As our Drag Race obsession continues with season 12, RPDR royalty Sasha Velour gets in the Dazed magazine archive cupboard to share some of her thoughts with us on queer communities, Drag Race UK, and becoming a business woman.
The Drag Race season nine winner spoke about drag families as a safe space to experience gender. “Drag, to me, means a fabulous queer historic art form that has been around since the beginning of time. It’s a safe space to dream about experiencing gender in less fluid ways, for sure, which has always spoken to people in this deep way. So I think it reveals something deeply true about human nature: that we’re drawn to fluidity,” she said.
“It creates families all over the country – these sort of like safe little pockets of queer people who support each other: help each other find jobs, find housing, find a sense of stability in our lives,” she continued.
The performer also opened up about her iconic lip sync finale, where she removed her wig to reveal red rose petals to “So Emotional”. “Well, queens have always been very inventive with their Ru-veals. On Drag Race, I think people maybe learned from me that the big finale lip sync is a great opportunity to prepare a Ru-veal. But, I really want people to remember that the Ru-veal has to come from the story of the song,” she said.
Speaking about Drag Race UK, Velour said: “I loved that the queens don’t seem to be bound by any kind of conservative idea about femininity or feminine beauty. Drag queens don’t need to be models. We should be like radicals and I got to see that.”
The 32-year-old also spoke of her aim to become a business woman as well as a “fabulous stage performer”. “There is a lot of drag artists who are getting screwed over by a really, really unfair system and people who take advantage of the fact that drag artists maybe aren’t the most business-minded when we set out as professionals,” she said.
Watch the video below.