Leaning into Auntie: an Interview with LaWhore Vagistan

interviewed by addie tsai

I’m curious about your evolution of your current drag aesthetic. Did you start with Auntie, or did you start somewhere else? How did it begin for you?

It began with whatever I could afford, which was mostly thrift store stuff. It was lamé tights, tops from the thrift store, and really cheap jewelry from those Chinese stores that sell wholesale samples in Chicago but they let you buy individual things. My favorite thing about those stores is that it was drag queens, West African women, Arab women, South Asian women all shopping in the same place and asking each other, “How does this look?” Those stores were a real beginning for me and realizing I like bling and I could afford it. It was really unaffordable elsewhere. Aldo has great big chunky pieces but they’re expensive and these places were not. And the aunties shopped there with the drag queens, so I thought that was really lovely. I really liked going there. I would take people there to shop. I went with what I could afford. Early on when I was doing drag I would go to India for research and I would buy saris because they were cheap and still fully covered in sequins. It was this way of aspiring to what I thought drag fashion should be but making it as affordable as I could and because I wore saris in the nightclub I became Auntie. Young women don’t wear saris. They wear them to a wedding or to an event but to graduate into the everyday sari-wearing figure makes you Auntie, or just ages you in a mature practice. It was a default becoming Auntie by wearing these saris.

How did that feel for you? When that was clear?

By the time it concretized I was one of the oldest South Asian drag artists on the scene. I started performing  in 2009 and RuPaul’s Drag Race had just started. That was the moment where you had a drag name, you had a social media account with your drag name. Prior to that, South Asian drag was, perform when you can, there wasn’t this persona-building around it. People would perform under this Bollywood star’s name one week, this other one the next performance. There’s a way that Drag Race made drag a more standardized practice. Then I would see other drag artists choosing a name, building a persona, again, using the language from Drag Race to say, “I’m this kind of drag artist,” etc. I was finishing grad school so when 2014, 2015 rolled around, there were several other drag artists, but I was the oldest one. So I was Auntie, so when people started referring to me as Auntie, it made perfect sense. I was performing at this party we started in Chicago and there were all these new folks who started under me. They would say, “Can I perform?” And I’d say, “I’m desperate for performers, absolutely.” So I became Auntie to them as well. I was lending them breasts and wigs and boas and jewelry. It fit.

Did you have an Auntie that helped you grow into drag? It’s a world you have to navigate in the beginning.

In Chicago, I didn’t. In Austin, at a club called Rain I did this event called Drag Class which was a 10-week competition and everyone was assigned a mentor. Every week there was homework, and every week there was an in class assignment. That made a huge difference. I don’t have a visual arts background; I don’t have a costume or dress background. I didn’t necessarily know what I was doing when I was doing drag. I wasn’t pulling from practices that were familiar or established. I was really winging it. With this drag mentor Rhonda Jewels, I learned about padding, how to do hair. When she was teaching me makeup, I learned a lot about color theory, about canceling out the blue of the beard, or the shadow, in order to put a foundation down. The judges kept saying, “we can’t see your lip, we can’t see your contour.” It was because Rhonda who’s white didn’t know how to teach me makeup that suits my skin so a Black queen who was one of the judges talked to me after the show, and said, “you need banana powder. You actually need to put a foundation on your lip before putting the lipstick on.” Things that Rhonda took for granted. Rhonda and I learned together through that process. There was an actual pedagogy happening there that was so valuable. When I put on hip pads for the first time . . . I would see clothes on the rack and I would think, they’re amazing, they’re cheap, I’ll buy them, sequins, great. I would put them on and they don’t look right. They don’t look like what I thought they would look like. I would realize when I tried them on again once I had pads and a bra on, I would think, Ohhhhh, it’s cut for a particular body already. You don’t necessarily see it when you hold it up, but then, when the flesh fills it out, Oh, this is the ideal body they imagined. If I can approximate that, then I can look like what fashion wants me to look like. That was a revelation. To make those hip pads, we  went to another drag queen’s house, and she showed us how to use an electric knife on Styrofoam and cut them out and shape them. Now you can buy them online.

What made you get into drag to begin with? How old were you?

2008. I was 25, 26? We were doing a South Asian fundraiser and we needed a South Asian drag artist. We couldn’t find one in Chicago, and so I did it.

Was it something you’d been thinking about before? 

No. I went out and bought things for this. I bought makeup for the first time. I bought a wig for the first time and went to the women’s aisle in a thrift store for the first time. Now I go all the time for all those things, and not necessarily for drag. So drag gave me permission to shop in another aisle. But it wasn’t an aspiration. It wasn’t a lifestyle I thought was sexy or even did deep thinking about. I watched RuPaul’s Drag Race and I loved that season, but it wasn’t the goal. I wasn’t like, oh, I’m gonna be like that. I was doing a one off. But the fundraiser went really well. They said, “we need another one and another one.” So I kept performing and performing and performing.

Did it do something for you that you thought you wanted to continue to pursue? Along with that question, I’m curious about your history with performance and dance up to that point.

This was my first time performing inside of a nightclub. My first time doing solo dance. I’d been part of dance groups all through college, and even after college I used to choreograph for a South Asian dance group, and I danced all through high school. I’d done all this group stuff. I felt confidence around taking a Hindi film song and turning it into a story and creating a world out of it. That was there. I wasn’t so worried about the performance part of it. I had years on that but when it came to being on stage alone, this was really the first time in my adult life, where I thought, this is just me, and I have to hold the audience’s attention, so it felt like a lot of pressure. I sort of blacked out in the moment. A lot of people were like, what’s she gonna do next? What’s next for LaWhore? It was really other people’s insistence and urgency around it, that I was like, okay, I’ll do it again.

These dance groups were from a South Asian dance practice?

In college I was in a Latino dance group and a South Asian dance group. At a different point I joined a step team. All groups. All of this dance stuff was called cultural dance. It was not studio training. It didn’t have the rigor of a teacher, a daily practice, or a routine practice we associate with Art. My research is about dismantling that hierarchy between what we call culture and what we call art.

One of my favorite things about drag is that you feel that people are creating it outside of traditionally-considered “virtuosic” practice.

It’s so virtuosic.

One of the things that’s Auntie is that I’m not doing drops and dips and splits. I think there’s a kind of athleticism to young drag, but I really love the old queen that doesn’t have to move. It’s in Austin where I saw a lot of slow drag and it’s really beautiful. 

I’m curious about the way you create this pedagogy and talk about your scholarship and then bring in the drag in your show Lessons in Drag. I’m wondering how you’ve developed that part of your practice over time.

All the numbers in that show are numbers I made for a nightclub or fundraiser or event…Putting together my scholarship and nightclub acts into a show has allowed me to go back to performances I did as a one-off and clean them up and redo the music and create some story around it. All of that said, clearly my research has been informing what interests me in the way I make a number. It’s a bit of both. None of those numbers were made to stage my research. Because they’re in the club. You don’t get on the mic and announce this is exactly what I’m doing, and then I do the number. The numbers had to stand on their own. Over the years I’ve been invited to do drag things in scholarly spaces. I’d do a ten minute thing or a thirty minute presentation that then became this 90 minute show.

It’s like a TED talk as drag. [They both laugh.] I really love it. Did you go into graduate studies first, or did drag happen first?

Graduate studies first. The site that I perform in is my research fieldsite as well. That party in Chicago but I didn’t know it would be. We started this party and we just kept doing it and it became a fieldsite and it also became where I perform. Some of what I write about is how drag has actually shaped my research. If I went into these spaces only as a patron I think what I would see is just masculinity. There’s a lot of gender conformity that happens but I think drag taught me how to value femininity even when it’s just ephemeral or ghosts the space. Even if I was the only one doing it because people would come up to LaWhore and tell me about how they used to dress up when they were a kid, how they dance as a kid, how they know all the steps to that song. Even if they’re not doing it in the club, or even if the club doesn’t facilitate or promote femininity, drag taught me how to look for it and find it and even invite it into my world because I was the one doing it. So by doing that labor in the club it brings more of it into my orbit.

When you first started doing scholarship, what was your scholarship focused on?

My scholarship was, at one point, supposed to be about South Asian drag queens. Then when I started doing research, I couldn’t find them. And for a variety of reasons including the way nightlife had changed between when I started going to clubs in 2001 in New York to when I started doing research to my own working assumptions around what a drag queen was, which was focused on cis men performing as women. Many that I was seeing and thought I would be writing about were trans*, embodying different gender formations that don’t always fit what we think and what I thought a drag queen was at that time. So my definitions have changed as has a broader understanding, a more pop cultural understanding, of what drag is. This was also an impetus to write my new book Decolonize Drag that interrupts the very definitions and rubrics we have for evaluating the category and value of drag.

What was your fashion aesthetic before you started drag, and did it change as you got more into drag?

200%. I went shopping for LaWhore and found all this other jewelry. I kept buying these weird rhinestone things. I have this giant rhinestone apple and fish. My signature was to wear these big blingy objects and for a couple of years I was known for that. The accessories in my closet tripled and it was because I gave myself permission to look elsewhere for them and not just in men’s sections where we get only  navy and khaki. It is really brutal. My comfort with longer garments, with looser garments, all emerges out of actually wearing them and trying them on and navigating them and learning that some are easy to move in and some are not. When you stop shopping in just the men’s section, you give yourself twenty times more options because the men’s section is always a fraction of what the rest of a clothing store might look like. There’s just so much more. The calls to make fashion more flexible are really legitimate. It could bring a lot of joy to people if they just looked elsewhere for clothes. The other thing is also clothing cut for the women’s section is meant to fit bodies in a certain way and it doesn’t always work for me either. Unless you’re rail thin.

I often wear masc clothing and I’d like to wear board shorts where they look like they’re supposed to look. It’s always about being rail thin.

This is why all of these questions of fatness and hair and skin color and race matter. Even things I’ll pick up that I’ll see on a model and say, that looks really stunning. I’ll put it on and say, I look like a FOB. Because I’m brown. It can look artsy on a thin white body and it just makes me look like I’m stuck in time as a Brown. Those are things I’m always navigating. This is not about my everyday wear. Prior to working with Rhonda and being in Drag Class, I’d never worn a gown. That was not the aesthetic I aspired to. I didn’t see it growing up. I didn’t know how to be beautiful in that way, in a pageant way. Actually having someone say, you can look good in this, especially after the padding. Oh, this is what I could look like. There’s something about people giving you permission and saying, you can try this. Drag has given me permission but also people like Rhonda have given me permission to try on other ways of dressing and being that were unfamiliar.

It's also interesting, even outside of the conversation around gender, to consider who gets the opportunity, really, unless you’re a celebrity, to wear a gown? Unless you grow up in this white debutante culture.

Black southern prom and then, drag. The same people are making the outfits from the same patterned sequin textiles.

You know about the Texas mums for Homecoming? I don’t even know how to describe them, but they’re these huge … they look like corsages, but because they’re from Texas . . . 

[LaWhore looks them up on their phone, and gasps.] Incredible.

Only through the Internet and viral posts in the last few years did I realize this didn’t happen anywhere else. Other than Texas. Leaning into the spectacle. You were talking about that your first foray into drag was out of necessity. There wasn’t somebody around that you could find to be in this performance. How have you seen South Asian drag particularly in the United States evolve since you started?

After a show, I would get out of drag immediately. I’d go back to the back room, wipe all the makeup off, want to jump right back. It was out of necessity, but there was some discomfort or sadness that I couldn’t participate in the masculinity of gay clubs. Growing out of it, aging out of that space, has also been, I’ll be the drag queen for the night. Since I’m not included in that economy of desire, I’ll do the Auntie work of being LaWhore for the night. That’s also a sense of comfort that’s grown around being the feminine figure in the space that other people were to me before. In terms of South Asian drag, there’s such an explosion of it. Interestingly, on Drag Race, there’ve only been two artists – Genie (on Season Two) and Priyanka (Drag Race Canada and who won). Genie being Indian from Southeast Asia on Drag Race Thailand and Priyanka being Indo-Caribbean are really unique examples of South Asian diasporic formations. It’s not the US or UK. There’s a cohort in New York, in Chicago, several between Montreal and Toronto, a few in the LA area, and then there are single ones in different cities who rely a lot on digital drag in order to have publicity. There are several drag kings who are really fantastic. This social media presence makes a difference. I have a drag daughter in DC who is a bearded performer – Kamani Sutra – she is so good at self-promotion online. DC doesn’t have a giant South Asian drag scene but she’s getting booked in these other places because she’s really enterprising. I think that social media is allowing these performers who aren’t necessarily in urban enclaves or urban areas with large South Asian enclaves to visit those other places and perform there, and I think that’s really valuable. The pandemic did some interesting things to bring South Asian drag artists into conversation. Because we couldn’t go out, some South Asian queer promoters were hosting online events and instead of privileging dancing which they would otherwise, they would instead host drag shows and they would bring together artists from Pakistan, India, Caribbean, the UK, and across the US and Canada. We got to be on the same stage. Three or four times there were these pan South Asian drag events that were really special. We got to know about each other. These were pre-recorded and then they streamed them. But we would have Zoom watch parties with the other artists. We didn’t know each other, but we’d get into a Zoom together, Work, bitch! It was great.

Have you been brought over to India or Pakistan?

I did my research in Bangalore so I did a show in Bangalore and then I did a tour of Bangalore, Bombay, Delhi one year. There’s a pretty fabulous nightlife scene in each of these cities and so there’s room for drag there and there’s a big drag scene in India that is interesting in a lot of ways because it’s really RuPaul driven. There are not a lot of people wearing South Asian wear to perform. A lot of them are performing Lady Gaga and … Lady Gaga. The party planner will have a Bollywood night or a South Indian night and they’ll do other stuff, but often it’s very driven by a western soundtrack. There are also drag kings who are doing really interesting interpretations of Bollywood stars that I think are sexy and exciting.

You’ve spoken about how the way you dress as an Auntie is different from this more revealing aesthetic we associate with white or American drag queens. How was the audience or drag community’s reception to how unique your aesthetic was initially? Are you seeing other Aunties?

The reception was about my use of non-English tracks, which was one novelty, I guess you could call it? I think the Auntie is a figure that makes a lot of people feel comfortable. I know how to place you. Even if they’re not South Asian they understand the stereotypes that live around the Auntie figure. There is a comfort to knowing who this figure in front of you is. I’m still on the older end of the drag scene. Part of being not skinny and very hairy is I don’t know that I can successfully pull off pop princess. In terms of how much skin to show, so what’s easiest is to wear leotards and things that cover most of my body, actually, that then make it weird to wear skin-revealing stuff because the skin isn’t showing, it’s an undergarment. So some of leaning into Auntie modesty is practical. If I did Ariana Grande it wouldn’t be to be Ariana Grande. One of my drag babies, Masala Sapphire, does Ariana Grande really well. She wears South Asian wear and western wear and does it beautifully. She will show more skin, more midriff, more thigh. I like to wear the pads but then that creates a limit to what I’m able to show. Those are just some interesting things about drag and body shaping. If you’re skinny you can wear pop princess clothes. There are enough fat drag queens on Drag Race we’ve seen that show us you can do a lot. Widow Von’Du who wears these neoprene outfits that are really sexy and young and fresh and bright colors. She’s got something on how to do fat and Black and fabulous in these really impressive ways I don’t know how to conceive.

As a nonbinary person, whenever I consider drag myself, I don’t want to show all my skin, so the idea of there being a model for drag like that expands the notion of what we think of as drag.

When you lean into this Auntie figure and then do something sexy, there’s a way you can work with and against it to create response.

In these conversations around “all drag is sexual” that the right wing is promoting, there’s been this pushback that drag is not sexual, and I think that’s a real problem. Because the way that drag artists use sexuality, working with and against it, as Auntie does, she’s modest and refined and also is rolling on the ground. Those are two different pedagogical ends, of finding beauty in your body and remaining desirable and practicing forms of desire you don’t often let yourself do in the everyday, doing sexual movements that you may not give yourself permission but a crowd cheering you on makes you feel like, maybe that’s okay as well. Drag is a place to explore sexuality as well as to explore racial histories as well as to explore sadness and melancholia and heartbreak and joy. Those things don’t need to be separate. It’s a deeply intellectual space and it’s one for our bodies. I hate that a consequence of the backlash against drag is that we have to write sexuality out of it. Because sexuality is tied to gender and we’re being forced into this corner and we have to say, oh they’re different. It’s also deeply transphobic to say that, oh, the audience isn’t experiencing desire because they’re just doing entertainment. And because they are gender clowns and making fun of gender, that’s not what’s happening there. There’s this really great moment on Drag Race where Sasha Colby is performing for RuPaul’s video and another contestant, Anetra, is like, “Am I a lesbian?” Because she’s like, Sasha is so hot. I think drag teaches us how malleable our desire is. We need to hold onto that as well. The first time someone came up to me at a nightclub when I was in full drag, and was like, Hey. I was like, what the fuck? You like this? I don’t like this. And I thought, Oh, no, I do look good. I had to go and look at myself, Oh, I can be desirable in this form too. There’s a real lesson for me there in what I allowed myself to think of as desirable or beautiful there, by giving me permission to see my body differently.

My other investment in Auntie is that I am invested in the future of those most vulnerable around me, including young people, queer people of color, queer and trans folks. Aunty is always invested in your future. Maybe not always in the best ways, but she is. We’re not sure why she cares so much but she does! Give me your babies and let’s give them permission to make choices about how they want their bodies to be in the world.

We need some healing Aunties. Queer Aunties.