Hello, I'm Dr. Jacob McWilliams. In this video, I wanted to explore one specific way that some people play with rules about gender through an activity called drag. Drag is a performance art, drag performers dress up as a gender that's different from their own, and then they sing, dance, or give some other kind of creative performance. The two most common drag performers are drag queens and drag kings. Drag queens are men who perform as women and drag kings are women who perform as men. As you'll see in the following interviews though, drag is a lot more complicated than I've just described it. Divinity Ray otherwise known as Aqua Marina. Aqua is my drag alias. At first, she was my alter ego and an escape for me, but over the past two years that I've been performing as her, she has become her own person. I am a born female. I do not identify as a female, so I can't exactly call myself a bio queen though that's what I technically started out as. But then when I came out as transgender and bigender, I realized that I was no longer in that category of bio-queen and it started to progress into another topic of what is a drag queen for me. To me, anybody can do drag, and it doesn't mean that we have to put everybody in boxes of what type of drag they do. If you do drag you do drag. So I just tell people I'm a drag queen, and it's confusing at first, but then they see me perform and I'm blended in with all the other queens on stage. Drag back in the day used to mean gay men or men in general dressing up as women. RuPaul's Drag Race, even RuPaul himself believes that that's still what it needs to be. It's very old-school mindset. I mean nowadays drag is anything, drag is whatever you want it to be. To me, to put it dumbly, I think it's like musical theater. You are putting on a show, you're not only dancing but you're also singing or lip sinking, and you're dressed up as a character. Whoever you are, you're embracing that full form, and you're impersonating something other than yourself. Whether it's a celebrity or it's just another persona that you made up in your mind. It's fine, it transforms you into a different world for a minute. It's an escape for some people. For me, I at first created an alter ego, this inspiration the kept me going on my daily life. I think that when I started doing drag, I was a lot more insecure at that point, and I was a lot more sensitive. It's funny because creating Aqua actually helped me as a performer well-round my talents on stage become a lot better with my stage presence. I then noticed that when I got offstage, I was a lot stronger as a human being as well, because she for a long time was my inspiration. She's everything that I'm not. So she was my hero, I used to look up to her. But since she's grown a lot and she has developed a fan-base , she has become her own persons. Now it's just like two people living inside my body. So I used to bartend at Hamburger Mary's in Denver. I was one of the head bartenders, I was always working. One of the main events that I worked was Dream Girls on Friday nights. I would watch the drag queens every Friday night. Whenever they had Bingo, I'd watch Drag Bingo. I had stressed my eyes watching the drag queens perform. I just thought "Man, how cool would it be to be a drag queen someday." When I was a kid, I saw a man wearing makeup and heels walking in the mall and my mom turned my head the other way because I come from religion, and I was infatuated with them then. The thought of cross-dressing was just so cool to me. So when I was bartending at this bar, I fell in love, and we tried getting married, and then we went through horrible breakup. Out of spite, I remember her telling me that she hated bartending for drag queens anymore, because they were just so high maintenance and she never wanted to serve another drink to a drag queen ever again. So after we broke up, I became a drag queen out of spite, and I thought it was funny, but then I realized I actually liked it. I started playing around with the makeup and I started dressing up a little bit. My friend let me guest spot in his show one night. I had never been able to control a crowd the way that I did is Aqua Marina. I thought of her name literally a week before performing. I thought a lot about her name but I didn't know what came with that name. I was like "Okay, well, I'm obsessed with mermaids, so I guess her first name will be Aqua." There's this chick in the L world that seduces the straight girl and her name is Marina, and I like to think that I'm a seductress on stage. So her name is Aqua Marina and boom she was born a week later, she performed and it was powerful. She had this control over the room and I was out of body. I got offstage and I was like "What the hell just happened?" I wanted to do it again and then, boom here we are two years later and I'm doing it almost full-time. When I first started doing drag, I identified as a lesbian and a woman, and I always told people I love being a woman, I'm just gay, I'm just a lesbian. At the time all of my friends were also lesbian, and I was only really in the lesbian community. I wasn't really hanging out in queer settings necessarily. So when I first started doing drag, I boasted about me being a woman who did drag, and it pissed out of the older queens off because a lot of the Shea impersonators, the Tina Turner impersonators were all like, "you can't be a drag queen, you're a chick", or I got the "Oh, you're a bio-queen.", "Oh, you're a hyper-queen." So to me, I didn't really understand why it was such a big deal because even then I looked androgynous. I didn't even look like a female even though I identified as one, I was strange because it wasn't like this super feminine girl just putting a lot of makeup on and lip sinking. I did have to do everything that a regular drag queen had to do. I had to change my ways, I had to pad, I had to wear a wig, I had to put the lashes on. I had to do everything else that they had to do to, especially because I look like such a tomboy on a daily basis. So I was confused why I was receiving so much hatred, and then I received a lot of respect from the other side of the community, the people that also believed that anybody can do drag, and so I ventured towards them. I had them help me and they supported me, they helped me with my makeup skills, and helped me with my performance and gaining that respect from the older queens. What's funny is that gender wise now two years later, I don't identify as a female anymore, I identify as a transgender, bigender, gender-fluid human. I really embrace the equal parts of male and female inside of me which I've realized I have over the past few years. I almost had full top surgery but I had a very intense reconstruction to maintain at least a little bit of my breasts, so that when I do perform or when I do embrace that feminine side even as Aqua, I can still do that. But pretty much every day, all the day, I'm wearing binders and I'm dressing in guys' clothes, I'm wearing boxers. So I feel a lot more masculine and a lot more male on the daily which actually is hilarious because now when I transform into Aqua Marina, I feel like I'm transferring genders now. I feel like I'm becoming a different gender entirely such as the original mindset of the older queens who were giving me shit two years ago. So it helped me a lot being a drag queen and being in the scene in that way, and representing this community of people that are trying to do whatever they want to do but they're getting a lot of backlash. That was cool, because it actually forced me to look into my own gender. Aqua Marina is such a woman, I'm not even sure that she's a gay woman, she's an every woman. She seduces anybody, it doesn't matter what gender that they are. Aqua is the ultimate dominatrix queen bad-ass Beyoncé on stage, and she just wants everybody to love her and everybody to fall for her. She was so powerful that it made me feel insecure getting off stage because I was like, "how can I be so powerful when I'm her and not feeling the same way as myself." I've really got to do some delving. So I started looking into my soul of who I actually was, and it made me look into my own gender finally. So what's funny is that drag is supposed to be you in the mindset of that you are truly embracing a different gender than yourself which wasn't the case for me. I was actually originally embracing the same gender as myself just a different version of that chick. But now, I feel like I'm embracing two different genders, two years later. So hopefully that makes sense. I think that drag is supposed to make you feel something, whether it's shock factor or you're going to hate it, or you're going to fucking love it. I feel like there's the classic drag, there's the glam drag, that's old school, again that's the share impersonators. The original queens that paved the way for the rest of us, and now this generation of queers in general on and offstage are fucking with everything. They are pushing the boundaries, they are pushing politics, they're pushing gender, they're fucking with gender. I love that when you watch a drag show, you could be walking into a female impersonator who's ripping her wig off onstage, and her core set, and her butt pads, and her breastplate, and she's going down to "full male figure form" on heels, and you're like what just happened. Then you'll see a bio-queen or a hyper-queen, or whatever you want to call a female dressing up as a drag queen at this point. You'll see her rip her skirt off and she's wearing a strap-on underneath with a giant realistic looking deck. I mean people are literally showing genders so in your face on stage these days. You can also learn a lot creatively, there are so many, what do you think of that? Whether it's a Halloween show where [inaudible] is having a baby on stage, and she's covered in blood, and she's got the uterus falling out of her stomach, and she's eating her baby. Again, there's the shock factor. It's Halloween and she's embracing that fully. I've seen people impersonate movie scenes. I've seen people do full Disney setups, where they transformed from the Lion King to a mermaid, and they had it all in one costume. It was crazy the costume changes that they were able to do. So it makes you think about, "Damn, how long did that take them to create that costume? How long did it take them to rehearse that number?" Everything is so out of the box. What's cool is that it truly is for everybody because there is a place for every type of drag queen these days. There's the drag queens that love the classic, but there's also drag queens that love the weird. Yvie Oddly from Denver just won RuPaul's Drag Race, and she was so celebrated on that show for being fucking weird. It didn't make sense, and it made people confused, and that's why she won, because she was truly an artist in that way. So I think you can learn a lot by watching a drag show, because there's a little bit of everything. You'll see singing, you'll see dancing, you'll see creativity, you'll see the costume designs and the makeup. Yeah, it's just so fun.
