'IT'S ABOUT BEING PROUD OF THE PEOPLE WHO CAME BEFORE US'

Met Gala and Grammys heroine Violet Chachki has taken drag to a new level. Here, she talks about learning her art in the gay bars of Atlanta, wild NYC nights and what London Pride means

- INTERVIEW BY PAUL FLYNN

Like so many queer kids before her and so many since, Violet Chachki noticed the rigours of gendered indoctrination young. Leaning towards drag, Chachki says, was “escapism, yes, but also therapy”. She attended a Catholic elementary school in Atlanta, Georgia, where “everything was really uniform”. “Even wearing a boy's uniform, I still somehow stood out. You'd look at me and say, that person is not the same as the rest of those other guys, in exactly the same outfit.”

A curious, bright child with vaulting early ambition, none of it made sense to her. “I had to repress, early on, as a child, those messages of ‘guys don’t walk like that’, ‘guys don’t talk like that’, ‘only girls do this’. Really, it was about channelling all of my anger and frustration.”

She began asking tricky questions young. “What is male clothing? What is female? And why are they gendered?” Smashing the system appealed. “It all culminated in me finding the art of drag and really doing it as a punk thing. It was rebellion.”

Chachki was the seventh, some might argue definitive, winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race, the multi-territory TV franchise that brought the conversation on dissolving the gender binary right to the family tea table. “She really has crawled so that we could walk,” says Chachki of Ru.

In a succession of steely, hardened glamour looks, Chachki utilised the show to channel the anarchic spirit of her early heroes, Divine, Leigh Bowery, and the New York Club Kids, out of whose entrails the programme first evolved. Her reward has been a lucrative career — a decade at drag’s top table.