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Daphne with C'mon Everybody's door dog, Ziggy | Photo by Cole Saladino for Thrillist Sometimes I feel quite outdated that I’m just she/her over here.
It feels like everyone is trans or gender fluid or non-binary or all sorts of different kinds of trans. This is one of those pendulum-of-history things where, maybe before Drag Race, there wasn’t much of a line between ‘I am a man who dresses up as a woman on stage’ versus ‘I’m a woman too.’ I think without the internet-driven vocabulary paradigms, there wasn’t as much of a need to draw such a difference between ‘I was assigned male at birth, but I identify as a woman and am a woman and live my life that way’ versus ‘I was assigned male at birth and feel like a woman sometimes.’ĭrag Race and Tumblr and the 2010s was an era of complexifying structure versus now it feels like we’re going back to something a bit more fluid. So, what was that like, being a drag queen and then transitioning? It seems that it’s becoming very normal for drag performers to come out as trans, even though-in my own observation-there’s a bit of misogyny against women in that if you’re a drag queen and a woman, you’re somehow not valid. Also, the show has lots of dumb, stupid parody songs that make me laugh. I kind of connect that to what drag is today. Kind of anachronistic to call people from other time periods trans, but they celebrated this earth mother goddess and they were born male and as part of the rights of initiation would castrate themselves and live as women. Then I connected with this cult of priests of the goddess Cybele. It drove me down a rabbit hole and I started translating these ancient Greek songs and seeing how they’re still relevant today. I majored in classics so that obsession was always there but it was really helpful for me to zoom out and see this as one event in human history rather than this consuming thing that’s happening right now. I went to a really spiritual place, and I started having this obsession with history. And then it’s like, a few years and a pandemic later, like, still? We’re still here? I guess it’s a show about looking back and taking inventory of what parts of ourselves we’ve managed to bring along with us and which parts we’ve had to leave behind. That was such an event-a real chapter for me. Your current show is Daphne Always: Sumtimez, Always-Still?!Īt one point, I was a drag queen Daphne Sumtimez and then I started transitioning and I realized that my relationship to performing had changed enough that, because the pun Daphne Sumtimez is that I was only Daphne sometimes, but then I was Daphne all the time. Daphne Always | Photo by Cole Saladino for Thrillist I tutor kids in math and physics and Latin, and that keeps me stable while I work on shows. After a few months of spiraling, I wound up getting a job as a tutor. And then COVID hit and it all disappeared. In 2019, I was starting to make this switch towards more of a rhythm where it’s like, ‘Hey here’s this show this month, buy tickets and see this show that I work on for the month’ rather than struggling to keep up with new looks, new numbers. It was really about the hustle of trying to get as many gigs as possible. What I realized for myself is that this was an unsustainable model for me and my happiness to have this pressure that every week you’re going to draw the same crowd to the same place for the same show. And it was very much about the weekly gig at the bar that you can have a tenuous agreement that they will keep on paying you on a week by week basis as long as you help keep their bar sales up. Before the pandemic it was bar gigs, it was nightlife gigs. Thrillist: Why don’t we start by talking a bit about what your performing life was like before the pandemic and how that’s evolved to now?ĭaphne Always: Yeah, it’s been a big recalibration.