With the first four episodes of We’re Here season 4 now steaming on Max, and new episodes debuting Fridays at 9pm ET/PT on HBO, drag artist, activist, writer, and RuPaul’s Drag Race season 9 winner Sasha Velour speaks exclusively with The Queer Review’s editor James Kleinmann about becoming a host on the Emmy, Peabody, and GLAAD award-winning unscripted series alongside fellow Drag Race alum, Priyanka, Jaida Essence Hall, and Latrice Royale, which takes the queens to Tennessee and Oklahoma.
This month in New York, Sasha curated, hosted, and performed at a We’re Here themed edition of her legendary New York drag revue Night Gowns which featured, her Tennessee “drag daughter” Norma aka veteran drag artist Veronica Paige, her We’re Here co-host Priyanka, and performance artist Zoe Ziegfeld. In August, Sasha will perform in a new show, Velour: A Drag Spectacular, co-written with and directed by Moisés Kaufman at La Jolla Playhouse, California. Her acclaimed book, The Big Reveal: An Illustrated Manifesto Of Drag, which explores the history, theory, and possibilities of the art of drag, was published in 2023.
During our conversation, Sasha shares with The Queer Review what drag means to her, her experience of working with her “drag kids” on We’re Here, and the concept behind her breathtaking lip-synch performance to Kesha’s “Praying” in the season finale.
James Kleinmann, The Queer Review: One of the things that I loved about watching this season of We’re Here was getting to know you better.
Sasha Velour: “I’m so glad. They did such a good job with our stories and with all of our drag kids’ stories. It really exceeded my expectations.”
What does drag mean to you in your own life?
“Drag really can be anything. It’s art, its performance that’s free of shame around gender, free of this fear that how we are born, the bodies that we have, are going to limit every choice we make; how we act, who we love, how we express ourselves, how we move, how we dress. That kind of radical freedom and acceptance for ourselves spills into an acceptance for all people and an open-mindedness towards the people in our community. That is drag for me.”
“Drag has been possibility when it seems like the world doesn’t have place for me. It’s been confidence when I had none in myself. It’s been joy and entertainment and laughter amidst darkness and sadness. That’s really the number one thing that I want to share with all the people out there: this is a healing, positive art form that spreads goodwill everywhere it goes.”
On the show, you mention growing up in a small town in Illinois. What perspective did that give you as you joined We’re Here and went to these small towns in Tennessee and Oklahoma?
“Just like Murfreesboro, Tennessee, the town where I grew up is a small college town with a big agricultural community. Chicago is three hours away from where I grew up, unlike Nashville, which is only 30 minutes away from Murfreesboro. But the in these smaller towns, drag shows, gay bars, and queer spaces generally are essential because for young people, sometimes there’s no other way to access information about what it means to be LGBTQ. Let alone that they are as natural as everything else that young people are exposed to. The dangers of not having any outlet for that, of having no drag, of having no visible queer people, is really present in my mind.”
“I held on to every scrap I could find about queer existence when I was a young person. I wandered back and forth outside the gay bar, dreaming of what was going on inside until I finally went in. With We’re Here, we saw it as our mission to kickstart that a little bit in some towns where drag had either been completely shut down, like in Murfreesboro, where they lost many spaces to perform drag because of fear, or where it was getting restricted and hidden away, like in in Bartlesville and Tulsa in Oklahoma.”
One of your drag kids in Tennessee, Norm, has actually been a drag queen for 20 years, known as Veronica Paige in drag. What was your approach to working with Norm and preparing him for his drag performance?
“It was the perfect first drag child for me because she already had such a strong perspective of what she wanted to do with drag. So it was really more about discovering her story and how she wanted to share it and getting to use what I know about putting on a great drag show as a tool for her to access new sides of her own drag. That matches what kind of drag mom I want to be anyway. A good parent doesn’t tell their child, ‘This is how you have to be’. Especially when we think about what queer kids need. They need a parent who is open to who they are and curious and is going to explore this world with them and support their instincts about who they want to be. As a drag mom, my approach is, you know better than me what kind of drag goddess or creature you need to become and I’m just going use what I know, and research what I don’t know, so that I can support you in making that happen.”
How about working with Christian? It was his first time in drag wasn’t it?
“Christian came in with a dossier of ideas that he wanted to do. I comically threw it out on the ground because there was some 101 Dalmatians thing in there that every drag queen wants to do her first time out of the gate that we don’t all need to do! But I did take some of his suggestions because as a drag mom I really try to draw from all your references and help you find the most unique, the most you version there could be.”
“I wanted to find a way for Christian to deal with the trauma that had happened to him without it being sad and painful on stage. When we bring painful things from our real lives into a drag number, it’s actually important that we do think of still being entertaining for the audience, of taking care of them as part of our family. We don’t want to expose them to trauma, but rather guide them to some moment of catharsis or possibility or hope, amidst the stuff that we have to face in the real world.”
I love the relationship that we see build between you and your other drag kid Jess throughout the episodes and that we start to see Jess become more comfortable in herself. What was it like being Jess’ drag parent?
“I was so excited for Jess to see herself looking different. She just needed to see that she had more possibilities for how she could look and how she could feel than she had become used to for all these years. I knew that a big face reveal had to be part of her drag number. I could tell how important an affirming makeup moment was going to be in her gender journey, especially in such a vulnerable, early place in her transition. I saw her as such a goddess, a hero, for being willing to share a part of every trans person’s journey that we don’t often see on TV. It takes enormous bravery to do that. It was really important to me to comfort her and let her know that this is normal and that you are doing so much for others by sharing this.”
“I had a million bad ideas for her number about how to keep the reveals going! But ultimately, I wanted her to feel really good and confident and I ended up paring down all the movement and choreography for her so that she could really live in her moment. We ended up cutting the shoes from her number because there was something so sensuous about being barefoot in this church, taking her hair down and revealing her face, her beauty for the first time. Talk about a spiritual moment in a church. It was quite profound.”
What was it like putting together your own number in the church in Tulsa that we see you perform? It’s incredibly powerful.
“Thank you. I’ve been so moved by that song that Kesha wrote, “Praying”. It’s definitely about regaining your strength after abuse and hearing the stories of the way so many queer people are abused—by the church, by their governments, by their families, by their communities, and even by other queer people—really made the dynamics of that song resonate for me in a new way. I wanted to perform it as a stripping away of the labels, the judgment, and the shame that is placed upon us so often by others and to reveal the pure joy that is the truth of all people, and particularly of queer people just trying to exist, just trying to express ourselves. I was using the white dress not only as a classic symbol of purity in opposition to the red dress, but also as a projection surface, a site of the possibility and becoming that if you really give us a chance our lives can represent, not just for ourselves, but for everyone in this world. That was my vision for the arc of that number.”
By James Kleinmann
We’re Here season 4 is now steaming on Max. New episodes debut Fridays at 9pm ET/PT on HBO and stream on Max. For more on Sasha Velour visit SashaVelour.com.
