The Big Reveal: An Illustrated Manifesto of Drag

In this showstopping debut, Velour, creator of the Brooklyn drag revue NightGowns and winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race season nine, interweaves her autobiography with the cultural history of drag. Placing her own achievements within the context of the gay rights movement and breakthroughs by previous drag artists, Velour recounts how the Stonewall riots and the emergence of queer theory and grassroots LGBTQ community movements in the 1980s and ’90s influenced the creation of NightGowns and her zine Velour. Elsewhere, memories of lip-syncing to Whitney Houston’s “So Emotional” on RuPaul’s Drag Race lead to a study of gender-inclusive theater in China and Japan, and profiles of 1920s drag aerialist Barbette, who “flew into the air like an ‘angel, a flower, a bird’ (as Jean Cocteau put it), draped in white ostrich with a platinum finger wave”; José Sarria, winner of San Francisco’s “first big drag pageant”; and Josephine Baker. Velour seamlessly mixes rigorous scholarship with inspirational aphorisms (“Beautiful relationships don’t need to last forever to make deep shifts in your life”) and heartfelt anecdotes about finding community and navigating the pitfalls of mainstream success, while enriching the narrative with copious photographs and illustrations. This is a rousing tribute to a revolutionary art form and its practitioners. (Apr.)