Sasha Velour recalls how her iconic rose petal lip-sync paid tribute to her late mom

Q38:34Iconic drag queen Sasha Velour on her new book

Whether you're familiar with the art of drag or not, it feels like anyone can benefit from reading Sasha Velour's new book, The Big Reveal: An Illustrated Manifesto of Drag, which chronicles the history of the artform interwoven with Velour's own personal story.

In a conversation about the book with Q's Tom Power, the drag queen reflected on her iconic lip-sync to Whitney Houston's So Emotional, which won her the crown on RuPaul's Drag Race Season 9 in 2017.

"I was determined to put together a story with the performance because that's what I always do when I perform in drag," she said. "And I wanted it to be about my mom a little bit."

Velour's signature bald look is her way of honouring her late mother, who lost her hair during cancer treatment. Not long after Velour first started performing in drag, her mom was diagnosed, which led them to bonding over their thoughts on gender and beauty.

"It was just this moment of connection where she was really vulnerable and I was kind of going through a vulnerable time as well," she said.

"[My mom] was very, very glamorous to me. Even though she had never been one for makeup, never styled her hair or wore high heels, something about her experience of femininity was really inspiring to me. And the fact that she felt she lost her access to beauty as someone going through cancer, just by losing her hair, was devastating."

Velour said bald drag queens like Kevin Aviance and Ongina showed her that there was real beauty in baldness, which her mom seemed to struggle to see in herself.

"To be beautiful and feminine and bald was possible in this queer world in a way that my mom didn't get to experience in the real life," she told Power. "People would look at her like there was something wrong. So to get to kind of reinterpret my mom's look … and have people say it's beautiful in this world means so much to me, because I feel like I'm advocating for her."

WATCH | Sasha Velour's interview with Tom Power:

The famous rose petal reveal

In her winning lip-sync against Season 9 RuPaul's Drag Race finalist Shea Couleé, Velour wore a red dress and a red wig — something that was uncharacteristic for her as a bald queen.

At the song's climax, she pulled off her wig to reveal a flurry of rose petals that cascaded down from her head. The moment was so iconic it was parodied in a skit on Saturday Night Live years later. 

"[My mom] had always really idolized red hair, even though everyone in my family has brown hair," Velour said with a laugh.

"So I put together this beautiful red wig and this kind of conservative dress. And I thought this is a story about someone who is trying to manage their emotions but — as the lyrics suggest — they just get almost out of hand, and the chaos that they cause is beautiful, as well as a little too much. So I thought this metaphor of the rose, a classic symbol of love, becomes something beyond a flower and becomes an explosion."

The move was a risk that ultimately paid off.

"I wasn't sure if it would even work, to be honest, because I hadn't practiced it in makeup or with a sweaty head — I was worried I was going to be sweaty and it was going to stick to my head," said Velour. "And I gave the whole performance just staring at RuPaul because she meant so much to me and I wanted to show her how much I can do on stage. So my goal was to get her to react and to smile and to feel some joy. And when I took the wig off, she got shocked."

The full interview with Sasha Velour is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. She shares more stories from her new book and how she hopes it might help combat hate from anti-drag backlash. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Sasha Velour produced by Kaitlyn Swan.