Sasha Velour and a Literal Lip Sync For Your Life
At Friday’s finale of Season 9 of RuPaul’s Drag Race, Sasha Velour made her two winning lip syncs look like life-or-death battles. And not just because the competition was fierce, but because for Sasha, drag is about life or death. It’s a fight for LGBT equality, and her aesthetic as a bald queen is also how she honors her mother, who died of cancer in 2015.
I was especially moved by Sasha’s lip syncs because on the day of the finale, my aunt was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, one of the quickest and most lethal forms. It’s already spread to her abdomen. The tumors aren’t operable.
It was a strange thing to face on the day of the RuPaul finale. I’ve loved RPDR since its first season for its artistry, wit, and role in moving LGBT rights forward — a cause I’ve cared deeply about my whole life, since my aunt’s partner (now wife) is a woman too. I affectionately think of them as my lesbi-aunts. They’ve been like a second set of parents.
When I went to a bar in Brooklyn for the finale of Season 9, I hoped it would give me a bit of distraction from the heartbreaking news I’d heard a few hours earlier. I hoped Sasha would win, but my mind was mostly elsewhere.
At least, until Whitney Houston’s “So Emotional” started to play and Sasha bled out a rose garden (watch it here). What she served was not only one (in fact, two) of the finest lip syncs in Drag Race history, bursting with passion, urgency, and artistry; her performances were also packed with powerful symbolism I’d expect from a Russian novel, but not a drag performance.
It starts strange, but not the strangeness we’re used to from Sasha. She walks onstage hand-in-hand with Shea holding a single rose and, stranger still, wearing hair. Why abandon her trademark now, in what could be her final lip sync?
Sasha calls her drag the future: her style is avant-garde, intellectual, and unexpected, most obviously in the fact that Sasha usually performs without hair. Conventional drag (as far as drag is ever conventional) is a man in a wig, where the hair is part of the illusion. Sasha can do that kind of drag and slay it, but she’s a bald queen to show that drag can be about the art, not the hair. And more importantly, she’s a bald queen because of her mother.
Sasha’s aesthetic is a tribute to the most important woman in her life, and her first performance at the finale was a tribute to the power of emotion in creating art.
With the first strains of “So Emotional,” Sasha tears the rose to shreds with a predatory glint in her eye and tosses the destroyed flower to the floor. Emotional, indeed: sometimes things happen suddenly and painfully, something beautiful destroyed in the blink of an eye.
When she pulls off one long gold glove and then the other, scarlet petals flutter around her like a florist shop exploding from her forearms. The petals fly into the air gracefully, but I thought of blood, too. Morbid? Maybe. Had Sasha thought something similar? I’d bet on it. Some people say roses symbolize death, after all, but others say they represent hope, new beginnings, and love.
In the bar where I was watching, the audience was in a minor frenzy by the second glove. When she lifts her wig and a whole garden spills out, everyone lost it. It’s not just because she somehow managed to stuff all of Valentine’s Day under there without losing a single petal. Her reveal of her smooth, shaved head under the bed of petals is a loud, celebratory declaration of Sasha Velour, and on top of that it is, like Whitney sings it, so emotional.
Sasha’s hands shake as she pulls off the wig: it’s a fight, it hurts, but it’s irresistible and it’s real, as we see for the rest of her hairless performance, her face contorted by fierce pain as well as fierce determination.
The lyrics go, “I get so emotional, baby, every time I think of you.” The intensity in Sasha’s eyes isn’t just the desire to win, and isn’t just Whitney’s focus on the emotion of romance. It’s also the emotion of losing someone you love and being powerless to stop it, but finding in that pain something courageous, and even beautiful.
The genius of that first performance is that it’s amazing to watch even if you’re not reading into every rose petal. It’s a stunt, but no Styrofoam snowman gimmick — even Michelle Visage would agree that there was meaning and force behind Sasha’s every move.
For me, I was getting my life — as popular drag slang puts loving the hell out of the show — but the power of the performance was not just the stunt: it was the heart behind it. Knowing that my aunt is fighting for her life—and not just in a lip sync—seeing Sasha bleeding out a florist shop gave me heart, too. It’s possible not to let grief overwhelm you, she was telling me.
Sasha’s second performance is also powerful, an angelic Darth Vader commenting on LGBT history, visibility, and equality. I could write a whole separate blog about her unmasking as a promise to be a voice for a community whose hard-won rights are under threat.
That’s why Sasha’s victory is doubly important. Drag is about fighting for recognition and rights — a fight I learned about when I was a lot younger and couldn’t understand why people thought my two aunts were different from any other two parents.
And drag is also about love. As Ru has told us for a decade, “If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love somebody else?” Sasha shows that loving somebody else can be fierce, beautiful, heartbreaking, strange, and, like Whitney sings it, so emotional.
Drag is also about finding power in loss. You can feel the weight of sorrow, and also create, be strong, and continue to love. That’s what Sasha told me with her victory, and that’s what I want to tell my aunts.
Can I get an Amen up in here?