Alyssa Edwards Quotes

For years, 'Drag Race' was gay people's best kept secret. When I started doing drag, people didn't know anything about it. Look at it now: it's like it's gone from black and white to IMAX.

I wanted to modernize music, but more than that, to completely modernize people's attitudes towards life in general.

It was a particularly interesting and exciting time, and the European political and artistic establishment was turned on by the Civil Rights Movement and the artistic revolution that was becoming a part of jazz.

I first got involved in theater in 1968, at the height of a social tumult. I was a poet.

I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.

You just never know when today's cultural outcasts will become tomorrow's cultural icons.

I'm certainly not inventing anything new with drag.

I think that drag, being mainstream, it's such a wonderful thing because even my sister, years ago, they thought it was so taboo and didn't understand it, or maybe they thought, 'Justin, do you want to be a woman?' and I'm like, 'No, Alyssa's my character.'

Although drag has a long cultural history in America, it remained largely underground till the late 1980s.

Drag, in my view these days, has become the thing it used to make fun of - which is Jennifer Lopez. Now we all want to be her. We have stylists; we have special photographers.

I think every city and every drag queen has a different aesthetic or set up, but in the end, it's mutual respect for one another.

If I could pick a dream job it would be sitting in a room with a fabulous drag queen chatting about 'RuPaul's Drag Race.'

Drag should push the limits of what is considered fashionable or beautiful.

America used to say that hip-hop was a cancer. Then it embraced that cancer and realized, 'Hey, this isn't a bad thing. It is part of us, just more America.'

Most drag queens, they put on music like it's a costume. It's not in their bones. It's not in their background.

The truth is I do take drag really seriously, and I think that there's kind of a place for that - to see it as this political and historical art form, and to want to continue pushing it in new directions. And also honor the old directions as well. So I'm sort of like a drag intellectual/drag queen.

'Drag Race' really offered me a platform to have a lot of people listen to what I have to show them, and I want to showcase the whole community I know.

I agree with Ru that it'll never be mainstream, because mainstream means everybody knows it, everybody loves it, everybody accepts it. That's never gonna happen with drag, but it's definitely become more mainstreamed for people that never knew anything about it, being opened up to it as a form of art.

I've always wanted to play a role as a producer and a curator and to help make drag really have an epic scale and a large audience and a lot of interest.

People are always asking me about the '60s, like I should be some sort of expert. It's like being in the middle of a hurricane, you can't describe it till it's over. Creativity was allowed to blossom, we were all allowed this marvelous freedom, there was money to do things.

I hit the road with a bunch of drag queens every year, sometimes two times a year. Again, as such a fan of drag, it's the art form that excites me and the longform presentation that they do. So it's super exciting to be with them, doing what they love to do and doing it well.

When I started doing drag, I always put together multimedia elements for live performance.

When I was on 'Drag Race,' it felt like a serious competition going on between drag queens... and then Katya and I were also there.

A drag queen on time is not a drag queen.

I feel like I am just an entertainer. It does not matter what form I take to perform and entertain. I think I deserve being called a performer because you don't call Tyler Perry a drag queen. You don't call Will Smith a drag queen and all the other mainstream artists who use the aesthetic of drag to entertain.