HEWISON: It was cool to photograph you on Skype. Last time we met you were Milk, but you are Dan today.

DONIGAN: I am Dan right now, yes. My better half, I guess I would say.

HEWISON: Milk is a New York queen. What’s the New York scene like?

DONIGAN: It’s a big city, but yet it’s a small city. There are lots of different genres. Uptown is more glitzy, glamorous. Brooklyn is very trash queen, cheap and artsy, with a lot of feeling. I’m downtown, so it’s more a mixture of trash and glamour.

HEWISON: And who is your drag family?

DONIGAN: The Suzanne Bartsch crowd of downtown New York. She represents a sort of “downtown club kid,” a sort of ode to the past drag world.

HEWISON: So is Milk a back-to-the-future queen?

DONIGAN: Flashback to the future! I like to take a lot of things from the past and bring them out again.

HEWISON: Is that nostalgia?

DONIGAN: Having seen pictures and movies about ’90s fashion and ’90s club kids, I sort of wish I was around during that time. It just seems like it was a whole another world back then. It was all about nightlife. I think nowadays, people realize that you need other things in your life besides nightlife. You can’t always depend on putting on a costume and going out at night in order to live. But it is nostalgia for James St. James and Michael Alig and Leigh Bowery, bringing all their creativity into the light again.

HEWISON: So what do you think the future holds for drag?

DONIGAN: I think it’s only going to grow. I hope to be a part of it. I think every queen has to take it upon themselves to make it grow, to push boundaries and set the path for the future of drag—and fashion, and art, and all of that…

HEWISON: And who is Milk?

DONIGAN: Milk is a wonderful creation that came about… [pauses] I was a figure skater, and I stopped skating, and so I needed some sort of creative outlet. Milk sort of took that role. My mom was an expert Bedazzler. She could sequin, she could rhinestone anything.

HEWISON: When was the first time in your life that you really took pleasure out of making something?

DONIGAN: I always wanted to be a shepherd in the Christmas pageant at my church. The shepherd was my dream. And my grandmother, who lived next door to us in Syracuse, New York, she and I made shepherd costumes out of pillowcases with dishrags and headbands. I don’t know what it was about a shepherd—to lead things, I guess.

HEWISON: If you couldn’t do drag for some reason, what would you do?

DONIGAN: Die! [laughs] I don’t know; maybe I would start painting.