A Quote by Bill Irwin

People ask me, 'Have you done much drag?' And I say, 'I don't think of it as drag. I'm playing a woman!' — © Bill Irwin
People ask me, 'Have you done much drag?' And I say, 'I don't think of it as drag. I'm playing a woman!'
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.
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.
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.
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!
I always say that drag queens are like an exaggeration of women, and I'm like an exaggeration of drag queens. People ask, 'Why do you do your makeup so differently?' and I always say, 'Well, in a subversive art form, ask yourself why so many drag queens do their makeup exactly the same.' If you can do anything, why does everybody do the same thing?
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.
You can have a beard and do drag; you can be a woman and do drag. I've met faux queens. I've met kings. Anything that you want can be considered drag in the context.
'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The way I've always looked at drag has been a little bit different maybe than other people because the drag community that I started doing drag in is full of trans people and women and people of various educational backgrounds, of different ages.
It used to be that I'd do drag, then get out of drag, and try and be as much of a boy as possible. That didn't feel entirely authentic for me, but it felt like what I had to do at the time.
A lot of people just feel really impacted and inspired by drag in ways that I don't think we, as self-absorbed drag queens, think about that often.
I think - I know - the normalization of drag and drag culture has definitely opened up people's minds in some parts of the world.
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