The star and producers of this world premiere play, ‘Velour: A Drag Spectacular,’ aim to move the show from San Diego to Broadway
A year ago this month in Murfreesboro, Tenn., the drag queen Sasha Velour shook the hands of a pair of anti-drag activists, as TV cameras recorded.
This encounter takes place in the third episode of the new season of HBO’s “We’re Here,” a reality series in w 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.”
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.
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. Their academic rigor can be seen throughout her book, which delves into unheralded gender-non-conforming performers in history, including Barbette , Coccinelle , and Washington’s own William Dorsey Swann .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, was new for her.
We “put on drag sometimes as protest, sometimes as community, sometimes as a little hustle. Always as art.”
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