Miss Gay USofA, Drag Projects, and Drag Fabulousity

Hello lovelies!! You all will be happy to know that i've been VERY busy behind the scenes working on some really cool drag queen things. Lashes, interns, and Goddesses just to name a few ;)

AND

i'm preparing for one of THE most awesome weeks of drag and pageantry of the year! Miss Gay USofA starts this Sunday with Classic and continues through Friday with Final Night. i have been scouring the earth looking for fabulousity to wear and i think i have found the perfect attire for Classic.

i'm dancing for Edna Jean, the current Miss Lone Star USofA Classic, and she had these FLAW LESS t-shirts made.

Well dear follows, you know that i am NOT the kinda of queen who would wear a t-shirt so i decided that i would turn mine into a dress!!!

i'm going to feature my mini project on this blog so you can enjoy the oh-so drag transition of an average t-shirt.

Now if i could just find something to wear for final night.

The search continues . . . .

Project Nunway Part I - The Birth of a Brandi Amara Skyy Couture Project

So i'm really excited to be designing for Dallas' Project Nunway. The date has been set (April 27th) and a theme has been chosen, "A Fairy's Tale." i got paired up with SisterPlenty O'Cleavage (her name is EVERYTHING!) and when we met she told me her favorite fairy tale dress was Drew Barrymore's Ever After Cinderella gown (which i then informed her is one of my favorite movies!!!!!!).

The dress is GORGEOUS, but a tad bit too traditional for my style. My aesthetic relies heavily upon unconventional materials--paper, condoms, found objects, etc. So, i really wanted to marry my vision to what she wanted. Later in the week, i came across this David LaChapelle photo from Harper's Bazaar and fell in LOVE with the concept



A DRESS MADE OUT OF CELLOPHANE!!! HOW BRILLIANT IS THAT?!?!?

i had found the missing textile to my design!! So i sketched out a dress made out of fabrics AND cellophane (oh, yes with wings too!)

TA-DA!!

The beginnings of Nunway Couture has begun! This is a very raw sketch of what the dress will probably end up looking like. One of the perks of this project is that i get to sashay down the runway with my sister so i get to concoct not one, but TWO sickening couture pieces!!!!!

i'm soo excited about where this is going and i can't wait to get started!  i will be blogging throughout the project (much like this post) so keep to checking back to see how the look progresses (and transforms)!!

 

New Drag Promo Shot!

2013 is going to be the year of the pageants! There are at least three that i'm looking to compete in: Miss CEBA Sweetheart, Miss Diva USofA, and the Rose Room Rising Star. With all this competing, i had to have a promo shot.

Enter drag mother extraordinaire Jenna Skyy and violià! Drag promo house down!This is my first drag promo EVER and i think it's FLAWLESS! What do you think?!?!

TA-DA!!!

YEA!!! Now i'm ready to take on the pageant world by storm!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Faux Queens the Book: Working Introduction

So with some tweeks of course, here is a sneak peak of the introduction to my work on faux queens.
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    It’s a good thing I was born a girl, otherwise I’d be a drag queen.
                                                                                               Dolly Parton (qtd. in Stevens)


     I was seven years old and I was obsessed with Dorothy’s ruby red slippers. I watched The Wizard of Oz over and over again fast forwarding to the parts that featured the shoes. I needed those shoes in my life, and I was determined to have them.  I rummaged through the all-too-big hand-me-down heels my mother gave me when she was finished with them and found the perfect pair to prep for transformation: a caramel-latte-colored, faux snake-skin, three-inch heel. I asked my mother to take me to the craft store where I had her purchase five tubes of red glitter. Armed with this glitter and an unstoppable imagination, I layered the entire shoe with Elmer’s glue and then covered them completely with those tiny red prisms of magic until I had created my very own pair of ruby red slippers. Fast forward to 2009: I am playing a modern-day Dorothy in a drag show and I am watching my drag mother, Jenna Skyy, somewhat in disbelief, as she transforms a pair of white knee high boots in almost the same way I had: red spray paint, spray adhesive, and buckets of red glitter into those same shoes I had created for myself over twenty years ago. At that moment I knew there was no real distinction, save for biology, between me and my drag mother—I, like her, had always been a queen.


     As far back as I can remember, I have always had an affinity for all things considered to be and accepted as gendered feminine/female excessive. From Dorothy’s ruby red slippers, to my obsession and need to be Miss Piggy—the way she could change her look at the drop of a hat (sometimes literally), I have never been one to shy away from all things shiny, sparkly, and rhinestoned.  So I am not surprised to find myself surrounded by books on drag queens, hyper-feminine female performance, and any/all things excessively marked feminine. Still, despite however closely and deeply connected I was or might have felt towards the drag queen community, there was still one obvious and blaring question that I couldn’t escape: how and where does a biological female (cisfemale/ciswoman) who loves and feels she is all things drag fit into this gay male-dominated community? And then, on a randomly ordinary kind of day, I stumbled upon my answer: in the Wikipedia drag queen entry nestled in-between the various definitions and descriptions was a new term that I, in all my years in the drag, academic, and LGBT communities, had never heard: faux queen. “A faux queen or cisqueen is a female performance artist who adopts the style typical of male drag queens. A faux queen may be jocularly described as ‘a drag queen trapped in a woman’s body,’ though few are female to male transsexuals” (Faux Queen 1).  Needless to say, this discovery set me off on a firestorm of Googling, YouTubing, and endless searches for literature, pictures, articles, personal testimonies—ANYTHING that would manifest and deepen my understanding of this new subset of  drag. My searches led me to small bouts of victory and sporadic revelations: I learned there was a faux queen pageant in San Francisco that began in 1996 and ended 2005 (where was I!?!?) and that more cisfemales than I could have possibly imagined claimed, right along with me, to both feel and identify as a “drag queen trapped in a woman’s body.” But it also led me to more questions and new obstacles: why wasn’t there more literature and scholarship on us? Why and how could I have not heard about these gender performance rebels in all my involvement with my local LGBT and drag communities and academic pursuits?


     This work is an exploratory journey into the world of drag: the art, the illusion, the queens, and how the cisfemales who love them make sense in it. While ciswomen performing various forms of femininity, sexuality, and women’s roles is not new, cisfemales performing drag in the gay male drag world is emerging as something unique. Among the various forms of cisfemale drag are female dragging male—drag kinging, woman dragging woman—burlesque or neo-burlesque, and woman dragging man dragging woman—the faux queen. While I touch upon notions of burlesque, particularly neo burlesque, I am not equipped nor do I have the experience and knowledge in this art form to begin to hypothesize what female/drag performances and identities mean to other cisfemale performers of drag. While I take into account and believe these gender performances carry their own gender, political, and social connotations that bring with them their own unique perspectives and relationship to drag, I do so only in relationship to the drag world and to faux queens. What follows is a narrowly focused snapshot into the complex panoramic world of faux queens. My ultimate goal is to illustrate how the faux queen relates to and transforms drag and gender; I argue that the very act of a ciswoman performing as a gay man performing as a “woman” and the choice to more closely align and identify with a drag queen’s version of femininity (what I call flamboyant femininity) is exactly the kind of transgression that queer studies, academia, and the LGBT community need to embrace in order to expand their definitions and beliefs about gender construction, gender performance, and gender identity.  My work on drag is about carving out and creating new spaces between preexisting ones for myself and others that I could not find in anyone else’s theories, scholarship, and media that surveys women, gender performance theory, gender identity, and drag.  

full drag pageant mode

hello kats and kittens! i have been obsessing about my package for this pageant, Miss LifeWalk, for the last couple of months and i'm finally at a place where i feel that it's going to be unbeatable. right now i'm still amidst all the sewing, stoning, and rehearsing for both gown and talent. while i don't want to post too much until after the pageant, i do want to show you what i've been up to. here are a few pieces and parts that make up my drag package. keep in mind the categories: presentation, gown, fundraising, and talent.

well, we all know what these are, but what could i possibly be using then for?!?!? 

there's a lot more where these came from!

i didn't make this but this may (or may not) be a hint to my talent!!! adore!

and lastly, here is a peek inside my drag factory. this is my sewing area in my drag room:

please forgive my partner's fingers-always the jokester!

i can't wait to post everything in detail!!! i still have a lot of work to do but it's coming along flawlessly!!



faux queen photo journal

i'm excited to share with you my photo journal from the appendices of my thesis entitled, "Faux Queens--Fauxing the Real: Biological Women, the Art of Drag, and Why the Real IS Drag and/or How I became a Drag Queen and/or How to Paint a Drag Mug."  i'd love to hear what y'all think!

drag-cap

whew! what an amazing, fun, intoxicating (tequila!),and very tiring weekend. the show, the costume, the performance was f l a w l e s s!! as promised here is a recap of the drag-(re)creation of m.i.a/madonna superbowl. enjoy!

i wanted to recreate the m.i.a headpiece with the feel of the black and gold costumes of the vogue dancers. so i made a make-shift fabric skirt, shoulder pads, and a face mask for the opening vogue dance number and then did a quick change into the m.i.a headdress and skirt.

for the shoulder pads i used fun foam for the base, hot glued my skirt fabric to cover, and hot glued a pair of $5 earrings and a $1.95 necklace.  

the face mask was something i decided to do last minute because i didn't want to do another head piece. this was my inspiration:

i used her mask for inspiration

i bought eight 99 cent mardi gras masks and hot glued them in a pattern that i liked. i added another string around the top part of the mask to keep it closer to my face.

cheap party city (yep, i'm a party city queen sometimes--ain't no shame in it) masks

here's the finished mask

immediately after the vogue dance break i rushed backstage to do a quick change. i took off the fabric skirt and the face mask and put on the skirt and the headdress.

the skirt was pieced together from fabric and trim bought at golden d'or (if you are ever in dallas this is a must-go-to for drag place!)

starting to come together

so i was originally going to use the headband (shown in pic) as the base of the headdress, but then i found this amazzzz-ing cesar-esque piece at a costume shop that i used instead. the fringe on the sides was made out of $1.50 earrings, the earrings that came with the necklaces i used for the shoulder pieced that i forged together, and $4.00 coin trim i bought at michaels. i bought a $7.00 necklace from a place called rainbow that served for the around-the-chin chain look.

i ended up ditching the headband, but kept all the other materials

here's the front of the finished headdress. i used one of the trim links from my skirt

side angle

ta-da!!   dragmation done! as a bonus, here are some behind the scene and onstage shots!

michael playing lmfao and me

mask, shoulder pads, and i used new and old necklaces to create the chain effect

during the show

the 3 queens: asia o'hara, jenna skyy, and me

project: m.i.a madonna superbowl drag

so this weekend i'm dragging m.i.a in madonna's superbowl performance and i'm going to make this head-wear:

however, in addition to m.i.a i have to make something that looks roman-esque/greek gods/goddess for the vogue opening (which i'm dancing in) and i still need to figure out my costume. So this morning minaj texts me (okay so it was really Asia O'hara, but she is nicki in the performance) and she has made this

which is MUCH bigger and more elaborate than i was thinking of doing...now i have to step up my game. i came to play. performance is saturday; today is thursday. i have a lot to do in the next 2 days. 

project  m.i.a. madonna superbowl drag in full gear. keep checking for updates on my progress!