Quotes from Sasha Velour

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.

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've found that embracing the things that make me a little strange and different from other people, and learning to love that, makes me feel beautiful and fashionable every day.

Drag should push the limits of what is considered fashionable or beautiful.

Purple has always been my favorite color... but purple, when I was a little kid, was a color that boys weren't really allowed to wear. That's what all the kids at school told me. I filled my wardrobe with as much purple as I could possibly find, because who cares? Life's too short to dress by other people's rules.

People are so serious about ourselves, and drag suggests that maybe it's all just a bunch of ideas, and we can be a little bit more flexible with them.

From the second there was drag, trans people were doing it. And when cis women started being allowed in theaters, then cis women doing drag was part of theater.

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.

I love hearing the same songs over and over again - as long as queens challenge themselves to come up with new ways of performing them.

Just in my experience as a drag queen, I've been able to connect with queer people around the world - and to see them connecting with each other over a shared love of drag!

Racism is a problem everywhere, especially in this country, but all over the world, and especially within queer space.

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.

I want to see some queer politicians, some drag queens and drag kings running for office and shifting the way that policy is made as well.

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.

Drag is literally so ancient that it predates modern understanding of gender, of transness, of queerness. Drag predates modern ideas of gender, of theater at all. Drag predates the word 'drag' itself.

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.

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.

There's so many more themes of drag than just fierceness.

I want to show people it's not elitist to be a deep thinker.

I'm a drag queen who is thoughtful and serious about drag in addition to being funny, ambitious, and glamourous.

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'd say my fashion or beauty tip is to take the thing about you that makes you most distinctive and then exaggerate it. So if you have a little bushy unibrow, make it a dramatic unibrow. If you're balding, go completely bald.

Conservatism is all about surfaces and labels and presentation, and drag says no, we refuse to follow any rules about that.

We need to talk about representation for queer people in the media and also in law. And there's a long history of drag queens leading those discussions in marches on the street and even in bars going back to the time of Stonewall and before.