deserve being called a performer because you don't call Tyler Perry a drag queen. You don't call Will Smith a drag queen and all the other mainstream artists who use the aesthetic of drag to entertain.
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.
Is the mainstream becoming more queer? Or is it the opposite? That artists like me are mainstreaming queer music?
I love that drag is political. For me, one of the reasons I started doing drag was reading about how in the past, drag performers were able to organize the queer community and move us forward.
In my early career I was sort of anti-drag. I said, 'Drag is dumb and boring, and I want to be an effing weirdo and go crazy and rebel.' But now it's like I've come to respect and understand how deep and traditional drag as an art form is.
Art - I had never thought of that as a career because it was like something I did so naturally, and it was fluid, and it is. And even though I still admire literature as the superior art form, I have to admit that art, for me, that's it; that's what I'm good at, and that's what I should be concentrating on.
I don't think drag will ever be mainstream because it's counter to what the mainstream directive is, which is picking an identity and sticking with it for the rest of your life.
The gay community has had a sometimes tumultuous relationship with non-queer people coming to their shows because it was tourism, like using the queer spaces as a form of comic relief or entertainment.
The truth is I do take drag really seriously, and I think that there's kind of a place for that - to see it as this political and historical art form, and to want to continue pushing it in new directions. And also honor the old directions as well. So I'm sort of like a drag intellectual/drag queen.
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.
Movies were never an art form, they were entertainment. It just evolved into an art form from there, and it's still evolving in different ways.
Just in my experience as a drag queen, I've been able to connect with queer people around the world - and to see them connecting with each other over a shared love of drag!
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