Drag is about asserting your power and your brilliance and your importance.
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 like a little Barbra Streisand!
I love 'Threepenny Opera'; I was exposed to it as a little kid because my parents, my mom and my dad, had bonded, when they were dating, over 'Threepenny Opera' and introduced it to me, a child, who could barely understand it. But I immediately gravitated even from that early age.
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.
For a while, my favorite movie was 'Vertigo.' Everything in that movie was captivating to me.
I've always wanted to play a role as a producer and a curator and to help make drag really have an epic scale and a large audience and a lot of interest.
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.
We still live in a country where there's disproportionate violence faced by our community, especially trans people and trans people of color. I think activism within the queer community continues to need to focus on those issues first.
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 find inspiration in the movies I've loved, especially all films ever made about Dracula.
I discovered that my drag really does speak to people on an emotional level. I also discovered that people are sometimes put off by an intellectual approach to drag.
I love being kind of reserved and serious and then having these explosions of passion when it comes time to perform.
I think sometimes you have to imagine a fantasy world in which we are represented and visible the way we should be.
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.
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.
For me, my greatest weakness is also my greatest strength: I'm a complete overthinker about everything.
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.
We need to talk about representation for queer people in the media and also in law. And there's a long history of drag queens leading those discussions in marches on the street and even in bars going back to the time of Stonewall and before.
Pride, to me, is a celebration of the past because we have come such a long way from the very first Pride parade marking the anniversary of the Stonewall riots, so it's a celebration of all that we've accomplished.