Keep Them Guessing: Sasha Velour on the Power of Storytelling and What Her Michigan Grandmother Taught Her About Drag
The Season 9 'RuPaul's Drag Race' winner performs in Ann Arbor on Jan. 17
The key to a good reveal is deceptively simple: Never let the audience know your next move. But the art of a perfect reveal takes it just one step further. Just ask genderfluid drag artist and “RuPaul’s Drag Race” winner Sasha Velour, an authority on the subject.
“They need to never see it coming,” she tells Pride Source ahead of her Jan. 17 show at the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor. “I myself forget the reveal while I’m performing and somehow still my body does it.”
True to form, Velour isn’t just the star of the show — she is the writer, director and producer of the 90-minute production that blends drag, live art and, perhaps most importantly, storytelling. While Velour’s show is unique, the surprise-filled performance is in part a response to her book, “The Big Reveal: An Illustrated Manifesto of Drag,” in which she explores the history of the art form, its deep impact on the LGBTQ+ community and personal memoir-like moments. Within the live show, Velour weaves themes about the positive power of drag into a performance that goes from lighthearted to poignant, and back again.
“The key to a great reveal is it’s always a metaphor for something in the story of the number. It’s usually the conclusion of all the thoughts that have been building,” Velour says. “And I love a self-empowerment story, so about 75% of them are about, ‘The power was within you all along!’”
Even before winning Season 9 of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” with one of the series’ most iconic rose petal-filled reveals, Velour has been an empowered artist, deftly navigating various artistic mediums across a multitude of platforms. In recent years, she starred in HBO’s award-winning series “We’re Here,” illustrated a cover of The New Yorker, hosted and starred in her much-applauded drag revue, “NightGowns” and performed in a sold out five-week run of an autobiographical stage production at La Jolla Playhouse.
Amid a packed schedule, Velour caught up with Pride Source to discuss the inspiration for her book, anti-drag legislation and her surprising ties to Michigan.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention this. Your grandmother Jo was a reference librarian from our state and taught you the definition of drag, right?
Oh my god, I can’t believe you know that. [Laughs.]
What was that interaction like?
My grandmother was born in 1911 in Michigan, and she grew up knowing about drag, which was popular in the ’20s and ’30s. It kind of blows my mind looking back at how much these aspects of queer culture existed and created fun things that we could enjoy that were for everyone. But yeah, she showed me “Some Like It Hot,” because I was a little gender-bending child without knowing that there was any context for that, and what does a reference librarian do but give you the larger context? [Laughs.]
Many of the themes in “The Big Reveal: An Illustrated Manifesto of Drag” are expressed in the live show, and you mentioned wanting to have “context” about how you fit into drag before writing the book. Did digging into drag’s history change your perspective on it or how you present it?
Yeah, I think it did, because unlike so many other cultures, when you’re queer you have no family stories about where that part of you comes from. So it’s kind of like drag queens to me are the aunties and grandmothers of the queer community, and we have to tell those stories.
I tried to write them in the book, but I know the best way to communicate is as a storyteller. And so, [whether] on stage at a drag show [or] behind the scenes annoying people with all the lore I’ve learned about things [laughs], I think it’s so powerful to know that we come from somewhere and that we don't have to reinvent the wheel by doing drag or by being boldly queer in the world. People have been doing that forever, and we can find strength and inspiration from how they’ve done it.
I have to confess, I’m a huge fan of the horror genre and I’m fascinated by your use of it and figures like Dracula and the Wicked Witch of the West as drag influences. Horror has a unique way of capturing attention and using subtext or overt themes to explore deeper ideas beneath the surface. When did you learn that you could use drag as a mouthpiece to do that?
I love that question. There are all these rich metaphors in horror and fantasy about the way that our world works. And even though sometimes it breaks the rules of reality as we know it, there’s truths about how human beings think and act, what we’re afraid of and what we fantasize about that gets illuminated by exaggerating it through horror and through fantasy.
It was really when I came to New York for the first time and saw all the experimental drag in Brooklyn, in particular. It was seeing the types of lip-sync performances that are everywhere in New York City where people have a story and political message, and sometimes a lip-sync performance in a bar can be a work of activism. Seeing just how powerful that can be at communicating got me so excited and inspired, and I think it’s the reason why I dove into drag.
You’ve talked about the authenticity in drag and that it can be really beautiful because at shows you might be seeing a heightened version of somebody, but in many ways it’s an expression of their deepest most authentic selves. Yet despite that honesty and vulnerability, people have lashed out at it with drag bans and anti-drag legislation. What’s your take on that?
Such a huge disconnect from our experiences of it as being a place that’s full of positivity and acceptance. It’s not about what actually happens on the stage; it’s projections based on the fact that we are out and open about being queer, about being trans, about being non-binary — however people identify.
Queer and trans people are everywhere; we’ve learned we’ve always been, and so the pushbacks against drag and against trans people are going to fail in the long run. Who knows what we are going to have to fight in the next couple of years? We’ve gotta be ready for it, unfortunately. But like I said, I’m overall an optimist about the flow of progress and people’s understanding. And every time I do a show, people show up who have not been to see a drag show before, so I do feel like the knowledge of what we really are all about is growing. And once people see it and learn about drag, they don’t think that it’s something dangerous anymore. As long as we have opportunities like this show, people can bring their family and see this is something positive; there’s layers to this, it’s truly for everyone and it’s beautiful and enjoyable.
It’s clear in your performances and approach to your art that you have a keen attention to detail and story. What was something you loved working on in this show?
My day job before I was a performer was a graphic designer and I laid out other people’s books for my living and [spent time] learning a lot about printing technology and the mechanical reproduction of books and ideas and imagery.
I put some of those nerdy things into the show because I wanted it to be a celebration of bookmaking and pop culture, and so the entire show and the art in the book very heavily leans on a CMYK color palette — the cyan, magenta, yellow, and black that make up every offset printed image or color that you can see in books. My costumes are all in that palette, the lighting is all in that palette — we bring special gels so that it’s all lit consistently. There’s usually one person in every show who picks up on it. [Laughs.]
Sasha Velour will perform in “The Big Reveal Live Show!” at 8 p.m. Jan. 17, 2025, at the Michigan Theater. View more details here.
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