A Quote by Jinkx Monsoon

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.
I have an inner drag queen. Or rather, I feel like I was a drag queen in a past life.
That openness to experimentation in Seattle is how I learned a drag queen doesn't have to just be in her pageant gear and lip syncing to top 40. Drag can be off-the-wall, ridiculous, profound.
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.
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.
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 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 feel like I have an inner drag queen. Or rather, I feel like I was a drag queen in a past life.
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.
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.
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 wanted to be a drag queen so badly. I'll bet I still own more wigs than any drag queen - I love me a wig.
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 started doing drag in Seattle because I started doing my column before I moved here, and then moved here and wanted to be able to go out and do things as Dan Savage without being recognized the next day, because the column was just in Seattle and it was kind of a sensation and I was beating people up. I was really worried and I didn't want to beat somebody up in a column and have that person know what I look like when I didn't know what they looked like.
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 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 listen to 'This American Life,' 'Serial,' 'S-Town,' 'Feast of Fun.' I listened to 'What's the Tee?' And that has really helped me throughout my entire drag career - podcasts have been a mainstay in my life as a drag artist.
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