My experience started in the gay nightlife/drag life. I was just as consumed in ignorance about what is offensive to transpeople because at that time I hadn't found myself. I was living as a drag performer only.
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 love that drag is a way for people to vacation in the gay nightlife, but... it's quite a different experience to perform for a gay audience than a straight audience.
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.
In the gay community there are not very many Jewish drag queens. I've always found that funny because there are a lot of Jewish gay people out there, so why aren't there more Jewish drag queens?
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.
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.
For years, 'Drag Race' was gay people's best kept secret. When I started doing drag, people didn't know anything about it. Look at it now: it's like it's gone from black and white to IMAX.
'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.
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 started drag in Portland, Oregon, but I don't feel that I came to life as a drag queen until I started working in Seattle. That's what really lit the rocket fuel in my career.
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.
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.
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 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 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.