Culture

For a drag performer with a stacked resumé, packed schedule and an ever-shifting wardrobe, Symone could be forgiven for seeming a bit tired. But while speaking to Billboard for a recent cover (alongside Maren Morris, Sasha Colby, Landon Cider and Eureka O’Hara), the only time the RuPaul’s Drag Race season 13 winner shows a hint of exhaustion is while addressing the rash of anti-LGBTQ laws spreading across the country like a virus.
“It’s a distraction from what’s really going on, what’s really hurting kids in the country,” she sighs. “Gun violence is the number one thing that kills kids.” It’s a point that’s impossible to argue: guns recently became the leading cause of death in children and teens between the ages of 1 and 19 in America.

“It’s a distraction. Gay people, trans people, our whole community has always been an easy mark. It’s easier than dealing with what’s actually going on in the country,” she continues. “Ultimately, they don’t want people to feel that they can express themselves and be different — or that there’s a different way of living outside of the norm.”

An urge to break out of the box was exactly what brought Symone to drag in the first place. Growing up in Conway, Arkansas, the self-described “shy, reserved kid” began doing her own makeup after school around age 16. By 18, she left the house in drag for the first time — to attend her senior prom.

A stint at a club on amateur night followed a few months later, and she’s been doing drag ever since. “It gave me permission to be myself,” she says of the art form. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is what’s missing in my life.’ ”

As one of the drag queens to be catapulted into cultural consciousness by the hit reality competition, Symone continues to operate by her own rules. She’ll walk the Met Gala one month, pop up in a music video (“Simple Times”) from Nashville singer-songwriter Kacey Musgraves the next, all while continuing to chart a course through Los Angeles nightlife via the House of Avalon collective.

While the regressive laws aren’t exactly quashing expression in queer meccas like WeHo, Symone knows that other communities aren’t so lucky. “It was very strange. I felt like there’s a contention there,” Symone says of a recent visit to her home state. “It’s heavier, much more than it was when I was growing up… I felt safe enough to go to prom in drag 10 years ago, and I was like, ‘I don’t know if I could do that now.’ It feels more conservative than it did even 10 years ago. And that, to me, is very strange.”

The queen is quick to clarify that the change in the atmosphere isn’t affecting her itinerary: “Is that going to deter me from going home and doing drag or going to the South and doing drag? Absolutely not.” Still, she notes that several of her sisters have begun avoiding drag performances in certain parts of the country because they don’t want to risk their safety by becoming “a focal point” for outraged — and perhaps even violent — people.

“That’s warranted, that’s very valid,” she says. “I just feel like, ‘We can’t let them do that to us.’ But it’s a very hard time. It’s a very difficult time.”

The Drag Race champ is aware that the privilege of expression afforded to her by her platform doesn’t apply to everyone. To queer kids living in states that are passing laws targeting their freedoms, she urges, “Find your family and find people who support you. You may not have them around you in your small town, but there is the internet — build a community and seek solace in that.

“Also, I will say: vote. We can have all the community and all the allyship that we want, but if we’re not voting into office the people that are going to look out for our interests, it doesn’t help. We have these laws coming down the pike because [anti-LGBTQ candidates] are being voted in, and so they feel like they can pass these laws. It’s going to keep happening. So go out in the local elections, midterms — it’s not just the presidential elections [that matter].”

As for where she finds solace these days, it turns out that one of the world’s most fashion-forward and inventive drag queens isn’t all that different from the rest of us. “When I feel bad, TV has always been my respite, my rescue and my solace. It’s how I found out about drag and pop culture, growing up where I did,” she says. “It’s my happy place.”

A version of this story will appear in the June 10, 2023, issue of Billboard.

“To me, this is a Christian crusade,” declares Landon Cider of the ongoing legislative efforts targeting drag and trans individuals across the country. “It’s just eradicating what you don’t understand or what you don’t believe to be morally correct. And in today’s day and age, it is so ridiculous that we still have people using religion to dictate what other people should do.”
Cider, the politically outspoken winner of season 3 of The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula, speaks bluntly and with a firm conviction about most issues. But when addressing the political right’s won’t-somebody-please-think-of-the-children dog whistle attacks on drag, he’s exasperated. “They’re just projecting what’s happening in their own churches,” he says, alluding to the well-documented history of children being sexually abused by priests in the Catholic church.

Some high-profile drag performers are willing to play nice when advocating for their art form, but Cider — who covers the latest issue of Billboard alongside Maren Morris, Sasha Colby, Eureka O’Hara and Symone — isn’t worried about pissing people off.

Before Kristine Bellaluna established the Landon Cider persona, she began developing skills with special effects makeup in high school, fueled by her love of horror films. The Los Angeles native was even sent home one time for “looking too gory,” thanks to a look that involved a screwdriver entering and exiting her flesh. She was involved in the theater growing up but was sidelined when her mother got sick — and then by her own battle with oral cancer as an adult. When she emerged from the fray, she felt an urge to return to the stage, but not in the theater: “I felt like it was not allowing me to be creative as much as I wanted.”

Enter Landon Cider, a “glamdrogynous” drag king influenced by everything from Freddie Mercury to The Lost Boys to the Leprechaun slasher films. Cider made history as the first drag king to win an American drag reality competition in 2019, when he emerged as Dragula’s top dog during a season that streamed on Netflix (the show now airs on Shudder). A trailblazer in his own right, he’s quick to list off the many important drag kings that preceded him, from late 19th century Native American performer Gowongo Mohawk to Harlem Renaissance blues singer Gladys Bentley, up through modern drag godfathers such as Mo B. Dick and Sexy Galexy, who created community and opportunities in New York City and Australia, respectively.

While drag’s presence in the cultural mainstream has exploded in the last decade thanks largely to RuPaul’s Drag Race, the wildly popular series has yet to spotlight any drag kings as competitors, contributing to a lack of parity when it comes to representation. “Our community is a subculture of a subculture,” Cider explains. “With any subculture, you’re going to have microcosm of the world and the society that it exists within — and sexism and misogyny is alive and well in our society, so that exists in the drag community as well…. As a cis woman and a proud lesbian who has been with her wife for 15 years, it’s every day that we face society’s sexist and misogynistic disrespect of women. Honestly, one of the reasons I became a drag king is so I can mansplain things back to men,” Cider laughs. “I’m manspreading mansplaining.”

But with the rise in anti-queer and anti-trans laws and rhetoric, Cider admits that he’s not comfortable manspreading everywhere in America these days. “I don’t plan on taking gigs in some of these states,” Cider says. “And not because I don’t want to stand for what’s right, but I want to come home to my wife. It’s a legitimate fear that we have now traveling to some of these states and some of these locations. And that’s so scary and so sad. Even 10 years ago, people wouldn’t have believed that.”

But staying safe doesn’t mean staying silent, and Cider remains outspoken on everything from racist politicians to misogyny within the queer community. Speaking to the next generation of drag kings, Cider urges, “Don’t let people tell you that you don’t belong. We’ve had too many drag queens — too many men — in charge telling us that we don’t belong in these spaces, or that we shouldn’t share these spaces. But we need you.”

Ironically, those drag gatekeepers could be seen as subscribing to the same rigid view of a gender binary that fuels religious conservatives. And to Cider’s mind, forcing the world into binaries means ignoring reality. “[Those with] conservative religious views, they see things on such a binary because they reject nature,” Cider says. “And nature is not binary. They reject all forms of evolution — not just the earth’s creation, but the evolution of art.”

A version of this story will appear in the June 10, 2023, issue of Billboard.

When speaking to Sasha Colby about the rash of laws targeting drag performers and trans individuals in America, it’s clear that she’s thought a lot about the politicians trying to silence people like her. And she’s probably sized them up with a far greater generosity than they’ve afforded her.
“I don’t even think they are necessarily mad at us,” opines Colby, who became the first trans woman of color to win RuPaul’s Drag Race in April. “I think they understand that our voice is very loud right now. I feel like they understand how much power we hold as a commerce and as people that have a lot of voting power. They’re just trying to scare us back into the closet, for lack of better words, because that’s the only thing that they know how to operate on. They don’t know how to operate on love — they’ve never done that — so they only know how to do fear.”

For the Waimānalo, Hawaii-born entertainer, the effect of fear-based bigotry is sadly close to home. Although her Jehovah’s Witness family would call her into the living room to dance along to Whitney Houston videos on MTV when she was a kid, they met her with less than open arms when she openly embraced her trans identity. Despite coming from a conservative religious background, Colby says there were “so many trans people in Hawaii” around her while she was growing up: “There was a lot of representation, probably to the point where I didn’t realize how many trans people I was interacting with as a kid. Mom’s hairdresser was a full trans woman and I never put it together [until later] — she just seemed like a really cool glamorous lady.”

Colby developed her drag skills secretly as a teenager behind a locked bathroom door. The self-professed “full-on ham” (“I definitely have main character syndrome,” she jokes) stuck with drag over the years because of the control it affords a DIY artist. “It’s one of the very few arts where you are completely in charge of yourself. You’re not working with a team — you’re not contributing to a bigger machine,” she says. “Drag is very personal. In drag, you are a living, breathing art installation — constantly changing, constantly improving. And this art is helping you grow.”

That art took center stage on season 15 of Drag Race, where Colby’s thoughtful interpretations of each episode’s challenges — and wildly acrobatic lip syncs — commanded the spotlight. The show enjoyed some its best ratings in years, with the season 15 finale ratings up 17% compared to the previous year’s.

Now, the naturally empathetic Colby is stepping comfortably into a larger spotlight (she covers the latest issue of Billboard alongside Maren Morris, Eureka O’Hara, Symone and Landon Cider). “It feels really nice to be able to be a trans woman of color that is being asked my opinion, and [who can be] a source of inspiration and safety for a lot of scared queer people out there,” she says. And she’s not letting opportunities to make a difference, whether big or small, slide by.

“I’m on the plane quite a bit, and sometimes I get to be business class. [I’m often] sitting next to people that probably would never talk to a trans person — or they’re watching Fox News right next to me,” Colby says with a dry chuckle. “I feel like I do have a very disarming personality, so that I end up leaving the person at least humanizing my experience so that they can understand what a trans person is.”

Colby’s aim is to get through to people — and yes, voters — who feel like the only way they can get ahead is by putting down others. “We have to make everyone’s human interest everyone’s concern,” she says. “We have to bridge that gap: why can’t you get what you need, but so does everyone else as well?” On a more somber note, she at least hopes that those interactions remind Fox News lovers that trans people — who are four times as likely to be victims of violent crime, according to a 2021 UCLA study — are human beings and not political scapegoats or statistics. “When they see a trans person getting killed, [I hope they] remember meeting me,” she says. “They made a human connection, which will hopefully help them vote in a more equal, enlightened way.”

In the face of everything going on, Colby says she finds solace in music, whether it’s “a good sad girls’ playlist” or the avant-flavored dance music of Kaytranada and Róisín Murphy. She also draws inspiration from her drag peers and friends, such as Brooklyn drag iconoclast Untitled Queen. “She gives me so much life,” Colby raves, instantly lighting up. “She’s a perfect example of what drag is when it’s a fully immersive way of being.”

As a gloriously unpredictable drag queen, she also points to a rather unexpected source of reassurance during tough times: documentaries that show how “human civilization evolves or de-evolves” over the centuries. “The pendulum goes back and forth,” she says. “It’s the momentum of life.” It’s a Zen approach, but don’t let it fool you into thinking Colby isn’t committed to high-kicking that pendulum back from its current far-right swing. Speaking to the next generation, she offers, “We’re going to make sure to make this place a little better for you all, a little safer, so you can feel freedom to express yourselves however you need to.

“And move to a big city whenever you can,” she continues with a laugh. “But vote in the small city at your parents’ address.”

A version of this story will appear in the June 10, 2023, issue of Billboard.