Sasha Velour

It is important to me to keep fighting for the rights of those who cannot.

For me, my greatest weakness is also my greatest strength: I'm a complete overthinker about everything.

The truth is I do take drag really seriously, and I think that there's kind of a place for that - to see it as this political and historical art form, and to want to continue pushing it in new directions. And also honor the old directions as well. So I'm sort of like a drag intellectual/drag queen.

I'd like to see drag really cultivate its political roots.

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.

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

There are some amazing people around who can tell stories about drag from the '60s and in New York, like the amazing club kid drag. About drag from around the world. So people should be asking questions and listening to stories.

It's so beautiful that drag is able to speak to so many different types of people.

The cities that I go to where I can tell that they have a lot of different types of drag, I tell them that they remind me of Brooklyn, and I mean that as the highest compliment in the entire world.

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.

Even though I present myself at the height of glamour and beauty, part of my truth is being desperate and emotional and unafraid of being unattractive.

Right when I was starting to experiment with drag, my mom was diagnosed with cancer, and during her chemo treatment, she lost all of her hair. And for her, the idea of being a fem with no hair was really difficult.