featured-image

The first time Sasha Velour , the Season 9 winner of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and an internationally known drag superstar, appeared in a professional stage show in New Haven in 1995. The future diva was 8 years old, cast in a Yale School of Drama production of Len Jenkin’s “Pilgrims of the Night,” a modern experimental take on Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales.” Velour beat out over a dozen other kids to get the role.

The experience was so profound that Velour devotes several pages to it in her book “The Big Reveal: An Illustrated Manifesto of Drag,” a combined personal memoir and well-researched history of drag performance published last year by Harper. Velour is performing her solo stage version of “The Big Reveal” on June 1 at 7:30 p.m.



at The Bushnell . Sasha Velour, who lived in Hamden and attended Cold Spring School in New Haven before moving to the Midwest at the age of 9, spoke to the Hartford Courant about drag history, her inspirations and the art of creating a book and a stage show simultaneously. I knew that was something I could do with drag as a performer where I could bring the out-of-date things and the out-of-date language through my own perspective into the present day and make it relevant to today.

I used the logic of putting together a stage show to do the final edit on the book. I’m not a book writer, but I do know how to write an exciting evening of drag and structure it. So I began to think about all the little stories, the pieces I ha.

Back to Beauty Page