Sasha Velour sashays into the culture wars (2024)

Velour invoked the separation of church and state. She talked about the “variety in terms of chromosomal gender.” She added: “There’s nothing immoral about loving someone.”

Velour parried ignorant comments with a firm politeness, like a lawyer disarming a hostile witness. She never lost her composure. “To us,” she gently told the activists, “this sounds like hatred.”

This encounter takes place in the third episode of the new season of HBO’s “We’re Here,” a reality series in which drag queens visit small-town America and face stereotypical resistance from locals (the show returns to Max on April 26). She was a long way from New York, where her art is revered, her shows sell out and she’s developing a stage show with Broadway ambitions.

To some drag fans, Velour may not have seemed like the most obvious queen to send to the front lines of the culture wars. The winner of Season 9 of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” in 2017, Velour is known for her highbrow, cerebral interpretation of drag, and for her reveals — drag lingo for little surprises built into a performance. Hers is the kind of drag that feels like true performance art, not like an appetizer for a boozy brunch.

The protests she encountered while filming the show felt “like drag, in its own way,” she would say later. “They dress up, they put on their red hats,” and put on “demented, wrong drag, where it’s like you’re performing something, and there’s no acknowledgment that it’s a performance. And it’s really designed to make people feel unsafe and weak and small” — unlike real drag, which, at its best, makes the crowd (and the performer) feel joyful and empowered.

So Velour stood strong and tall, towering in heels over the pair of activists.

“I’m grateful that this young woman and her father want to speak with us,” Velour said to the TV cameras, “but it doesn’t feel like they really want to have a conversation. They’re not going to hear us.”

In one America, drag is practically illegal. In another, it’s never been more mainstream. Some drag artists get picketed and threatened with arrest, while others get Super Bowl commercials and Emmy Awards. The emotional and geographic distance between the two is growing depressingly distant.

Velour, 36, has become a traveler between these disparate lands. Having reached an echelon of drag fame below only RuPaul, Velour could have stayed ensconced in New York, leaving only to play sold-out crowds on her national and European tours. She’s doing those things, too, but she’s also fighting with conservatives for her freedom of expression, and for the rights of queer people in small towns.

Six months later and 900 miles away from Murfreesboro, Velour is sitting in her art-filled Brooklyn home with her Italian greyhound, Vanya, lounging nearby. Her partner, Johnny, is upstairs with covid. This return to reality TV — it’s a move that Velour joked about dreading in the intro to her 2023 memoir and drag history book, “The Big Reveal.”

Will such a move make a difference? Could a performance amid people who hate her art change their hearts and minds about it? She demurred.

“If anything,” Velour says, “I think our ability to be visible on TV is a reflection of the work activists do on the ground to shift culture and to change up institutions, and to illuminate for powerful people where their blind spots are.”

A few days prior, at a rehearsal space in Times Square, a group of powerful people (i.e. potential investors) was prepared to open their wallets for her theatrical project, a drag history that also explores how she went from Alexander Hedges Steinberg — the theatrical, vampire-obsessed queer child of academics in Urbana, Ill. — to Sasha Velour, drag superstar.

The show, opening in San Diego in August, is based on Velour’s book, which traces drag from ancient shamanistic ritual to Elizabethan theater and Chinese opera.

Director Moisés Kaufman — who considers Velour “one of the best performers of her generation” — introduced the presentation, standing before a makeshift white curtain that looked like bedsheets. “Everything you see has been made with spit and glue,” Kaufman told attendees. “If something crashes, that’s drag.”

But Velour’s drag is not ad hoc or ramshackle. It is precise, considered, sharpened to a knife’s edge. She emerged through those bedsheet-curtains and stretched a spike-heeled foot to the sky. She wore a showgirl headdress and was surrounded by a video projection of four versions of Sasha Velour — making her, in effect, her own backup dancers. Then she competed with these avatars for the spotlight in increasingly comic and then aggressive ways. They spilled virtual marbles and tripped her, trying to sabotage her act. She pushed them back behind the curtain. They closed in on her. She let out, to the tune of Aerosmith’s “Dream On,” a lip-synced scream.

“Our art literally gets criminalized,” she says during another number. “Our voices, often discredited. But not tonight.”

Every good drag show has a reveal, and every reveal contains a greater truth. So it’s tempting to view the offstage version of Sasha Velour as the real Sasha Velour — sans makeup, wearing a black turtleneck and angular glasses, looking like she’s about to teach a college course on neo-expressionism.

With drag queens, everyone will “focus on unmasking the person and seeing, you know, who they really are,” Velour says at home. “There’s something kind of faulty about that.” Many people, she says, find out who they really are through drag, through fantasy.

Velour began to find that through her grandmother Dina, a Ukrainian immigrant to San Francisco and failed actress, who encouraged a young Velour to dress up in dramatic costumes and perform skits. Velour’s father taught Russian history, and her mother edited a scholarly journal. They were supportive of their child’s sexuality and drag ambitions, and Velour’s book praises their “seriously good parenting.” Their academic rigor can be seen throughout her book, which delves into unheralded gender-non-conforming performers in history, including Barbette (a 1920s drag aerialist), Coccinelle (a French actress who, in 1958, underwent gender-affirming surgery), and Washington’s own William Dorsey Swann (a former enslaved person known as the “queen of drag”).

Velour entered the pantheon herself because of three simple, perfect reveals in the semifinals of “Drag Race” Season 9, which aired five chaotic months into the presidency of Donald Trump, but before Republicans focused their sights on queer literature and drag.

Velour was considered the avant-garde underdog against her competitor, Shea Couleé, who had won more challenges that season. But as soon as they started to lip-sync Whitney Houston’s “So Emotional,” Velour ran away with the show. She began to rip the petals off a rose, mouthing the lyrics with a snarl. At the first emotional crest of the song — “I get so emotional, baby” — she plucked off an elbow-length glove and unleashed an arching spray of hidden rose petals. She teased off the other glove, burlesque-style, as the second verse began, sending up another burst of petals. When the song reached its climax, she lifted her crimson wig, arms quivering, to unleash a cascade of petals onto her signature shaved head — a tribute to her mother, who died of cancer in 2015.

Most “Drag Race” reveals had, until this point, consisted of ripping off a dress to display another outfit underneath, or taking off a long wig to reveal a short one — a neat trick, but one that didn’t capture the emotional catharsis of a song, or reinterpret it entirely. Velour’s “So Emotional” wasn’t about the romantic swell of love; it was about out-of-control obsession, vulnerability and savagery. In her 1987 music video, Whitney Houston smiled and cooed her way through the “So Emotional.” When Velour lip-synced the song, she sneered and raged and flared her eyes. She field-dressed a bubbly pop song into a meaty, manic breakdown.

The rose petals were one reveal within a larger reveal. The audience, electrified, leaped to its feet.

Within 24 hours of her arrival in Murfreesboro, seven years after her win, someone shouted the age-old slur — “F-----s!” — at Velour and one of her co-stars, Priyanka, a winner of the Canadian version of “Drag Race.”

“Thank you,” Velour replied. “I love that word!”

Despite her impervious reply, shooting episodes of “We’re Here” brought Velour back to her teenage years, living in a small town, being the only gay person she knew. She was used to online trolls, in 2023, but to hear hateful words directly, to her face, after so much progress?

“That was pretty new for me,” Velour says.

The life of a modern drag queen: caught between abject adoration and casual degradation.

When they meet her, fans sometimes pull off wigs and shower the floor with petals, and Velour is always polite, even though it’s equivalent to, say, a person performing a scene from “Kramer vs. Kramer” in front of Meryl Streep (“It’s sweet,” Velour says, diplomatically).

Early seasons of “We’re Here,” which debuted in 2020, could be summed up with a pithy elevator pitch: “Queer Eye,” but for drag. Queens traveled the states, performed makeovers on queer locals and allies, shared bittersweet personal stories, and finished the episode off with a joyous drag show.

Then came the drag bans. “We’re Here” creators Stephen Warren and Johnnie Ingram decided that the show needed to change its format. Season 4 spends more time in two communities — Murfreesboro and Bartlesville, Okla. — that had effectively banned drag in public, at least for a time (Murfreesboro’s ban was repealed in December; Bartlesville’s one-year restriction expired earlier this month).

When Velour was announced as a new cast member, Steve Morris, a political reporter, wrote dryly on Twitter: “Sasha Velour asking rural southerners if they’ve read Judith Butler.” The implication was that Velour — who had considered impersonating the famous gender-studies scholar on “Drag Race” — was too erudite to connect with “real Americans,” and it wasn’t really fair to either party; Oklahomans and Tennesseans read gender theory, too.

But the perception of Velour has always been that of a highbrow academic. She studied literature at Vassar. She received a Fulbright Scholarship to study public art and urban identity in Moscow. She is fluent in Russian. Her book notes that her favorite philosopher is the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, who believed that a single person exists beyond definition — particularly definitions imposed by external forces.

Velour even illustrated a cover of the New Yorker with her own face — she has an MFA in cartooning — and told the magazine that “the most ‘revolutionary’ aspect of drag isn’t this act of dressing up against the rules; it’s the way we use this no-bulls--- philosophy to stand up for what is right.”

To people who don’t really know Sasha Velour, “she comes across like an art piece that should be hanging in a museum, you know?” says Priyanka.

The Sasha Velour in “We’re Here” may soften that perception. The reveal is that she makes a great drag mother, as mentors are called within a community where many performers are rejected by their own families. She is behind some of the show’s moments of tenderness, such as accompanying a newly transitioning woman on a trip to buy her first wig.

But the producers, aware of her stiletto-sharp mind, also deployed her to interact with bigots. Velour is the queen who parses a Murfreesboro ordinance, to understand the legal definition of “prurient interests.” Last August, the cast attended a Murfreesboro city council meeting on this “decency” legislation. The experience shook Velour.

During the meeting, Priyanka said that Velour was “breathing so heavily. And I was like, ‘Are you okay?’ And she’s like, ‘I’m just getting so overwhelmed because I cannot believe what I’m seeing.’”

“We’re Here” draws parallels between drag and other forms of adult dress-up and fantasy, such as wrestling and the child beauty-pageant circuit (the latter actually sexualizes minors, Velour notes). And, of course, there is the protesters’ American flag drag — as symbolic and ostentatious as any sequined, high-haired, RuPaul-ready outfit.

Aren’t we all performing, though, regardless of whether we’re on or off a stage? We put on different faces for friends, family, work. We reveal ourselves in our own ways, sometimes through a glance, sometimes through a joke, sometimes through a protest. We dress for the role, and the role is ever-changing and incomplete.

As Bakhtin wrote in 1929: “Nothing conclusive has yet taken place in the world.”

Or as RuPaul famously said: “We’re all born naked, and the rest is drag.”

The cast and producers of “We’re Here” have no idea how the people in these communities will react to the show, but Velour gets the last word. The season’s final scene takes place in an Oklahoma church not far from the town where Nex Benedict, a nonbinary teenager, died in February after intense bullying (their death was ruled a suicide by the state medical examiner). Velour’s performance in the church culminates in what might be her greatest reveal yet. It’s not a prop surprise, like a flurry of rose petals, or the inversion of a famous song. The reveal is meant to make an entire community — an entire country, really — confront itself.

Will anyone hear the message? Will it change anything?

“I don’t think entertainment is enough,” Velour says, at her dining room table in Brooklyn. But “I think the emotional impact on the audience can be really profound.” Profound enough to save a life, she adds. So the answer, actually, is yes.

In Judaism, Velour’s religion, one who saves a single life has saved the whole world, according to the Talmud. And Velour, according to her own book — and aligned with the philosophy of Bakhtin — supposes that a single life is only truly perceptible when it’s over.

“The biggest reveal,” she writes, “is death.”

When asked at home to elaborate, Velour reveals a bit more: “I’ve always been compelled by the idea that our afterlife is how our story gets told and how we’re remembered, and that we give people an afterlife by remembering them and telling their story.”

An hour before a February show at Le Poisson Rouge, in Greenwich Village, Velour was washing her makeup sponges, surrounded by a trio of pink wigs. When she was coming onto the scene, years earlier, she felt pushback against alternative forms of drag. Now it feels like experimental drag is mainstream drag.

Near Velour’s dressing room, a D.C. drag king named King Molasses trimmed a luxuriously thick faux beard. “‘NightGowns’ is a North Star for so many of us,” said Molasses, referring to Velour’s monthly revue, which for nine years has given guest stars a chance to tell their own stories, often through drag that is abstract, experimental or just plain bizarre.

A drag show at a bar, where performers work for tips, isn’t the best environment for true artistry or adventure, said Sapphira Cristál, a finalist on the current season of “Drag Race,” as she was getting ready backstage.

But when Sasha Velour is the curator, Sapphira says, “we get to feel like true artists, and be respected that way.”

A trained opera singer, Sapphira’s second “NightGowns” performance that night was a confrontational lip-sync about black femininity, to Danielle Brooks’ “Black Woman.”

Nymphia Wind, another finalist on the current season of “Drag Race,” began her lip-sync to “Take It All,” from the musical “Nine,” like a typical burlesque number, with backup dancers. But it became a balletic assault — a commentary on violence against the queer community. The dancers stripped off Nymphia’s clothes and carried her limp body. And then she began a dreamy, sinewy dance to FKA Twigs’ “Mothercreep” that ended with her being draped in a sheet, like a corpse, or a ghost.

Death: the biggest reveal.

Addressing the rapt, sold-out crowd at Le Poisson Rouge later that night, Velour proclaimed that notion as her guiding light.

“My only spiritual belief, really, is that by dressing up in drag, we connect with the generations that came before us,” she said from the stage, dressed in a shimmery caftan. We “put on drag sometimes as protest, sometimes as community, sometimes as a little hustle. Always as art.”

Shot at Love Studios. Makeup by Velour. Styling by Willyum Beck. Velour wears dresses by Quine Li and Attico, shoes by Pleasers and models own, jewelry by Robert Sorrell and Misho, gloves by Wing & Weft, mask by Lory Sun.