Everyone is welcome in drag. Everyone is important and valuable.
I think sometimes you have to imagine a fantasy world in which we are represented and visible the way we should be.
To costume yourself in the way that you fantasize, to make that a reality, and then to go right into the universe looking like an exceptional being takes a lot of courage.
I've always tried to twist the ideas of beauty that are maybe considered to be ugly by the mainstream. I was already kind of toying with that when it comes to baldness, which came from a discussion with my mother about how to be considered a beautiful woman if you're bald.
I went to Vassar College for undergraduate and studied literature and queer theory, and all of the above. And then I took a Fulbright scholarship in Russia.
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.
Purple has always been my favorite color... but purple, when I was a little kid, was a color that boys weren't really allowed to wear. That's what all the kids at school told me. I filled my wardrobe with as much purple as I could possibly find, because who cares? Life's too short to dress by other people's rules.
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.
Absolutely anyone can and must do drag.
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.
People are so serious about ourselves, and drag suggests that maybe it's all just a bunch of ideas, and we can be a little bit more flexible with them.
I want to show people it's not elitist to be a deep thinker.
The audience of 'Drag Race' and the fans of drag queens are often very surprising.
The cities that I go to where I can tell that they have a lot of different types of drag, I tell them that they remind me of Brooklyn, and I mean that as the highest compliment in the entire world.
Drag should push the limits of what is considered fashionable or beautiful.
Some people play it safe in the world of drag - I'm guilty of it myself, sometimes - but I hope to always be a voice that encourages people to buck trends, follow their instincts, and do good in the world.
Uniformity is not very interesting or sustainable - it's boring.
My favorite diva is Dame Shirley Bassey from the U.K. I just love that every song she sings becomes crazy and intense with feeling. That's how I feel in my daily life.
Siouxsie Sioux was such an inspiration when I was a teenager because I connected with these goth college students who listened to this genre of music. She showed me that femininity didn't necessarily have to look the way that I was familiar with. It could be more exciting and much more identifiable.
Right when I was starting to experiment with drag, my mom was diagnosed with cancer, and during her chemo treatment, she lost all of her hair. And for her, the idea of being a fem with no hair was really difficult.
