Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My house is a mixture of mid-century 'Brady Bunch' and the Addams family, so it's not uncommon to find vials of blood in my house.
Most American adults know what a drag queen is, but as they're portrayed in films like 'Dressed to Kill' and 'Silence of the Lambs.'
It has always been my aim to live everyday like Halloween by celebrating individuality and creative freedom within a world of horror.
The secret to a great Halloween costume, and I can't stress this enough, is in my opinion is to extract sexuality out of your costume.
If you were to come in to my house, I have archived every fan letter I've ever been given, boxes and boxes and boxes and boxes of them.
Beneath the 30 pounds of makeup and corsets and gowns are real beating hearts of real people and they usually come from a place of pain.
On 'PG-13,' the way I wrote that is that I would get my tracks ahead of time and then I would write for them, and I wrote fairly quickly.
It's a pleasure to join the ranks of Debbie Rochon, Linnea Quigley, and Heather Langenkamp as one of America's most recognizable Scream Queens!
When most kids were hiding their eyes or cowering under the covers, I was three inches away from the television when horror movies were played.
When I wrote 'PG-13,' I had just won 'RuPaul's Drag Race,' all my nightmares had come true, and I was a brat. I was a privileged brat overnight.
I've always said that punk is a time and money thing. You can only be punk if you're poor and you're young. It's for the poor, it's for the young.
I was such a bizarre conundrum of everything that makes you worry about a child. I was a bad student. I got picked on a lot. I loved horror movies.
Once you are in full Sharon Needles mode, you don't feel fear, you don't feel physical pain, and you also don't feel your own moral filter any longer.
Every disposable job makes you partially suicidal. But I've always worked because I need to buy drugs and wigs so I could go out in drag and get wasted!
A Scream Queen is a beautiful, bad actress who's really good at screaming, but it also represents standing up for equality and anti-bullying for LGBT youth.
Growing up in Iowa I could have had it a lot worse. My family was more worried about my education and my health than the fact that I wore my sister's dresses.
Gay people in general, I think, like telling secrets because we have to hide a huge secret for the first half of our lives. Why would we want to keep any more?
I love covers because there's just something I love about replicating someone else's music or taking rare music and introducing it to a wider or a new audience.
Not all drag queens but certainly the ones who empowered me, are people who pushed buttons, and poked fun at society from Leigh Bowery, to Lady Bunny and Divine.
I come from regional, small-city drag, where if you won Miss Des Moines, Iowa, and you did something bad, or you were being a role model, your crown was taken away.
My concept is drag queens are not a reflection of society, they are a fun house reflection of society where we bend, and twist and manipulate the anxieties we all feel.
I don't want to be anyone's role model. My mole models were assholes. My role models are dead. My role models never made it to 30, so I'm a bad person to ask for advice.
I can't speak for everyone, but the kind of comedy that makes me laugh are the ones that kind of make me cringe, and kind of make me look inside my own fears, my own anxieties.
RuPaul's Drag Race' is my favorite show on television, and I've never missed an episode. With season 4, I watched it as if Sharon Needles wasn't me but was just another character.
I was raised on GG Allen, Divine, Elvira and Marilyn Manson. I was always more interested in those button pushing, transgressive artists and they made a lot of good money doing it.
I never worry about the social backlash against my work because I'm a man in a dress, and somehow American society creates a buffer on how severe things are when you put a man in a dress.
I don't care how many times I play 'Angry Birds.' When you have the world's cares on your shoulders and you fling those little birds at those rotten pigs, then the whole world just melts away.
Never feel guilty. Don't hold yourself back by guilt or fear. No other species in the entire world deals with guilt. Guilt is a bizarre emotion that makes you feel bad about decisions that you make.
Before my time on 'RuPaul's Drag Race,' Halloween was my favorite day of the year since I was a little kid. It's the day we worship the macabre and live vicariously through the costumes that we wear.
I found my first picture of Amanda Lepore online in fashion magazines. It was the most beautiful thing that I had ever seen in my life. I thought nothing could trump the perfection of that photograph.
I was really into the bimbo archetype that filled late 80s-early 90s TV when I was growing up. You know, women circling the want ads with nail polish, Rhonda Shear from 'U.S.A. Up All Night,' Peggy Bundy.
I come from what we call the pre-'Drag Race' drag world where I didn't start doing this with aspirations of being a reality television star, or this going any further than the small smoky bars of Pittsburgh.
Jason Voorhees was a kid who was picked on at summer camp, and Michael Myers was someone vilified by his own family. I think that's why gay people like horror movies, because it's seeking revenge on the privileged.
I went into 'RuPaul's Drag Race' saying, 'I'll never cry.' Because they make fun of every queen that cries on the show. And I did cry, and I did scream, and I did have doubt, and I did have great, victorious moments.
Any younger person - let's say if you're over the age of 30, Pride is a great excuse to go day-drinking. But no one forgets their first Pride and how much they felt that they were included and that the future was bright.
In the entertainment industry women are often judged. They judge bigger women, they judge black women, and older women too. We just don't do that in drag. Drag is open to everyone, regardless of gender, body shape or age.
Well I grew up in a small town in Iowa and there weren't a lot of imaginative and fun outlets for kids of my caliber, so pretty much my mom's closet and any large pieces of fabric in the Halloween box were my favorite toys.
The thing about fame is, you want it your whole life, but no matter how bright you are, no one ever asks themselves why they want fame. You never really know what it is until you have it. You can never tangibly feel your own fame.
I never hate my bullies from high school. I actually kind of appreciate them. If it wasn't for that boot camp training of how the world treats gay people and especially drag queens, I don't know if I would have survived as well as I have.
I like money but I love performance art and it goes hand in hand. I'm not the 'Titanic,' I'm 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show.' I'm not a blockbuster, I'm a cult classic. I think my strong but cult-like fanbase expects me to challenge norms.
Not to be rude to my sisters, but I don't listen to drag music. I listen to everything from punk to Italo disco to Appalachian country music, but I don't know what their records sound like. I hardly listen to my own records. I'm like Cher!
I am a Sagittarius. Two people live within me. One's a very savvy businessperson; the other's a party girl. Part of me is a very sensitive, connected, balanced person, and the other part is a selfish, fame-seeking asshole. Terrorist, really.
Most drag queens dress up as super women, as an over exaggeration of the female form, because we like women, usually powerful women. I think that's why we are so over exaggerated; we are an amplification of the women who empowered us in our youth.
After I went on 'Drag Race,' I was allowed to do so many things. I was allowed to do theater, commercial work, television work, modeling, fashion design, and it was great. But the thing with reality television fame is that it's got a pretty quick expiration date.
A lot of people call horror movies 'campy,' and I can certainly see why they think that they are, but being a product of the 80s, I didn't notice that they were campy - I came from a campy generation. I mean, Ronald Reagan is campy. But I don't think they're campy.
Sometimes when I'm working with RuPaul, I can't even look at her without feeling so emotional about the process I went through, and what was before the competition and what happened in my life after, and what it's done to millions of gay disenfranchised freaky kids.
Some people say, 'Oh you're a weird queen. You're a punk queen.' All queens are weird! I don't care if you're in a sickening gown or dressed as an octopus. You are treating every day as if it were Halloween. You are donning a character and a persona that isn't real.
Sharon Needles is definitely Pittsburgh - always rough around the edges, a little ignorant, a little uneducated. And she's dead. And Pittsburgh is, after all, the zombie capital of the world, a little financially lower class, and just all-around a gritty, rough city.
It's like, 'Oh, great, drag queens can excel!' - but then the ceiling is so low. You're only allowed on the first floor; you're not allowed to go play with the big boys upstairs. Even RuPaul, who's a massive success, has been limited to where her music career can take her.
I love taxidermy. I collect taxidermy. I'm fascinated by the art of taxidermy. But on a more artistic level, I look at taxidermy as pulling something from the wild and taming it, and posing it in a style of your own personal pleasure that will last forever, and ever, and ever.