BETHLEHEM, PA - Tonight, she’s Krymson Scholar. But more than a decade ago, she was a boy and his name Spencer Zachary Sanders.
“I pretty much knew I was different right away, ‘cuz I have two older sisters...and the earliest time I can remember was one Halloween they dressed me up as a doll,” she explains, “So they put a wig on me, a dress and I felt comfortable. I didn’t feel like I was wearing a costume at that point in time.”
Born August 10th, 1993 in Amory Mississippi, now 25-year-old Spencer is Aubrey Fioranelli. She lives in Philadelphia and performs as a drag queen across Pennsylvania and as far as New York City. Aubrey was just fifteen years old when she began transitioning into a female. Growing up in rural Mississippi, she was surrounded by devout religious people who told her being different wasn’t okay and her very identity was an abomination. “One day I was walking and he started chasing me almost down my driveway. So, that in itself was creepy. But he like a was a preacher to the church that was next to our house,” Aubrey explains, “and I’m like you’re a Christian and the Bible says thou shalt not judge. How do you judge people? You should treat other people the way you want to be treated and for a preacher whose supposed to read the bible, should know that.”
As a child, Aubrey’s says her mother would have been more understanding of having a gay son than a transgender child. After revealing that he was in fact a she, Aubrey told her mother, if she couldn’t become her true self, her mother wouldn’t have a child for much longer. It wasn’t until she was older, that Aubrey left the south, stopped taking illegal female hormones and began transitioning safely from male, to female. “I mean, I’d kill myself if I couldn’t be the person who I am instead of the person she wanted me to be,” Aubrey tells PBS39, “I couldn’t live anymore. That is selfish to say at the same time, I was going to do whatever it took to become who I am today.”
And while drag culture has become more mainstream and accepted, even embraced, in many parts of the world today, it still is a battle for people like Aubrey, transgender women who are fighting for acceptance and their own place on stage. “There are trans girls who do drag that have a hard time because people don’t accept them. Well, honey, sorry ‘bout it. We’re here.”
What was once thought to be just gay men dressing as women to be free in their identity, became a performance, an art, and today, for everyone an expression of gender and identity.
“It’s a very complex issue because as gender is a very complex issue. For a lot of individuals, the majority of individuals who identify as drag queens also identify as gay men. And so it’s not typical for individuals to identify as trans women and drag queens,” explains Dr. Nicole Johnson, “When you think about the trans identity, it kind of goes with that narrative. It’s about pushing against this idea that just because I was assigned this at birth, that must be who I am or that I can’t play with my gender or be flexible in gender and that there’s something wrong with that.”
Dr. Nicole Johnson is an assistant professor of counseling psychology at Lehigh University. Her research has brought her to examine sexuality, gender differences and sexual violence. She says for many trans queens, drag has given them an outlet to safety express their identity; before they could communicate otherwise who they are and what they are feeling. “There’s some individuals who identify, maybe because they don’t have support or there’s stigma around trans identity, as a gay man, but really the identity of being a drag queen is their true identity,” she explains, “and so it’s a way for them to express themselves before either the ability to come out as their true identity as a woman or possibly as an outlet for that identity.”
So PBS39 went to Town & Country Lanes in Bethlehem Pennsylvania where Krymson Scholar performed this weekend fellow drag queens. But unlike some of her co-stars, Krymson is a woman. And for some, that doesn’t mean she’s doing drag anymore. That mindset can create a feeling of exclusion that for many within the LGBTQ community can be life threatening.
“When we say okay, we will accept trans people, but you can’t do this, then there’s thirty people waiting for you go where here’s the doorway to get in and hurt this person; this is how you do it, we just gave you the ammunition,” says transgender Drag King Lee Hill, “We have to stop.”
Ultimately, drag culture is historically centered around the role of transgender women in the gay community. The first drag queens were men searching for a way to safely express their gender identity. Some queens say it’s that fact that has allowed drag to evolve. For queens of all gender identities, that acceptance has enabled what’s called drag families to foster. Thomas Schneider, also known as drag queen Eileen O’Brennan says, “We all work together so that at the end of the day, everything is met. Everybody has a purpose and a function, and a job and we all know what our strengths are and our weaknesses are and we all help each other out.”
Eileen O’Brennan and Bryce Culver are Krymson’s Drag parents. Culver is what’s known as a Drag King. Born female, Laura Leanne Hill never wanted to be referred to as a ‘she.’ Today, he lives as Lee Hill and performs as Bryce Culver and says after being molested throughout childhood and abandoned by his father, drag has given him an outlet to create the father-figure he lost as a child and become the man that was always inside. Hill tells PBS39, “I had an uncle, his name was Newbie, he was gay. Everybody wanted to hide it when I was a kid, but he would always talk to me. Every time he’d come to see me, I’d see him once every two years, and he’d come in to town and one day he took me to New Orleans with him. And while we were there he said I’ve got something to show you, I said okay. So, he went to his room and he comes out and he’s just this marvelous woman. And he was like, ‘I’m a little different too…’ because I refused to wear girls’ clothes, I refused to be called Laura, I wanted to be called Lee and he understood. He was the only person who did.
For those whose blood relatives have rejected them, their chosen, drag family can give them some things that they’re biological family cannot give, or refuses to. “...love, understanding, a place to vent, a place to where I can basically cry on their shoulder and then not have them look at me any other way. Basically, they treat me like a human being and that’s all we ever ask for in life is to be treated like human beings.”
For Krymson Scholar and her drag family, gender identity may be at the root of performance, but to them, they cake on the makeup, step into stilettos and lip-sync the house down for a variety of reasons.For the young girl that was Laura Leanne Hill, drag was”...an expression of love, of talent, of energy, of acceptance, a form of communication.”
For Thomas Sneider, drag is “...a source of income, a way of life. There is not a day that I’m not looking ahead to what I have coming.”
And for Aubrey Fiornaelli, drag will always be “...beautiful, gorgeous, being you but exaggerated you, not just for trans people, not just for gay people. You are a drag queen ma’am! Whether you like it or not ma’am, you are a drag queen and you are fierce!”
Going Drag
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Trans Drag Queen, Krymson Scholar, performs in Bethlehem.
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