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Drag culture has always been about excess.
Sharon Needles
RuPaul's Drag Race' is my favorite show on television, and I've never missed an episode. With season 4, I watched it as if Sharon Needles wasn't me but was just another character.
I love what news has become. It's no longer based on facts, it's based on entertainment.
I can't speak for everyone, but the kind of comedy that makes me laugh are the ones that kind of make me cringe, and kind of make me look inside my own fears, my own anxieties.
Drag really isn't just about exaggerating and celebrating femininity. Some drag queens want to look like monsters, some drag queens want to look like hot dogs. Really what it is is just dipping your toes in all the swimming pools of identity and allowing yourself. Because society really tries to compartmentalize humans in a certain way.
My brain is a great fashion designer. Unfortunately, I don't have the skills to do it.
In the entertainment industry women are often judged. They judge bigger women, they judge black women, and older women too. We just don't do that in drag. Drag is open to everyone, regardless of gender, body shape or age.
I never hate my bullies from high school. I actually kind of appreciate them. If it wasn't for that boot camp training of how the world treats gay people and especially drag queens, I don't know if I would have survived as well as I have.
A man in a dress can get away with a lot.
When I wrote 'PG-13', I had just won 'RuPaul's Drag Race', all my nightmares had come true, and I was a brat. I was a privileged brat overnight.
I'm kind of a hokey-jokey, campy idiot in black lipstick, but when it comes to my music, I take it very seriously.
I've always said that punk is a time and money thing. You can only be punk if you're poor and you're young. It's for the poor, it's for the young.
I wrote my first album almost as an entitled child. 'Taxidermy' is written by a much more precarious, untrusting adult.
I'm obsessed with celebrities and fame. I always will be.
Jason Voorhees was a kid who was picked on at summer camp, and Michael Myers was someone vilified by his own family. I think that's why gay people like horror movies, because it's seeking revenge on the privileged.
I'm kind of against car culture - I've always been a cyclist.
It seems I am more beloved on a reality show from an extended cable network than I am in social circles in my own city.
I love covers because there's just something I love about replicating someone else's music or taking rare music and introducing it to a wider or a new audience.
I was such a bizarre conundrum of everything that makes you worry about a child. I was a bad student. I got picked on a lot. I loved horror movies.
I love Halloween. I mean, yes, I consider every day to be Halloween, but it's a very special day for me.
Call Me On The Ouija Board' is homage not just to horror movies involving children, but my favorites as a child.
It's like, 'Oh, great, drag queens can excel!' - but then the ceiling is so low. You're only allowed on the first floor; you're not allowed to go play with the big boys upstairs. Even RuPaul, who's a massive success, has been limited to where her music career can take her.
After I went on 'Drag Race', I was allowed to do so many things. I was allowed to do theater, commercial work, television work, modeling, fashion design, and it was great. But the thing with reality television fame is that it's got a pretty quick expiration date.
I did drag out of necessity. I had to do it... I had to create this other character because - because she's cheaper than therapy.
I've always toyed around with creating over-the-top lady characters in my head.
It has always been my aim to live everyday like Halloween by celebrating individuality and creative freedom within a world of horror.
I love celebrities, and I love the concept of fame, but it took me getting fame to realize that it doesn't exist, which was kind of a bummer. Fame is great if you're not famous, because it seems like this elusive impossible dream world. And it's not. It's a fancy word that managers and producers make up so they can keep hawking you for more money.
The secret to a great Halloween costume, and I can't stress this enough, is in my opinion is to extract sexuality out of your costume.
Some people say, 'Oh you're a weird queen. You're a punk queen.' All queens are weird! I don't care if you're in a sickening gown or dressed as an octopus. You are treating every day as if it were Halloween. You are donning a character and a persona that isn't real.
My house is a mixture of mid-century 'Brady Bunch' and the Addams family, so it's not uncommon to find vials of blood in my house.
I like work that pushes the barrier of bad taste.
My mom let me play in her clothes, wear makeup, and I had high heels from a thrift store. My mom tells me that the only reason she let me dress in her clothes is because she couldn't afford any toys, and it seemed entertaining enough and kept her from having to buy me anything, 'cause everything I wanted was in her makeup box or wardrobe.
Before my time on 'RuPaul's Drag Race', Halloween was my favorite day of the year since I was a little kid. It's the day we worship the macabre and live vicariously through the costumes that we wear.
Most drag queens dress up as super women, as an over exaggeration of the female form, because we like women, usually powerful women. I think that's why we are so over exaggerated; we are an amplification of the women who empowered us in our youth.
Politics remind me a lot of 'RuPaul's Drag Race.' It's real but it isn't.
A lot of people call horror movies 'campy', and I can certainly see why they think that they are, but being a product of the 80s, I didn't notice that they were campy - I came from a campy generation. I mean, Ronald Reagan is campy. But I don't think they're campy.
I can't speak for all queens, but Sharon Needles is definitely a different entity from me as Aaron Coady.
Not all drag queens but certainly the ones who empowered me, are people who pushed buttons, and poked fun at society from Leigh Bowery, to Lady Bunny and Divine.
If anyone boos you offstage, that is simply applause from ghosts.
My concept is drag queens are not a reflection of society, they are a fun house reflection of society where we bend, and twist and manipulate the anxieties we all feel.
I'm obsessed with media and news. I could watch it all day.
Growing up in Iowa I could have had it a lot worse. My family was more worried about my education and my health than the fact that I wore my sister's dresses.
Most American adults know what a drag queen is, but as they're portrayed in films like 'Dressed to Kill' and 'Silence of the Lambs.'
When most kids were hiding their eyes or cowering under the covers, I was three inches away from the television when horror movies were played.
The most powerful woman I know is my mother, and she doesn't wear any make up at all.
Discrimination must always be drawn out, like venom from the wound.
Beneath the 30 pounds of makeup and corsets and gowns are real beating hearts of real people and they usually come from a place of pain.
I think that the attraction to camp is its irreverence, it's strange, it in no way reflects reality while using real characters.
I come from what we call the pre-'Drag Race' drag world where I didn't start doing this with aspirations of being a reality television star, or this going any further than the small smoky bars of Pittsburgh.
When your hobby becomes a full-time job that pays you and the people around you, it's not fun anymore.
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