Sasha Velour

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 hope that people look at Brooklyn as kind of a drag utopia, because that's what it's been in my experience - all genders and bodies and ages doing drag.

There are no limits to what kind of bodies, which types of people, which genders, or what races can do amazing drag, and I think the audience is clamoring fighting with each other more and more to see drag represented as fully as it possibly can be.

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!

My favorite diva is Dame Shirley Bassey from the U.K. I just love that every song she sings becomes crazy and intense with feeling. That's how I feel in my daily life.

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.

It's important in drag to challenge things and present your own vision.

To costume yourself in the way that you fantasize, to make that a reality, and then to go right into the universe looking like an exceptional being takes a lot of courage.

Taking care of your mental health is important, and being able to model that for queer people who are out there every day dealing with their own struggles is very significant.

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.

My favorite thing about drag is taking one idea and flipping it on its head entirely.

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.