Says Sasha Velour, interviewed in "Sasha Velour’s 'The Look of Pride'/The artist discusses gender, self-expression, and how drag can be an antidote to shame" (The New Yorker).
June 13, 2023
"I think the biggest misconception is that we are making fun of gender, or somehow romanticizing gendered clichés."
"In my experience, drag is mostly about emotion, story, and beauty. The gendered aspect is simply a stage, a gesture that helps free the performer and the viewer from the supposedly realistic limitations on the world 'as it is,' helping us step into the realm of fantasy. Sometimes, the character we create in drag is more authentic, more personal, more real that what we are allowed to be in our day-to-day.... I first created Sasha Velour as a comic character, and slowly became that illustration in real life, too. Comics and drag share the same idea: you take a good story, clear character design, and put in lots of hard work.... Both comics and drag come from strong independent traditions that enable artists and performers to develop a more unique and recognizable style, and to address a wider range of political and personal topics. All you need to make art is your own self."
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Most everyone loves to dress up as a fantasy character. It's called Halloween. Some hardcore role-players also make fantasy outfits for Renaissance Fairs and Trekkie conventions, or for general cosplay. During the work week they go back to their routine, humdrum and functional lives.
Church priests and choirs dress up weekly (or daily) in robes to show their affiliation. Some also wear crucifixes to show it too. So, please just admit that drag shows are a de facto new religious order and then we can treat them as such per the separation of church and state. No crosses on state property, not religious events on state property...so no...
So this is why they are performing in front of children and soliciting dollar bills stuffed into their g-strings. Gotcha
Humans express themselves in infinite ways— from theatre to painting, ceramics, mime….we costume on occasion to pretend we are someone else. But we don’t inhabit those expressions. We don’t pretend that we are the painting or the pot or the costumed character, because that is not psychologically healthy.
What absolute, breathtakingly self-justifying horseshit.
- Rafe
Blackface as a form of liberation, of personal truth. Rachel Dolezal can relate, I'm sure.
It's been said all over the internet - everything's binary in the bedroom. Drag is the homosexually flaming over-the-top caricature of that binary, a binary that they try to mimic behind closed doors but fail at miserably. Drag is a subconscious manifestation of their gay male frustration and failure to understand women, whom many of them secretly hate.
They say it's art. They say it's playful. They say it's kitsch. It's actually an insult. It's a veiled sneer at women generally and white f*g hags can't get enough. Must be a 50 shades of Grey thing...
The NE ACLU had a table at the Lincoln Pride parade last week. At the table was a drag queen who was obviously male; no fake boobs. Also at the table was candy.
I don't care what these people say, but this drag queen story hour and normalizing drag queens is all about confusing children and luring some into sexual contact.
Tucker's second Twitter show episode said it best. It used to be a universal taboo that adults can't have sex with children. Now, the Left wants to normalize and legalize it.
After gay marriage was made legal by King Tony Kennedy, the Left had to move on to the next crisis. That crisis is now transgenderism. It is way worse as the Dems want us to believe 2 +2 = 5. Anyone who won't bend the knee on that issue, is banned from YouTube and not seen as a "kind" person in liberal society.
We are deep in the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution. The King (Trump) has been arrested. They want to cut off his head (life in prison). We must deny basic facts about science and human nature. Sen. from TN: What is a woman? Justice KBJ: I'm not a biologist.
The Jacobins created the Cult of Science and the Cult of the Supreme Being. Today's Jacobins have 3 cults: The Cult of Transgenderism, The Cult of Global Warming and the Cult of Tribalism.
My Creighton professor said of the French Revolution: The veneer of civilization is very thin. He was correct, but I never thought it would come to this.
For many years RuPaul did not allow so-called transgender women on his (his, not her) hit TV show Drag Race.
His reasoning was that drag is about men impersonating women. He felt that since transgenders were actually women (or at least claimed to be) they were not drag and were not impersonating women.
So can a woman, either real (biological) or fake (transgender) be a drag queen or even a drag artist? How?
Perhaps we could get our beloved hostess to appear on Drag Race? What about it, Ann?
RuPaul is most definitely not transgender. He is a gay man who lives as a man in all respects except when performing. He is a female impersonator, not a female, by his own self-description. His pronoun is "he".
John LGBTQ Henry
… vanity…
I am perfectly comfortable with acknowledging that drag is a performing art form and can be liberating for the performer. Inhabiting a character can have that effect even when the character is a normal, boring one. And I like drag - I like the internal creation of the character as well as the expertise required to manifest it physically, and (as with acting generally) the commitment necessary to make it believable and entertaining. No problems with any of that.
Where the problems arise for me is when it appears that drag is being used as a vehicle publicly to say that a person really is the character, or these days the "gender," that the person is putting on, which is no longer characterization but delusion. A delusion that we are all forced to accept as normal. Worse when that point is being made to children, whose relationship with reality is already tenuous.
It doesn't even necessarily have to be sexualized, though of course I'm creeped out the most when it is. So I have to ask myself, why is a (non-sexy) drag performer at story hour any worse than a mall Santa Claus? Both are representing themselves as real people to the children. Well.
I can't say that I ever gave "drag queen story hour" a moment's thought until maybe last year; it might have been a thing in few places, but it wasn't what it is now. The reason I see it now as a social ill is that now it's being used not just to blur the lines between fantasy and reality for children (like a mall Santa), but as a performative protest aimed at the children's parents and society generally: "This bizarre and possibly entertaining character is the real me, and you have no right to judge my mental health or fitness for a job just because I present myself publicly as a cartoon character. I am every bit as respectable and socially acceptable as the elderly librarian over there."
It's one thing to play with fantasy in a light-hearted fashion that acknowledges, "We all know this is make-believe, but let's put it on for the kids." It's quite another to say, "This is my reality, and if you don't respect it, you're actually harming me!" Unfortunately drag performers are now in the thick of the latter, whether or not they want to be.
Again, I'm just talking about non-sexualized drag here - a "fairy godmother" doing story hour, for instance. Sexualized drag is inappropriate for young children.
Why do cross-dressers never dress like plain, normal women?
gender is sex-correlated attributes (e.g. sexual orientation): masculine and feminine
clothing is a social construct established to normalize a favorable juxtaposition of the sexes: male and female
pride is a polyamorous parade of lions, lionesses, and their [unPlanned] cubs playing in gay revelry on the African savanna, but probably not on the Isle of Lesbos
The Rainbow is representative of albinophobic empathy, sympathy, and intent.
#HateTrumpsLove #HateLovesAbortion
He is a female impersonator, not a female, by his own self-description. His pronoun is "he".
Deflating the conflation of the social and biological. Good for him.
That said, to mock or muck, is the question... is a sincere form of flattery?
… vanity…
The look of Pride and prejudice.
I learned about drag in 1978. A friend was deeply involved in it as a tranny stripper at a gay bar in our hometown. Cross dressing was all about gay sex at the time. Only about gay sex. Empowering gay sex. Enabling gay sex. The gay sex was the totality of the experience, after the fancy dress on stage was over. Donna Summer was a mere opening to more gay sex. NTTAWWT, of course. HIV was but a glimmer in the eye of its many fathers at the time.
Tell me how it is any different now, please. Better PR?
Obtaining straight sex follows a multitude of paths to success, many more vile than crossdressing. Back then, drag was a superhighway compared to most other roads to meeting new partners. Gay bath houses and male prostitution were perhaps the only comparable connection modes for achieving successful male sexual promiscuity. And promiscuity was glorified.
The more things change, I think, the more they stay the same.
Wait! They're like comedians, but they aren't making fun of gender.
Run that by me again....
This is a valuable look into the mind of a terminally narcissistic personality. Thanks!
RuPaul's show mocks and degrades women, just as the Real Housewives series mock and degrade women, just as strip clubs mock femininity and degrade women.
None of this is about celebrating anything: at its foundation, drag is about despising women and the new transgenderism about literally mutilating them.
Best drag ever was Monty Python. Each player did a pretty respectable Hideous Old Bag.
But I guess that doesn't count.
The pushback has begun as the child victims have started to accrue. Now come the questions: "What makes you relevant to society?" and "What is your contribution?". And as the stammering answers are given, the phoniness of the weak explanations start to become apparent. High time, too. Stay away from our kids.
So, why, do you suppose, drag queens are always wanting to perform for children and not old people at the rest home?
This subject matter obsession, gender/drag/trans, is so tiresome so pervasive here that I just can't even waste any more time on this blog. Everything good about the internet is slowly passing away. Insty only posts a handful of interesting takes a day. Althouse, my second favorite blog of all time has turned into T-central. But worse, real life is so cluttered with drag show talk that what was once an escape, to come here and see legal arguments or language analysis with wit and humor, is now just a boring reflection of the democrat obsession with all things trans. Maybe I'm the only one who is tired of it. Maybe the rest of the USA is happy to hear about read about see programming about those sick and twisted people trying to corrupt America's youth. I'm not. It's like watching a gruesome slow-motion train wreck over and over.
I don't think that's the biggest misconception (the biggest, or at least most common, is probably that it's all a creepy sex thing, like Nero and Doryphorus). It's just the "misconception" that hits hardest because it's the hardest to rebut. Given, you know, the way drag performers dress and act.
Nobody gives a shit, Sasha. It's the mutilation, grooming and recruiting of children that is attracting attention.
Otherwise, trans people are just another bunch of deviants.
Enigma: "Church priests and choirs dress up weekly (or daily) in robes to show their affiliation."
So do soldiers, policemen, firemen, chefs, construction workers, doctors and countless other people wearing the uniform of their livelihood - not living in a perpetual Comic-Con. Besides, Halloween is once a year, not every day, and initially for children. That said, I often went to the Castro on Halloween to watch the show, so I get the fluff of it.
Drag has been stale since before Milton Berle.
At some point in his career Stephen Foster realized that his minstrel songs romanticized racial cliches and altered his style. Of course, he doesn't appear to have been a complete narcissist, unlike "Sasha Velour."
The problem with Dylan Mulvaney isn't that he's got gender dysphoria, it's that he's a drag queen cosplaying as gender dysphoric. He can always drop the act, but a teen who is influenced by him and goes through with "gender-affirming" surgery has made an irreversible choice. That makes Mulvaney evil.
Who gets to decide if a group is being mocked, the one dressing up as a member of that group or the group being charicatured? Why use a photo of Sasha wearing sedate, work at home clothes? The outfit looks atypical, compared to what shows up on an image search and the issue isn't what somoene wears/does in the privacy of their home but what is done in public.
Drag is not the problem.
As usual, the left continues to distort the argument until it gets a public reaction it likes.
The goal is far beyond art, which has been largely ruined by waves of modernism and post-modernism. The goal is the destruction of civilization with the aim of replacing it with Anarcho-Tyranny where the deviants somehow think they'll end up on top. Meanwhile we are allowing our our children to be destroyed. Look at the sharply higher rates of mental illness OD deaths and the collapse of marriage and fertility rates.
Whatever. Stay away from the kids.
"It used to be a universal taboo that adults can't have sex with children. Now, the Left wants to normalize and legalize it."
What a bunch of horseshit. Its not drag queens molesting children. It's heterosexual men by far (usually molesting family members and acquaintances), followed by religious figures, and much more rarely (but not nonexistent by any means) people who identify as gay. Drag has absolutely nothing to do with pedophilia.
You all just can't see the pattern, can you? Every single time right wingers lose elections, they have to come up with a new group to bash: immigrants, gays, now transgender which is being confused with drag queens (no, they are not the same). They do this to distract you and to create hate and division rather than focusing on actually important issues like spending, infrastructure, healthcare, etc. and yet you fall for it every single time. You don't like drag shows (I personally don't find them that entertaining), then don't go to one. Don't bring your kid to a drag queen book reading, whatever. This is such a tiny fraction of the issues of the day, and yet you all obsess over it.
Does anyone really need to have it explained to them why some men like to dress up as women? That's been around forever. No one cares.
What we want to know is why has it become necessary for other people's children to become a part of their fantasy? Can someone explain that?
"I think children should be introduced to drag, not shielded from it."
In the next sentence he equates it to playing dress up with Granny.
People want to equate today's drag queens with Corporal Klinger, Milton Burle or other entertainers.
If that was all it was, I'd have no problem. But tipping into the costume, reading from age-inappropriate material, pole dancing and exposing your penis to kids?
Not the same. It is just not.
"What do you say to those who think that children should be protected from seeing drag performers?
Drag is an antidote to shame. It is pure entertainment, freedom, joy—it should be for everyone! I think children should be introduced to drag, not shielded from it."
If only they were of age, they could experience the booming Drag Bingo nights popping up in even small town bars.
Behind a pay wall. Can anyone tell me if the article explains the current garish, "clown meets Mexican wrestler" aesthetic?
Anyone?
A woman wearing a feather boa is "drag". A woman in an elaborate, flashy gown is "drag". A woman with big hair and bold make-up is "drag".
I don't want women defined by terms used by men pretending to be us.
lawyapalooza said... Its not drag queens molesting children. It's heterosexual men by far (usually molesting family members and acquaintances)
--
Perhaps. See Hunter referring to Pop as "Pedo Pete" and his daughter's diary discussing "Pedo Pete" showering with her.
Of course, are we certain "Pedo Pete" doesn't engage in a bit of Drag in his private moments?
He is full of surprises. Ask his female secret service personnel.
Still, you don't get to do your comedy routine in front of school children.
"What a bunch of horseshit. Its not drag queens molesting children. It's heterosexual men by far (usually molesting family members and acquaintances), followed by religious figures, and much more rarely (but not nonexistent by any means) people who identify as gay. Drag has absolutely nothing to do with pedophilia."
This is complete horseshit. First off, people who have sex with the same sex are gay regardless of whether they "identify" as gay. That's a BS dodge made up by the gay lobby to distance them from their well-known penchant for grooming underage boys for sex.
Second, drag is all now all about pedophilia and recruitment to the deviant lifestyle. As someone asked above, why aren't they knocking down the doors of old-age homes? Because that's not where the fresh meat is.
Third, this dishonest list is based on pro-gay definitions of reported cases -- what purveyors of lists like this fail to mention is that they are hiding the ball and classifying child molesters as something other than gay in order to maintain their narrative. The priests (for example) who molested boys were gay. Period.
"Gay" has a definition and it is not dependent on someone's "identity". Anyone who says otherwise is a dishonest and wedded to a pro-deviance narrative they know is untenable unless they massage the language like they massage teenage boys.
"I think the biggest misconception is that we are making fun of gender, or somehow romanticizing gendered clichés."
"Who are you going to believe, me or your own lying eyes?"
We correctly understand what the drag monsters are doing. We also correctly perceive that only a pervert and a sex grooming monster would want to aim this at kids.
lawyapalooza babbled:
"What a bunch of horseshit. Its not drag queens molesting children"
Getting kids to put money in the costumes of "drag queens" is molesting children.
EVERYONE involved in that situation is molesting the kids. That means the "drag queen" letting the kid do it, the people letting kids there, the people taking teh kids there.
Even when they're not directly interacting the kids, they're still sexually grooming the kids, because a drag show is a sex show, and exposing kids to sexual shows is sexually grooming the kids
lawyapalooza said...
It's heterosexual men by far (usually molesting family members and acquaintances), followed by religious figures, and much more rarely (but not nonexistent by any means) people who identify as gay.
Got some numbers to back that up? Or are numbers "racist"?
Drag has absolutely nothing to do with pedophilia.
Drag that has NOTHING to do with kids has nothing to do with pedophilia.
Sexually grooming kids by taking them to sex shows, like "drag shows" has EVERYTHING to do with pedophilia.
Interesting how your'e fighting so hard to dishonestly blur the boundaries between "drag show" and "drag shows aimed at kids"
Mikee: it is different now because practitioners deny it is about sex while it is; that it is not about degrading women, which it is (and didn't used to be so); because it is being forced on children in multifarious ways in schools; because it is no longer a mating performance but a movement with demands on ever aspect of public and business and academic and government life; because mutilating surgery and drugs are now a main driver, not nightclub performance; and because we are now all being forced to participate. Every time I go to a doctor, I have to define my sex as "how I was identified at birth." That's repulsive to me: it reduces me as a woman. The corporate capture will not cease.
And those gay clubs and bath houses were not necessary for gay men to find mates, only to engage in sex, while, you seem to believe, heterosexuals had it easier? When AIDS struck, gay men were already so statistically promiscuous that epidemiologists were staggered by the numbers of sex partners patients reported. Many fine gay men, and female partners of men down low, would be with us today if not for a gay culture that exclusively encouraged extreme promiscuity -- ten partners a night was not unusual. This was toxic both physically and mentally, and too many died young -- and were exploited young. Schools are not bath houses, ok?
mikee said...
Obtaining straight sex follows a multitude of paths to success, many more vile than crossdressing.
And every single one of the "vile" ones has its equivalent on the "gay sex" side
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