Sasha Velour Breaks Down RuPaul's Drag Race, New Book & Finding Freedom in Transformation

This was the moment, the moment that everything changed.

I rehearsed the hell out of this, like over and over again.

I remember picking up rose petals from the carpeted floor

in my hotel room as I just like,

Okay, let me try it again.

Hi, I'm Sasha Velour and today I'm looking back

at some moments that have shaped my career and my identity.

This is becoming Sasha Velour.

[soft upbeat music]

First one, let's see what you got for me.

This is the cover of the first issue

of my self-published drag magazine.

First called Vym Magazine.

Later we renamed it to Velour.

My dream for this magazine was just to have some archive

of not famous drag artists, like get those voices

and that brilliance down for posterity.

And then we all became famous in the process.

Actually, this was also a really special project

because it was the last piece

of my drag I got to share with my mom,

and she had worked her entire life as a copy editor.

So she took her red pencil

and copyedited this very first issue in 2015,

just a couple months before she died, actually.

I felt like in some way I was carrying her tradition

of helping people refine what they have to say

and get it out into the world.

And I'm so glad she got to see this little peace

of what I was about to become.

[soft upbeat music]

Wow. Oh my gosh.

Okay, this was a performance I put together

at my show, Nightgowns.

People were like freaked out.

I had never had a reaction like that before in drag.

I felt like I was onto something.

I wanted to honor the way that my mom looked

for the last few years of her life.

So I went with the bald head and I've never looked back.

Next one. [soft upbeat music]

♪ I get so emotional, baby ♪

Okay, so that is my lip sync to So Emotional

by Whitney Houston competing against my dear drag sister,

Miss Shea Couleé in the finale

of RuPaul's Drag Race season nine.

This was the moment, the moment that everything changed.

I'm still so like blown away by that performance.

Like who is that? She had something to prove.

She had a mission.

I rehearsed the hell out of this, like over and over again.

I remember picking up rose petals from the carpeted floor

in my hotel room as I just like,

Okay, let me try it again.

I can still remember like what I was looking at

from that perspective, like just seeing all of these lights,

all these cameras looking at RuPaul

who had almost no reaction, just so stoic watching us.

And I was like, I want to make her excited.

Give her a show that she's happy about.

The life of this lip sync performance afterwards,

like that was the real victory for me.

When I did win, I suddenly felt like a whole new level

of pressure to kind of prove

that I was deserving to have one.

That I did have a lot to offer and a lot to say.

Like no one had seen this format

for the finale of a lip sync.

I don't know if it's the best lip sync of all time,

but it definitely surprised people.

And there's something about a lip sync

that can surprise people

that you're always gonna remember.

[soft upbeat music] Next.

Oh, okay.

This is the Google doodle of Marlene Dietrich

that I got to draw in 2017

for the 116th birthday of Marlene Dietrich.

And this was so exciting when they reached out.

I got to play Marlene Dietrich in the Snatch Game.

Thank you so much for having me, RuPaul, on your drag race.

I've always looked up to her.

She was a gay icon when it was not even legal to be gay.

Her shows became gathering places for queer people,

and then in her act she would perform

in both high femme drag with jewels and feathers,

and then she'd put on a tuxedo

for the second act and sing men's songs.

So I think there's a very draggy element to what she served.

And even as a little kid when I would see clips of her

and her movies, I thought like, Oh God,

there's just something so powerful and alluring

about her style of femininity.

And I think it's been a huge influence

on how I paint myself, how I arch my eyebrows,

and how I like to stare into the camera.

Alluringly.

[soft upbeat music]

The Saturday Night Live presidential town hall

from 2019, with Kate McKinnon as Elizabeth Warren

doing the signature Sasha Velour rose petal reveal

to a beautiful bald head.

This was so funny. I remember when this happened.

I just started getting all these texts

from surprising people.

People I did not know watched Saturday Night Live.

But they kept saying like, Oh my God,

you are on Saturday Night Live.

But really they were also saying, Johnny and your dad

are on Saturday Night Live.

Because although there's no clip of me here,

there is a beautiful clip of my partner Johnny and my dad

watching the actual finale.

So I think Kate McKinnon is a fantastic drag king,

drag queen too, doing Elizabeth Warren.

This was so exciting because it kind of showed

that this performance had crossed over

to being recognizable by mainstream pop culture.

This was two years after it had first aired.

So the fact that it still felt

like this iconic queer reference point,

like it would make sense to be pandering

to gay people by performing a rose petal reveal.

It's a huge honor.

[soft upbeat music]

This is the trailer for the Nightgowns streaming series

that was created for Quibi but lives on on the Roku channel.

And I had been trying for years to pitch a TV adaptation

of my stage show, Nightgowns.

I really wanted to see what a show about drag

would look like that wasn't all about competition.

I thought it would be so great to see just the process

behind the scenes of putting together

these really personal performances,

bringing them to life against all odds,

and then throwing a show together in one night.

The original show was just a platform for all kinds of drag.

It was an extension of the magazine we've been running

for over eight years, and it's still going strong.

It moves venues all the time.

Now it has a monthly residency at Le Poisson Rouge,

which is beautiful historic music venue in New York.

And I'm always surprised when I travel overseas

that people have heard of my New York show.

Like I never thought that would happen.

But because of YouTube, the internet,

people have watched these performances.

Drag artists in Belgium and in Manila

have seen these Nightgowns shows

and take inspiration from that.

[soft upbeat music]

This is my performance of Come Rain or Come Shine

by Judy Garland from the Smoke and Mirrors tour,

which started in 2019 and because the pandemic,

continued all the way to 2022.

This was an incredible experience.

I start from the blank page

and I draw what I imagine the audience seeing

as my first step.

So I'll listen to a song hundreds of times,

try to get into the story and the energy of that,

and then using colored pencils,

I'll create like a tiny drawing of it.

I say tiny 'cause the seats I was always able to afford

in theater we're at the very back.

So I know it has to look good when it's very tiny,

and I kind of build around that and then get closer

and closer until I'm finally standing in the middle of it

trying to decide every detail of the facial expression

and a hand gesture, but always in reference

to what the audience is gonna see 'cause it's for them

at the end of the day.

This I feel like, up to this point,

was the best thing I'd ever done in drag.

And I hope in five years I'm gonna look back

and say like, Oh, I'm such a baby then.

If I only knew, I hope to keep getting better.

[soft upbeat music]

This is the cover of my forthcoming book, The Big Reveal.

This project has been three years in the making.

I wrote every word, drew every picture.

It's full of comics, history, memoir.

As I was writing this book, it became more

and more necessary to tell the story of drag,

to give context for this art form, to explain

that this history has been around forever,

and to correct all the misconceptions

that people have about drag.

No drag queen has ever written a history

of this art form before.

The history is one of it being oppressed through fears

of queer expression that pop up every couple hundred years

and require those of us who want to live queer lives

or who want to perform in this way to fight back a little,

to resist, to bring a little revolution,

or just create our own separate spaces to thrive in.

We are not going anywhere,

and the history gives me hope that nothing can stop us.

Drag is all about freedom.

I think people need that still in the world.

Freedom from fear, freedom with how you dress yourself,

with how you talk, with what about your life you share.

And like the drag way is about kind of radical honesty

dramatized through complete over-the-top fantasy.

This is why I say everyone should do drag at some point.

The more people get comfortable with exaggerating, laughing

at transforming themselves, becoming not just who they are

but whatever they want to be, whatever they can imagine.

The more flexible and adaptable you are.

Life is not easy and you have to find a way

to make it fun and to make yourself ferocious.

And that's what drag is about.

Survival. Glamorously.

[soft upbeat music]