• Format
  • Transcripts
  • Interviews
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  • Text
• Extent
  • Duration: 11 pages (transcript)
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  • Western Carolina University
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  • HL_GSOH_Steiner_Nightly_2018_04_25_transcript

Nightly 1 GENDER & SEXUALITY ORAL HISTORY PROJECT DRAG PERFORMERS Interviewee: Natasha Noir Nightly Interviewer: Sarah Steiner Location: Asheville, NC Date: April 25, 2018 Duration: 54:09; 11 pages Sarah Steiner: My name is Sarah Steiner and I’m here with Lane Wagner, whose drag name is Natasha Nightly. And it’s April 25, 2018, and we’re in Asheville, North Carolina. And we’re going to be discussing Lane’s experience with drag performance in western North Carolina. So just to start with a couple demographic questions, how old are you? Natasha Nightly: I am 23, turn 24 in August. SS: And how do you describe your gender and sexuality? NN: I identify as a cis male, but I do identify as pansexual. SS: So can you just tell us a little bit about you, about your life and experiences here? NN: In Asheville or in general? S: Everywhere. NN: I was born in Indianapolis, Indiana actually, and lived there until I was about 8. My parents moved us, my brother and I, to West Lafayette, Indiana which is where Purdue is and I lived there until I was 16. And it, even though it was a college town, it was a very rural and very back woodsy and I was struggling with a lot of things, the fact that I was more effeminate than all the rest of the guys in my school were, the fact that I wasn’t really interested in having a girlfriend, but I was afraid to come out as anything other than straight because my one friend who was out as gay ended up being thrown into a dumpster and beaten within an inch of his life almost every day. And I had been called a faggot repeatedly from the time I was in second grade and I had, it was scary, but after being stabbed on the school bus by a group of kids, I decided that I could be whoever I wanted to be because fuck them. It made me angry because of the fact that I wasn’t doing anything to anybody and they were just being awful. And when I was 16 my parents moved my brother and I down to Winston Salem, North Carolina. I was absolutely terrified because I was like oh god we’re going to the south, everyone is racist, everyone is a homophobe, I’m going to be that kid. I tried to butch it up my first day of sophomore year, it was awful. I remember picking my outfit to be as gray and drab and hiding as possible. But there I met some theater kids and they were like, hey you’re awesome, come play with us. And so I ended up doing theater for sophomore, junior, senior year, was by the time I was a junior I was comfortable enough with myself to come out as non-straight. Because I didn’t know what I was, I was still attracted to lots of people. It was easy to call myself gay when I was in high school because no one knew what anything else was, you were either, bi, gay or straight, that was it. So my junior and senior year I really kind of came into myself and I ended up being president of every club I was involved in. Everybody knew who I was, I was captain Nightly 2 of the color guard, ended up going to San Antonio, Texas to perform with the Army band. I directed a charity theater group, I went all over the place and was very out about the fact that I was not straight. And 18 started dating which was not… my first boyfriend was 23, he was the same age as my history professor, or my history teacher, which I reminded her of frequently. It was probably not the best idea, I was kind of a jerk in high school. I ended up going to Catawba College in 2013 for theater arts education because I was convinced that I wanted to be a theater educator. And then I got to my, I was in the honors teaching program, and in that class I was told that I needed to be more serious and I couldn’t be as into fun as I was. And at that point I said, fuck this, I’m not about to do that. And I was also taking a sociology course at that point so I decided I was going to pursue sociology, but I was scholarshiped into the teaching education major and I had met a guy at that point who had transferred into the school. We were dating pretty seriously and he also couldn’t afford to go there anymore, so he and I started looking for other schools, and we came here to UNC Asheville. He was a philosophy major [lol] and I declared a major in gender studies and minor in dance. And we, he went her for another year, I stuck around, we ended up going long distance, getting engaged, breaking it off. Lots of drama. And then I graduated here this past December actually. I am now a “fully functional” adult. But I started drag here. SS: Okay. NN: Technically I guess I started at Catawba. Our end of the year banquet was a costume party so my boyfriend and I at the time went as female characters from two of the shows that we did, The Little Shop of Horrors and so we were like the disco girls. That was my first experience in heels, a dress, and eyelashes. I don’t show those pictures because [laugh] I think I contoured with blush. It was awful. But I may be able to find them somewhere. And then I ended up doing Drag Ball that next year here at UNC Asheville. I did a trio with two other girls. Two bio queens, two femmes. And then the next year, I did bearded drag for the first time because I was performing professionally with the color guard, a winter guard and I was kind of selfish. Everyone knew me in the color guard world, because of my beard, because I was one of the only guys in color guard to have a full beard. And so I didn’t want to shave it, but I still wanted to do Drag Ball and so I saw Shane Dawson I think, or somebody it may have been the other annoying one on YouTube--they did a How To Do a Glitter Beard. And so I was like I can do this. This is so easy. And so I did it, and it looked like Velcro because I used black glitter and that was the first time that Natasha had a beard in drag. And from there I performed at O.Henry’s at Cherrybomb which was a lesbian centric burlesque night at O.Henry’s and I performed with my best friend/drag sister there. And we did a cannibal picnic thing, which is blood everywhere. And from there I ended up getting adopted by my mom Chartreuse and it kind of exploded from there and now I perform at Ole Shakey’s I perform at the Odditorium, I perform here at UNC Asheville. I’m performing at Scandals this weekend. And I perform, yeah, I perform a lot of places now. SS: Can you tell me a little bit more about the Drag Ball at UNC Asheville? NN: Yeah, so it actually just happened this past weekend. It’s a amateur drag show at first so the Out Club now is what they are called, they used to be called Alliance, they sponsor the event. They have a signup sheet if you’re on campus or actually in the community and have never done drag before you are more than welcome to take the stage and perform for one number and then they have a professional show afterwards. So I performed two or three years ago, probably three years ago now, in the amateur show twice and then the next year I ended up being able to perform this in a professional show as a student. Cause I was going all over the place. But my drag sister Aralyn, she won the--it used to be a Nightly 3 competition, used to be, is no longer--she won the amateur show and that was, probably my first year when she was performing as a professional. And then the next year, that year they didn’t have a winner, the next year they didn’t have a winner and then the year after that, my drag brother, whose name is Marlon Brandowl, he won and yeah. Then it was… I think every single member of my family has performed at Drag Ball now, every single one, there are six of us now. SS: Can you tell us more about your drag family, sort of how that came together and what it means to you and what role it plays? NN: [laugh] So the people of the house, we have our drag mom, whose name is Chartreuse, she is a political activist, she is amazing. She does a lot of really important work in the community. She actually just moved to Oregon to pursue a Master’s Degree of Charity Management. So her eldest daughter, my older sister, is Aralyn and she is one of my best friends and actually is more of a mom to me than Chartreuse is. She taught me how to paint eyebrows and helped me with costumes and has helped me with numerous pageants I’ve attempted. And we have a dead sister, she’s not really dead, she just doesn’t perform anymore. She also is no longer a part of the house I don’t think, her name is, or was Diamond Champagne. And then there is me, Natasha Noir Nightly, and then there is Scarlett Johannesoff, who is our femme sister, she was assigned female at birth and performs as a drag queen and her boyfriend/partner is Marlon Brandowl and there is kind of an estranged sister/ my ex, is Ithaca Cerise, and that’s a lot of family drama. She used to be really involved in the house and then we broke up and she went crazy--things are challenging in her life right now I hope she’s getting better. But yeah, she’s still a full member of the family officially. And that’s all of us. We are named after colors, so we are House Acrylic. We all have a color in our name. It’s really nice to have that. Our house is known in Asheville specifically for doing non-typical drag. So it’s not like pageant, but it’s not like club kid, it’s just kind of whatever the hell we want to do. We have two bearded queens, myself and Arayln are both a bearded lady. Our mother Chartreuse attempted a lot of pageants, she did a lot of strange things, but she was more of a ‘fish’ queen than anybody. Scarlette and Marlon don’t really perform very much anymore. They are in Raleigh pursuing grad school as well. And Ithaca does a lot of comedy non-typical drag, they do--she does a lot of very very funny, very funny things. She’s an amazing performer. Again, we just kind of do whatever. Our makeup isn’t really like typical. We do more drag makeup, but it’s not pageant-ready, it’s not anything amazing, but it’s really nice to have that connection and mentorship almost from different performers and someone you can always go to for advice and they are kind of obligated to help you because if you mess up it looks bad on everybody. And drag houses kind of started as substitute families for people who were kicked out. Luckily all of us have really supportive families, which is not something you’d find a lot of the time. So it’s less of a family unit and more of a kind of like—one of my friends says that drag houses in Asheville are more like houses in Game of Thrones to where like you have allegiances and you have, that’s a little more dramatic than I think it really is--but it’s more like you are part of this house and it gets you these things because you are known for this. And there are some houses in Asheville who are not really looked that fondly on and or they’re expected to be trashy, or very pageanty, and we’re known as the house of advocates which is kind of really cool. SS: And do you have... I feel like I’ve seen you post about having drag children of your own. NN: I do, I do have children now. SS: Do they have a different house name or? Nightly 4 NN: Yeah, so, Chartreuse being in Oregon, typically the protocol, whatever for adopting more in the family is if you’re using the last name, or the name of a house started by a specific queen you go… so House Acrylic was started by Chartreuse… with my daughter, Nostalgia, if I was trying to integrate her into House Acrylic and give her a color name, I would introduce her to Chartreuse and talk to Chartreuse about it and Chartreuse would give me the go ahead to allow Nostalgia to use a color in her name. because Chartreuse is in Oregon it’s kind of hard to introduce her, or introduce any of my kids to her. And my house kind of exploded in 2.5 seconds. So they are not technically part of House Acrylic, they are part of House Nightly. So I have my oldest daughter is Nostalgia Nightly, and she is the only drag queen actually of the family. I have a drag king son and his name is Freddy Crooner, isn’t that amazing. [laugh] He sings live a lot. And his femme persona, because he has done drag queen drag before, is Miss Behavin’ Nightly and which he picked hat name before I adopted him, it’s just a beautiful, beautiful name. And then I’m in the process of possibly adopting another son and his name Daddy. SS: And how will you help them on their path? NN: So, with Nostalgia specifically is… had no idea about anything drag. She and Daddy actually helped start drag night at the Crow and Quill here in town and she really wanted to be in drag. She really wanted to be in full face, costume, everything. So she asked on Facebook, hey I need help, any of my drag queen friends like to help me. And I was like yeah, sure. I like John Paul, he’s a really cool person. So I went over and I painted his face and I was kind of teaching him how to makeup and what I did that worked for me because I am by no means a makeup artist, I would do a lot of things that would make professional makeup artist cringe. So, but I ended up adopting him that night and we were working and ended up she adopted the Nostalgia Nightly, and I’ve been teaching her better ways to do face, teaching her how to style wigs so she’s kind of been doing that all by herself. Giving her pointers on how to make pads, just like the intricacies of how to create a drag persona as you want to see it. And also kind of like, I’ve connected her with a lot of different people that I perform with, a lot of my personal friends from the drag community. So I’ve been helping, I’ve actually been helping Freddy with a performance that he wants to put together cause he is not comfortable lip syncing because he does so much live singing, and so I’ve been kind of there to help give ideas and to kind of like, as a professional performer, bounce things off of, this works for me, let’s run through some things. So basically I just mentor them. I mentor them in how to drag, as I see it. And I also really encourage them to go out and talk to other people find they admire. Or they like, I really like how she does her eyebrows, I want to know how she does that. Or like, I have no idea how the hell she got this costume to look this way, and I really want to talk to her about it. I don’t hold monopoly on anybody’s drag, I encourage... some mothers do. They are like, no you must look like me you must do this and I’m not that mom. SS: They don’t need the family resemblance…? NN: She is kind of turning, Nostalgia is turning out to look a lot like me. She doesn’t have a beard, but she just recently, actually yesterday, she made her own hip pads and her silhouette looks exactly like mine. Almost like, this is very strange. We all, everybody at House Acrylic, and Nightly actually all have the same size shoe as well. SS: That’s fortunate. [laugh] NN: That’s really weird, we all wear a size 10 in Women’s and that’s Freddy, Nostalgia, all of Chartreuses’ really. I have shoes if you want to borrow any. It’s crazy. That like to be our joke that that Nightly 5 was the only requirement to be a part of house Acrylic is you have to have a size 10. It’s not true, you can still be a part of House Acrylic and not be a size 10. SS: So, you’ve touched on padding a little bit. How would you talk about your style of presentation on stage in terms of… you’ve talked about beards and padding, anything more to say about that? NN: I’ve, I mean you’ve seen my performances. I don’t always wear my pads, I do burlesque in drag and so I have gone basically naked on stage, not really hiding the fact that I was assigned male at birth and so I like to present myself as very androgynous. I don’t wear boobs, but I pad my hips to give myself a more full, rounded figure. I am very small, my waist is very small so it tends to align itself with that kind of like more feminine figure if I pad like that. I always wear sky-high shoes, but I have a beard. I do try to feminize my face above it, so I wear really intense eye makeup. I started wearing this nose to ear chain, I wear things that feminize me, but also don’t hide the fact that I do not identify as female. Because my personal philosophy is Natasha is a female character but I will never claim to be a woman, or I will never claim to look like a woman because I don’t like saying I look like anything, I look like Natasha, because I think womanhood is such a varied descriptor. There are so many people who are women who look so different. Some women do have beards, some women don’t shave, some women do shave, some women are small, some women are big and, so like I will never claim to be a woman, but I do draw inspiration from femininity and from my personal divine feminine. I am a little pagan-ish. I don’t really claim that identity, because I don’t practice, but I personally find a lot of solace and a lot of comfort in talking to Apollo and so I live in the sun, my Natasha side is Artemis so she lives in the moon, she’s a defender, she does not have sex, she’s not sexual, but she does a lot of empowering things. I never pick songs about having sex with people, I never pick songs that would objectify me in anyway. Anytime I do burlesque I am powerful and I may be nude, but it’s not in a sexual way. Which is kind of a weird line to tow. But it’s something that works for me and something that… I want to portray confidence as Natasha because I want to inspire femininity to be as confident as they possibly can because I think that our patriarchal society really limits female-identifying people’s confidence and that they shouldn’t be confident or says that they should feel strong or amazing so I want to portray a character that does. I think that answers, I don’t really remember the question that I was answering. SS: No, that was amazing. So, you’re kind of touching on something that seems like a point of contention in the world of drag right now. It seems to me like there are some people who define drag as female impersonation. NN: Yes. SS: Right, sort of narrowly. How would you define it? NN: I have a lot of issues with that. I think everyone’s drag is valid and I think everyone who does drag--it is their art. But also, I do have issues with the idea of female impersonation drag. Primarily because in pageants, which is, drag pageants are typically where the term female impersonator is used, at least in the drag community. They have a very specific set idea of what you of what you should be impersonating. And that’s the big hair, the cinched waist, the big boobs, big hips, perfect gown, perfect makeup, nails, all the time and I--I don’t know what type of femininity they are impersonating, but it’s not femininity that I see every day. They are definitely some women who are like that but saying that you as… and they’re typically trans-exclusionary so they’re not allowing transwomen to compete. Or if they are, they are still calling them female impersonators when they actually live as a female every day Nightly 6 of their life. So they are not really impersonating anything. And I just have an issue with the idea that a group of cis guys are saying what femininity is and what the best type of female impersonation is. I do recognize that drag is character work and you are designing a character around what you think femininity is, but I also know that a lot of drag queens don’t have a degree in gender studies and don’t have the awareness that I’ve been kind of like drilled in. But there are plenty of people in Asheville’s community who are aware of what they are doing and are aware that drag is, at its core, a form of activism and a form of oh god, what, I’m not thinking of the word right now, but it’s a very like fringe art form and it can be used for political activism and it’s controversial in the fact that we are typically crossing gender boundaries. That makes a lot of people uncomfortable if they’re not really exposed to it… so. SS: Can you talk more about how you use or and interpret drag as activism? NN: Yes, I like I said I want Natasha to be confidence. I want her to inspire change. I want her to inspire safe spaces. I am very vocal about a lot of different issues that I hold very near and dear to my heart. Like advocating safe space. Consent, talking about health education, specifically when it comes to sexual health in the queer community. My personal view is I have a stage that people will pay to see me on, so I should be using it, not just to make money, but to make a difference. I have a microphone typically, I have people’s attention and I am a 6-and-a-half-foot tall glitter bearded creature. And typically people remember what you say. So, at the Odditorium, I am given a like five to seven minute introduction to the show, so Pricilla Chambers will actually introduce the show and like this is Party FOUL, this is what we do, this is why we’re here, please welcome Natasha. So I’ll get up and we’ve talked about, I’ve talked at the audience about consent, my drag mom’s mantra was “Consents not just sexy it’s mother fucking mandatory.” So we’ve talked about consent and what that looks like and why it’s important. We’ve talked about my mantra is “I hate straight people” and we talked about why I say that and what that means. SS: What? NN: So, it’s kind of a joke. When I say that usually there are 5 or 6 straight people that are really offended and then I follow up by saying “don’t be offended, it’s not you, it’s just your life style choice that I don’t appreciate.” But it’s also to kind of call out the fact that I do drag not for the cis straight heteronormative community. I do it for queers. I do it for people who are oppressed. I don’t do it for the oppressors. I had been performing at the Papermill in Sylva for a little while and that was a bar full of straight people for the most part. In Asheville we are actually kind of lucky in the fact that we have pretty large queer community that supports drag. I had never in my life encountered the stereotype memes of straight girls coming up to drag queens asking them to do their makeup like right now. Or just really personal just awful questions. It was just shocking to me. So that’s where that came from. It’s a big joke, I don’t actually hate straight people, but it’s also like if you’ve gone 27, 23, 21 years without being like “Why would she hate me just because I exist?” than you’re doing really, really well. You know like there are people, I had to find out when I was in second grade, I didn’t even know what sexuality was, that there were people out there that hated people, actually hated people enough to beat them up just because of who they were attracted to. So it’s kind of my little up yours. You managed to make it this long without someone saying I hate you because you exist - good for you. You’re doing pretty well on the privilege spectrum. It’s [a little] petty, but you know. SS: It’s a good message. Nightly 7 NN: But also, if you are a drag queen you are a very visual representation of the community. Because of that, I feel, not a lot of people feel this way, but you have a lot of pressure, and you shoulder a lot of responsibility because of the fact that you may not want to, but you speak for a section of the community. And I feel like if we can recognize that and use that especially when now drag is becoming such a main stream thing we can make a lot more change, we can do a lot more. I was part of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence for about a year, and they do a lot of advocacy work around health and they raise a lot of money for people in the area. I had an issue with the Beer City Sisters, not the organization as a whole, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, but the Beer City Sisters. It was a lot of petty drama that came from a conversation I had with one of my fellow drag queens who is the drag mother of an individual who is also a Sister whose Big Sister doesn’t like me, if that makes any sense. So in the Sisters we have mentors, there are Big Sisters and Little Sisters. And this performer, I had said that she performs very… in a very misogynistic way, she presents women as gutter trash, sluts, whatever, which she’s new, typically new drag queens go to that because it’s easy. So I had said to her drag mom, it’s not a big deal, I understand it makes you uncomfortable, it makes me uncomfortable too, but hopefully she’ll grow. That was the conversation. It ended up getting blown out of whack. I’ve consistently tried to talk to the Sisters about trans-inclusionary language. Doing more than just performing drag shows. Use different venues as benefits, and then leaving because we’re not really doing a lot for the community besides raising money. And then I was told that I would be elevated to Fully Professed, and then it was taken away from me for the fact that they questioned my dedication because I didn’t go to events that they held at a bar that I’ve been assaulted in and I didn’t feel comfortable going there. So just a lot of really messed up stuff that happened behind closed doors that, I’ve told them that I’m talking about because there are issues that I tried to fix from the inside, but now I’m a community member and they are actually ministering to me and we can expect more from our advocates. We can expect more from the people who are ministering to us and who are helping or say they are helping us. So I’m actually, because of this whole debacle of fleeing the Sisters and starting a new group in Asheville of queer community leaders and people who can help us. We’re calling it The Pride. And I just got our logo back and it’s a beautiful rainbow lion and so we are starting out by doing educational events. I want everyone involved, all the, specifically right now, drag queens are involved in it. I want those of us who can make it, Tranzmission, who also I’m interning with, it’s a trans-identified persons research center in Asheville, is doing a cis ally of trans people workshop and how to be a better ally and I want us to go to that. There is Our Voice which is a rape crisis center in Asheville. They do ally training for friends and family of victims of sexual assault and I want us to go to that. I’m working with Brandon Romstadt who works in the Health and Human Services Department who is part of the queer community. He’s putting together a power point presentation/community driven effort on reducing STDs and STIs in Asheville MSM population. So we’re getting together all of the, a lot of the bar owners in Asheville that have queer events a lot of the queer show directors and lots of people in the community to get together and be like, hey syphilis rose by 151% in Asheville specifically in the MSM population, maybe we should do, which is Men Sleeping with Men, maybe we should do something about this, and so we’re starting that. Eventually I want to put together a list of spaces, like bars and places that have been to preventative clinics on, or workshops, on how to prevent date rape--chemical-induced date rape--which is a real problem in Asheville. They have them consistently like every three months and only two bars in Asheville go to. Right that’s terrifying. And I think those two bars are actually owned by the same Nightly 8 person. And there’s also Tranzmission does queer safe space training for nightlife for bars. And again, only two or three bars ever go to that. So I want to make that public. I want to make the bars that are actually providing Safe Space training and going to these things, I want to make that public and put together some little sticker they can put in their window and be like we recognize this as a safe space. So that’s where I am right now. That’s what I want to do and Natasha is heading that up because she has a fan base and people listen to her, and she’s a very visible person to be the head of that, so. That’s a little drawn out, but that’s what I’m doing advocacy wise in Asheville in drag. SS: That’s amazing. You’ve talked about Natasha and a little bit about Lane. How do you see those two identities fitting together in terms of socializing or going out, or even social media? NN: So I do have two separate Facebook accounts for Natasha and for Lane. Natasha doesn’t get much use because I don’t like Facebook. But so, Lane is my every day. I work, I get angry at injustices, I go to meetings, I try and talk about things, I try and educated people. But I found that while people will listen to me one on one, they don’t pay to come see me. So Natasha is a little bit more extra. She’s not quite as polite as Lane, mostly because she’s uncomfortable a lot of the time. Drag is not a very comfortable thing. So she gets to be a little short with people and she’s kind of the… she’s… Lane is pretty confident, Natasha is more so. So she will go up and talk to people as soon as she sees them, she will introduce herself, give a business card, she will do these things. Whereas I will typically wait for people to come to me. And I will network and everything, but I will definitely kind of sit back a little bit more than Natasha will. She and I both really like attention and to perform. Her venues, the venues she performs in lend themselves to a little bit more gawking and awe inspiring just by sitting and having a drink. Which gets both of our egos up I’m not going to lie. But they are the same, we are the same person. Natasha is just a more amped-up version of myself. I am known in Asheville as having a bit of a short temper when it comes to people touching me inappropriately or people saying inappropriate things. And that is very true, especially as Natasha because I’ve gotten quite a few people thrown out of places for grabbing drag queens or other people without consent, or while hurting them. Lane would do the same thing, just Natasha gets it done faster because she is 6-and-a-half feet tall. And everyone is looking at her already. So we are the same person, Natasha is just a 99 whereas Lane is a 97. SS: As a point of education, what sorts of things, maybe not specifics if you’re not comfortable sharing, but what sorts of things are not really great to say that get said? NN: Faggot. I do not tolerate that word anywhere. I will call you out on it. It’s a little bit different when queer identified people are using it because there is a bit of people--there is a movement of people reclaiming that word. I know Pricilla Chambers uses it all the damn time. And a lot of my really hard core anti-establishment queer friends are very very much into reclaiming that word. But if you are a straight identified persona and are using that word there will be consequences. Anything that is trans-misogynistic or transphobic in general. Misgendering people I will snap to correct. Basically being a decent person is really what I expect from people and a lot of times people are just not… they don’t think when they are drunk, or when they are drinking and out with friends. And so if they are having a conversation with me and they say something, I don’t even know specifics, but anything that could negate someone’s identity or lend itself to rape culture or anything that could cause a place or an individual not to feel safe somewhere--I don’t tolerate. SS: Thank you. What makes you happy day-to-day as a member of the drag community? Nightly 9 NN: Oh god. When people finally put aside their differences and actually work together. Drag Ball was this past weekend, there were 13 professional drag queens that I had to wrangle in and put together a show. That is a lot of personalities. Because drag personalities anyway are extra, they are so big and so loud and having them all together… there are some drag queens that don’t like each other, there are some drag queens that want to scream at each other all the time. But the fact that we all came together and put on a damn good show for a whole bunch of really amazing kids… people, they really aren’t much younger than me, was amazing. That was some of these people’s first drag show. There were a whole bunch of freshman there this year and they had never seen a live drag show before and this was their first experience. Because some of them aren’t even 18 yet, they can’t get into Scandals. So that was… seeing that is amazing. Seeing queens come together at Pride is beautiful. Seeing, getting to work with, I call them my coworkers because we are technically all in the same business we just work at different places. I get really excited when I see them doing things for the betterment of the community. That makes me really happy. Also glitter, glitter makes me happy. [laugh] SS: Do you feel like you encounter any struggles as a member of the drag community? NN: Yes, yes, very much so. Primarily when I started out specifically I think. I was trying to fit into like typical southern pageant drag which is very female-impersonator based, and I didn’t fit in at all. I didn’t wear pads, I had a beard, I didn’t give a shit what my makeup looked like, but I knew I could dance, and I knew that I could do it better than everybody else. And so I was trying pageants, I was trying to fit myself in, but I wasn’t willing to change. I encountered a lot of lashback because of the fact that I was not trying to conform--but I was. Even now. I won last month’s talent show at Scandals, or two months ago was the talent show they had. And one of the queens, the queen who directed it, who is a wonderful person, she’s very classic drag, told me that if I was trying to get on the main floor of scandals I’d have to lose the beard. And that’s not my main goal, I’m not trying to get in anywhere, because I don’t see any one bar as the epitome of drag in Asheville. So, you know, I told her, I was like that is not the end goal, but thank you, I appreciate that. Cause she said you could do it if you lost the beard. And it’s not her choice, she fully supports my drag, but the owner of Scandals doesn’t like bearded drag. It’s such a weird thing to be contentious about, but it causes a lot of issues. The fact that I don’t wear a lot of rhinestone costumes and a lot of like, fringe also bothers some people. I buy a lot of my stuff at the mall because it fits and I can. And that makes some people not so happy. But those are mostly the only critiques I have now because I have realized I don’t fit in, but I’m good at what I do and people respect me for the fact that I don’t try anymore, I don’t try to fit in, I just kind of make my own space. So that is mainly, the beard is the thing. I did a Miss Sweetheart pageant last year, and my only critique from all five judges, why the beard, the beard kind of threw us off. Not the fact that my costume disintegrated during my talent, or the fact that I didn’t know any of my words, or the fact that my dress was literally held together by fishing line. It was cutting into my shoulders so much it almost bled, or the fact that I had actual rocks glued onto my dress. None of that—none of that was brought up. It was just about my beard. That’s mainly the most. SS: When was that, how long ago? NN: Last year. SS: Yeah. Nightly 10 NN: So it would have been Miss Sweetheart 2017 because Ida, who won when I was there, stepped down this year in 2018. SS: I was going to ask you if you feel like acceptance of bearded drag, or non-padded drag or femme queens has been changing here or nationally and…? NN: I don’t know about nationally, I can’t really speak for nationally, I know there is, they are putting together a Miss Bearded Queen pageant, so it’s specifically a drag pageant for bearded queens. And more bearded queens are coming into popularity. I know there are at least five of us in the state now. Which doesn’t sound like a big deal considering the fact that there are probably over 300 drag queens in North Carolina alone. Or maybe not, 300 that’s probably overexaggerating. But there are a lot more drag queens than there are bearded drag queens. And to see that, I’ve met some of them. I met Jack Dahlia who is from Charlotte. There is another one from Charlotte that I met recently, but I don’t remember her name, she’s gonna hate me. But there are a lot more of us now coming into existence as more famous bearded drag queens become more famous. Helvetica is one out of New York, I love her stuff, oh my god. She’s also a beautiful man. Lilith Night is, I don’t know if she’s a performing drag queen but she’s a Facebook personality, snarky as all get out. But Jody Foster Child. There is Missy Cocaine, I think, or Missy Cocoa Caine. There are a lot more of them, I follow a lot of them on Instagram. I almost don’t follow any non-bearded drag queens. And I know Kingdom in Asheville has been promoting femme queens like femme performers, and drag kings which is something everyone needs to do. SS: And that’s at Scandals? NN: Yeah, actually Freddy is performing this Saturday at Scandals. So yeah, I think that as drag has become more mainstream and more people has found their niche of drag, our niches are expanding and so there are more people finding them. So it may not be more accepted, but it is more tolerated. I think that is probably the best way to put it. SS: In the drag community or in the general population? NN: Drag community. SS: What about the general population? NN: General population I have yet to encounter someone who told me I would look better without my beard. It’s mostly drag queens who tell me that. But your normal everyday-to-day performance goer has definitely been all about the beard. They are confused by it I really think. Because from here down, I present as a very, like, attractive shape and once you get to the fact that I have a hairy chest and no boobs and a beard people get a little confused about why they’re attracted and I think that’s kind of the draw to it. I’ve had more straight men hit on me as Natasha than I ever thought I would. Didn’t make any sense to me. I’m obviously not female-identifying, but you do you. SS: Is there anything else you’d like to share that I haven’t asked about? NN: Not particularly, I think we’ve talked about a lot. I’ve really enjoyed this. SS: Yeah, me too. We didn’t talk about your ballet background at all. NN: Oh yeah, I do ballet with Asheville Ballet, I’m actually putting together a pointe piece for a freak show that I’m actually in. Grand Maw who is one of my favorite drag performers in Asheville. She broke Nightly 11 from Party FOUL, which is where I also perform and created her own show with the Grand Maw Freak Show and I am… it’s kind of like a circus. So I’ll be probably the most traditional performer there. Which is saying something. And I will--my debut will be a pointe ballet piece. So I dance every day. I dance professionally every day. I’ve actually been back up dancers for drag queens in national pageants and everything, which has been so much fun. But I definitely, that contributed to my ability to perform. I can confidently say that I’m known as one of the best dancers in Asheville if not the best dancing drag queen in Asheville, with the style of dance I do. Alexis Black does clogging… SS: I didn’t know that. NN: Yeah, it’s fucking amazing. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen her do it, but it is absolutely stunning. She did it for Sweetheart actually this past time. She had an entire clogging team. It was so cool. I don’t pretend that I can clog, but I do know that I have a very good understanding of how my body moves through space because of ballet, because of dance. I have a minor in it. I’m going for a master’s dance and a PhD in dance studies, though--that’s the end goal. SS: Alright, well thank you so much. NN: No problem.

Lane Wagner, stage name Natasha Noir Nightly, is interviewed by Sarah Steiner as a part of the Gender and Sexuality Oral History project. Wagner, who identifies as a pansexual, cisgender male, is a bearded drag queen and part of the drag family House Acrylic. Wagner lives in Asheville and has performed as Nightly at local venues such as O.Henry’s, Ole Shakey’s, The Odditorium, Scandals, The Paper Mill Lounge and Theatre, and UNC-Asheville’s Drag Ball. Nightly was crowned Mx Blue Ridge Pride in 2018. The interview covers House Acrylic, the dynamics of drag families, drag as a form of activism, and thoughts on outlying forms of drag. Nightly uses drag as a platform to advocate for safe spaces, consent, and health education. Off stage, Wagner works with community members such as Tranzmission and the Health and Human Services Department to address these same issues. Wagner dances professionally for the Asheville Ballet. Includes additional photographs of Lane Wagner in and out of drag.

• Creator
  • Nightly, Natasha
• Contributor
  • Steiner, Sarah
• Format
  • Sound recordings
  • Transcripts
  • Photographs
  • Interviews
• Type
  • Sound
  • Text
  • StillImage
• Date
  • Date interview: 2018-04-25
  • Date: 2000s (Decade); 2010s;
  • Date digitized: 2018-11-07
• Extent
  • Duration: 0:54:09 (sound recordings)
  • Duration: 11 pages (transcript)
• Subject - Topic
  • Autobiography
  • Ballet dancers
  • Cisgender people
  • Coming out (Sexual orientation)
  • Drag community
  • Drag families
  • Drag shows
  • Gay men -- Family relationships
  • Gender identity
  • LGBTQ+ communities -- North Carolina, Western
  • Performances (creative events)
  • Political activists
  • Wagner, Lane, 1994- -- Interviews
  • Wagner, Lane, 1994- -- Photographs
• Location
  • Buncombe County (N.C.)
  • Asheville (N.C.)
  • North Carolina, Western
• Source institution
  • Western Carolina University
• Source Collection
  • WCU Gender and Sexuality Oral History Project
• Identifier
  • HL_GSOH_Steiner_Nightly_2018_04_25
• Repository
  • Western Carolina University Hunter Library