I want to do performance that inspires people to be true to themselves and has tangible impact on the community. Not just because I want to be a role model - I just think it's the best way to honor the tradition of drag.
— Sasha Velour
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.
For me, my greatest weakness is also my greatest strength: I'm a complete overthinker about everything.
I want to show people it's not elitist to be a deep thinker.
The loss of my mom really inspired me to go to a place with my performances that were emotionally honest, and I found that audiences really responded to that. People need to see heartbreak transformed into beauty.
Drag should push the limits of what is considered fashionable or beautiful.
No matter what you're doing, whether it's a makeup tutorial or an interview or a lip sync, performance is the essence of drag. It is gender performance. Being able to produce a performance is what a superstar has to do.
It's important in drag to challenge things and present your own vision.
Identity for Jews like us was shaped by cultural practices and family traditions rather than allegiances of place or language or class, because those things continued to be redefined for us. Drag operates along similar lines.
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.
Even though I present myself at the height of glamour and beauty, part of my truth is being desperate and emotional and unafraid of being unattractive.
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've learned that I am a complete workaholic and that no amount of sleeplessness or exhaustion will keep me from taking on new or ambitious projects. That is both a good quality and a terrible one, I think.
I think sometimes you have to imagine a fantasy world in which we are represented and visible the way we should be.
When I started doing drag, I always put together multimedia elements for live performance.
There are no limits to what kind of bodies, which types of people, which genders, or what races can do amazing drag, and I think the audience is clamoring fighting with each other more and more to see drag represented as fully as it possibly can be.
Drag resists conservatism in the most basic way possible, and also in the most effective way possible, because it's improper when it comes to looks, which is everything in conservative systems.
I'm a drag queen who is thoughtful and serious about drag in addition to being funny, ambitious, and glamourous.
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.
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.
I grew up in this house of intellectuals, and for me, it wasn't, like, a negative thing. And what I've discovered is, for a lot of people, it is. But I think knowing history, liking to talk about ideas - like, I just genuinely like to geek out and go on these intellectual thought journeys.
There's so many more themes of drag than just fierceness.
For a while, my favorite movie was 'Vertigo.' Everything in that movie was captivating to me.
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 find inspiration in the movies I've loved, especially all films ever made about Dracula.
I've always been committed to tuning out the trends of drag and doing styles and fashions and performances that are really true to what I love, to the movie references I've always loved, fashion that speaks to me for whatever reason - no matter what people say.
I love being kind of reserved and serious and then having these explosions of passion when it comes time to perform.
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.
'Drag Race' really offered me a platform to have a lot of people listen to what I have to show them, and I want to showcase the whole community I know.
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!
When I was in high school, I used to beg my teachers to let me create films and plays instead of writing essays. I think they were at least happy I was excited about school.
People are really seeing that drag is an art form, that it's so much more than self-expression.
I try to write an essay every time I speak.
It is important to me to keep fighting for the rights of those who cannot.
I really believe in the power of playing by your own rules.
A lot of people still have the idea that drag goes from one end of the gender spectrum to the other end of the gender spectrum, and they expect drag queens to be masculine out of drag and hyper-feminine in drag. I think that portrays a lot of binary thinking and, ultimately, a lot of misogyny.
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.
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.
It was definitely my grandmother who introduced me to fashion.
When it comes to drag, my favorite thing we can do is kind of push against the beauty standards of magazines. We don't need to look like supermodels. That what really makes drag special and makes it unique and makes it queer.
As a drag performer, my identity exists in music, art, and fashion, not in any one 'language' of gender or 'appearance.'
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.
I like a little Barbra Streisand!
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.
I love biting off way more than I can chew, and that's a great motivator because it forces me to rise to the occasion.
There are some amazing people around who can tell stories about drag from the '60s and in New York, like the amazing club kid drag. About drag from around the world. So people should be asking questions and listening to stories.
Even if I hadn't won 'Drag Race,' even if I'd never been on, I'd still be working my tail off, creating live shows, magazines, videos, anything I possibly could!
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.
Conservatism is all about surfaces and labels and presentation, and drag says no, we refuse to follow any rules about that.
