Describe Ivy Winters.

Creative. Innovative. Circus. Drag queen [laughs]. Put it all together.





What was your first exposure to drag culture?

I was at my grandparents’ house. I was flipping through the channels and To Wong Foo came on. That was the first time I saw drag queens and the first time I saw RuPaul.





How would you describe New York’s drag scene?

It’s like a buffet – you have everything. You have campy, you have pretty. You’ve got pageant queens, beauty queens. You have a lot of circuit, club kid performers. I mean, I consider those drag queens as well. They may not look like females, but they’re pretty much walking art sculptures and for me, that’s drag. So you get a bit of everything.





To a lot of people who don’t understand what drag is, they tend to automatically assume that drag queens or kings are synonymous with transgenders. Have you ever been put into a situation where you had to explain the difference to someone?

Years ago, I think a lot more people didn’t know what a drag queen really was or what they wanted to do with their lives as far as having a sex change or why they did it. When I told my parents I started doing drag, honestly, they were a little bit uncomfortable with it. But I told them that I [had] worked as a clown for eight and a half years and I put on makeup and a costume to entertain people. It’s not a sexual thing – it’s fun and entertainment. And they completely got it. They came to a show of mine and they loved it. They completely support me now. People just need to understand what it is – we’re just entertainers.





Some of the queens on the show opened up about how getting involved with drag, or even just coming out as gay, had created a rift with their families. What was your family’s reaction when you first told them you wanted to do drag?

I came out really young, freshman year of high school. And I was super nervous. I told my mom and it was super late. I had a juggling club in my hand as a comfort blanket. Which is strange [laughs]. But I told her, and she cried. She wasn’t upset that I was gay. She was upset by the thought of how hard it was going to be for me to go through high school and through life, period, with ridicule and people making fun and not accepting me for me. After that talk, they supported me 100 percent. My sister came out a year later, and my older brother a year after that. So both my siblings are gay and we have a very supportive family. We’re all very different.