When I started doing makeup, I had no intention of doing drag.
I guess it wasn’t really part of my story on ‘Drag Race’ but I’m a trained actor and singer.
The drag scene in Miami has always been top notch to me.
During the summer, I used to hate when my mom would call me inside to eat – it was such a drag to leave all the fun.
When I’m in drag, I don’t always want to be spoken to, but I love being looked at. Nobody puts that much work into how they look to be ignored.
I’ve been obsessed with David Letterman forever, and I’d love to be the drag version of David Letterman.
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.
If I could pick a dream job it would be sitting in a room with a fabulous drag queen chatting about ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race.’
Any time you get to see a bunch of drag queens performing music and performing songs and being idiots, I’m in.
I show up in my writing room at approximately 10 A.M. every morning without fail. Sometimes my muse sees fit to join me there and sometimes she doesn’t, but she always knows where I’ll be. She doesn’t need to go hunting in the taverns or on the beach or drag the boulevard looking for me.
I first learned how to do hair from drag queens. I learned eyelashes are the key to life, because they make everyone look fabulous.
As a drag flicker, I have always strived that my team wins and comes on top.
The reason I started drag in the first place is because I felt like I never really fit in, and I still don’t feel like I fit in to any of those places: the drag world, the circus world or the burlesque world. I’m kinda this combination of everything, so it made sense to me that I’d set out to do my own solo show.
Not only does the title ‘We’re Here’ highlight the fact that me, Shangela, and Eureka are here, but we as a queer community, we were already here. We were already existing in your space before these drag queens showed up with a big purse bus.
Comedians walk out, get a feel for the crowd. If it’s not going good, we change directions. If we got to drag your momma into this thing, we will. Whatever we got to do.
To me, as an audience member, movies always come to a screeching halt when they get to their action scenes. They always feel like they drag on to me.
If you’ve got the chance to really speak your mind and do what you feel and express yourself how you want, then this is freedom. Drag is freedom.
I’m just authentically, unapologetically myself. In and out of drag, in and out of the gig, in and out of the studio. My friends know. Miss Thing Over There wakes up 8 A.M. and she’s on. The sun, the rain, the snow, whatever’s going on outside, I’m ready.
As a little kid, you go where your parents drag you. You have no agency, no dominion.
All things to do with drag are inherently therapeutic because the realization of your own insanity is the beginning of sanity.
The press criticism made me feel at times like I was someone who had landed from outer space and, to my parents, being in show business was the worst thing you could be. Especially because I did drag, they didn’t think much of it.
I’m the Terry Bradshaw of drag. Not Carrie Bradshaw. Terry!
I was really scared that I would never be able to date anyone… because there was a huge stigma against drag. But the drive was so strong to do it that I was like, ‘I don’t care. If that happens, I’m fine.’
In the world of Tinder and Bumble, where people keep up the appearance that they are low-key, lacking in any drama and partaking in an Instagram-worthy activity during every free moment between trips overseas, admitting you work from home and have small children orbiting you full-time feels like a drag.
Give a talk to children and tell them dinosaurs didn’t drag their tails, and you get arguments.
Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.
We all hit moments when we feel helpless. The test is how we react to that feeling. We can either learn from it and move forward or let it drag us down.
I don’t think it’s the function of Congress to function well. It should drag its heels on the way to decision.
There’s this idea that it has to be made in London. But we’ve got everything up here, and if you’ve got comics who are gifted because of where they’re from, you shouldn’t drag them away from that natural resource.
I’m the mess of drag queens.
I’d like to see drag really cultivate its political roots.
A drag queen on time is not a drag queen.
I’m not going to do an album. There’s enough horrible drag queens singing – especially when they do that spoken word over music, ‘I’m fierce! I’m fierce!’
For someone with darker hair in the beard area that likes to sometimes sprout during a 14-hour drag day, I must have a thick, yet smooth foundation.
For all those people who always thought I was nothing more than a drag queen, wait until they see what I agreed to look like in ‘Hairspray.’
I’ve brought my daughters all over the world-they travel with me. I drag them out of school just to keep the relationship. When I’m home I’m a big-time daddy.
Not all drag queens but certainly the ones who empowered me, are people who pushed buttons, and poked fun at society from Leigh Bowery, to Lady Bunny and Divine.
My drag mom is YouTube. I learned everything I wanted to learn. You can learn anything on YouTube.
Hiking in drag is hilarious!
Whenever two guys got together, you asked, ‘What body part would you like to work?’ In my case, it was the arm. Most guys wanted to feed me for that arm drag. We always believed in storytelling, so if I had the arm, the heel would get away for a moment – or heel his way away – and then I would get back to it.
Being famous was extremely disappointing for me. When I became famous it was a complete drag and it is still a complete drag.
I’m certainly not inventing anything new with drag.
Drag, at its core, is about honoring yourself and your own unique way of being a gendered, queer person. Your own unique way of using fashion to express yourself.
People ask me, ‘Have you done much drag?’ And I say, ‘I don’t think of it as drag. I’m playing a woman!’
The audience of ‘Drag Race’ and the fans of drag queens are often very surprising.
The truth is, a lot of people go to drag shows, really, for very light entertainment, and I think sometimes maybe we don’t even give the audiences enough credit as to what they’d be down for.
My concept is drag queens are not a reflection of society, they are a fun house reflection of society where we bend, and twist and manipulate the anxieties we all feel.
One of the things I did to make myself feel better is that I kicked up my running even more. I knew that I had to stay active, that I had to keep living as if my life was actually going to unfold naturally because when you stop, when you freeze, and you think about it, that’s when the demons come and can drag you down.
People sometimes think that drag queens are always really confident and fearless because we transform ourselves into these beautiful creatures, and they believe that it’s how we live our everyday lives.
If every song is in the past tense, that’s a drag, so you have to predict the future.
Drag Race’ is giving visibility to our community. It’s on TV and you can see RuPaul, who is a black, queer, powerful figure who has run this empire for years, and I think that’s an amazing thing.
Death used to announce itself in the thick of life but now people drag on so long it sometimes seems that we are reaching the stage when we may have to announce ourselves to death. It is as though one needs a special strength to die, and not a final weakness.
I’ve only been living in Los Angeles for three years, but I’ve already become a huge baby about the cold. The temperature in my house is 64 degrees, so I drape a blanket over my body and drag it around like Linus. I am also wearing a sweatshirt.
From childhood, we’re trained to be a certain way, to behave a certain way – so that the power base can control us, really. And punk and drag are completely outside of that.
Don’t drag the Mossad into political arguments. These are people who can’t defend themselves.
Drag is literally so ancient that it predates modern understanding of gender, of transness, of queerness. Drag predates modern ideas of gender, of theater at all. Drag predates the word ‘drag’ itself.
As drag queens and as comic people, we listen to our own artistic compass all the time.
My own experience of gender has been about a lot of fluidity. In drag, I like to combine aspects of masculinity and femininity and rewrite the rules for those.
Where I come from, if you weren’t a drag queen or a radical thinker or a performance artist of some kind, you were the weirdo.
I’ve always been into subcultures. In the ’50s and ’60s, what Pierre Molinier was doing was super subculture – he was taking self-portraits, it was very private, very intimate. I think that’s actually how I started my drag – in my bedroom, taking MacBook self-portraits.
I think that fashion, in general, is a world of super-heightened glamour, and when you talk about super-heightened glamour, the first thing that comes to mind is a drag queen.
