Overview

On December 17, 2023, we talked for four hours with our favorite drag artivists in our new city of Charlotte, North Carolina: Oso Chanel, Nova Stella, Lolita Chanel, and Onya Nerves. These artists create drag that breaks the mold, enlarging the space for queerness, for all of us. In the South, that has the power to transform culture--a power sadly evidenced by the death threats and protests they face. Amid the rise of drag bans and anti-queer legislation and attacks, performing drag is activism. But these four performers also advocate for immigrants, HIV care, body positivity, POC performers, and performers who live with disabilities. They create small-town Pride celebrations and fight drag bans at city council meetings, urge their audiences to vote, and organize boycotts against racist bars. In this interview, they discuss the issues they're focused on as leaders in the queer community and the power of drag to create social change. Listening to them talk about facing down death threats and protests, on top of drag bans and anti-queer and trans bills, and the unique power of drag in the South, which they describe as being about survival and the creation of queer history, felt like a revolution in our living room. In the wake of great danger, these artivists continue to make and change history. We've recorded their voices in this book because we believe that they are vital to our queer history and our collective movement forward.

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"""I get to live myself freely and not care that there are moments where I don't appear to be one gender or the other. I am my own experience."" - Lolita Chanel ""If little Nova the underdog Miss Periwinkle from back in Tennessee can be congratulated by these drag icons on successes, then what can you all do? The opportunities and possibilities are endless."" - Nova Stella ""There are so many different ways to define what being queer is, and I think through our art form, and individually, we all bring so many different things that we're recording. That way, two, three generations down the road, they won't have to deal with the things that we're dealing with. We'll be able to be a small part of that change"" - Oso Chanel ""I created a catch-all of misfits. The island of lost drag toys. I treated it like bargaining power in the union of Charlotte drag. It allowed us to move into new spaces that weren't typical drag spaces."" - Onya Nerves"

Author Information

"Where are you from and what's your last name? In India, your response reveals your religion and caste. Niteesh's answer was complicated. His experience of mixedness began at home with his Catholic mother from the coastal Portuguese state of Goa and his Protestant father from the Hindi heartland of Madhya Pradhesh. He grew up Catholic, a religion that comprises only 1.5 percent of India's population, in bustling Mumbai. Catholics were the minority even in his missionary-run Catholic high school. Growing up in Mumbai, he spoke English at home and Marathi and Bambiya Hindi with friends and people in his community. He celebrated Christmas, Diwali, Holi, and Eid. He and his friends spent summers playing cricket in the maidans (ball fields). Cricket is the one religion that unifies India, even in its current divisive era. Still, Niteesh remembers walking home from a cricket game with a school friend who said, ""I'd invite you over if you were from my religion/caste.""Niteesh enjoys seeking meaning and cultivating creativity at the intersection of diverse cultures and domains. Though trained in computer science, he followed his passion for human-centered design. He's conducted ethnographic studies in rural Indian villages and American manufacturing plants and designed business models and products for healthcare, safety, energy efficiency, and other markets. In his directorial role at Honeywell, he coaches managers about how biases get in our way and how empathetic listening can connect us more deeply to both customers and employees. A visual artist, he enjoys combining watercolor and digital design to create stunning book covers. With almost two decades spent at the intersection of visual design, enterprise, and human-centered innovation, Niteesh is currently interested in how innovative business models can help creativity to thrive in the artistic world. Through Freedom Tunnel Press, he hopes to help bring a diversity of stories to readers and give writers the freedom to explore their identity (or not) in ways that feel authentic to the stories that they want to tell. Brooke grew up part Garza, part Shaffner on the Texas-Mexico border. Her Garza grandfather was an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who harvested citrus fruit before putting himself through school to become a pharmacist. Her Shaffner grandfather was raised Mennonite and the first in his family to attend college. She grew up singing Christmas carols with her hilarious tias leading synchronized hand jives and cheering at drag pageants in her town's only gay bar. Her novel Country of Under is a book that straddles borders, bringing together drag queens, nuns, activists, artists, and healers. Country of Under won The 1729 Book Prize in Prose, judged by Diane Zinna, and is forthcoming from Mason Jar Press in April 2024. The novel was also the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction runner-up and was shortlisted for Dzanc Books' Prize for Fiction and Black Lawrence Press's Big Moose Prize. An excerpt won the Asheville Writers' Workshop Fiction Contest. Brooke is currently working on a memoir that explores living and loving in the face of radical uncertainty through the experiences of her father becoming a quadriplegic when she was a child, living with the chronic illness primary sclerosing cholangitis, and losing a love to cancer. An excerpt won the 2023 Lit/South Award, judged by Melissa Febos, and appeared in Litmosphere. Other work has been published in The Hudson Review, Lost and Found: Stories from New York, The Lit Pub, Marie Claire, and BOMB. Brooke has been awarded artist grants from United States Artists and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, the Saltonstall Foundation, the Edward Albee Foundation, the Jentel Foundation, the I-Park Foundation, and VCCA. She received her MFA from Columbia University, where she was a Dean's Fellow, and won the Charles Lloyd Writing Award at Davidson College. Read more at BrookeShaffner.com. Brooke is the Founder/Director of Between the Lines, which offers writing, editing, tutoring, and workshops. She's worked with Rio Grande Valley students on admissions and scholarship essays for 13 years. These students' stories keep her connected to the border. She received her MFA from Columbia University, where she was a Dean's Fellow. Her writing has been published in The Hudson Review, Lost and Found: Stories from New York, The Lit Pub, Marie Claire Magazine, and BOMB. She has been awarded artist grants from United States Artists and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, the Saltonstall Foundation, the Edward Albee Foundation, the Jentel Foundation, the I-Park Foundation, and VCCA France."

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