Bringing It Out

“Hey Boo!” Danni says when she answers my call – “how are you?” she asks, like she genuinely wants to know. She’s in the car, leaving her day job as a chiropractic assistant and heading to Lore, where she’ll get on stage and become the drag queen Danni Dabaddest for the night. It’s the first time we’ve spoken to each other, yet somehow I find myself gushing as if we’d been friends for years— that’s the effect she has on people. Her grounded, open energy washes over you and invites you in, even across a phone call.

 The more I chat with Danni, the more I learn that this confidence and enthusiasm she has for expressing herself and connecting with other people wasn’t a born disposition, but a developed attitude— one that grew over years of discovering who she was as both an individual and a performer. Throughout the trials and efforts in her life, Danni turned to performance as a navigation tool, finding joy, identity, and community through it. Without performance, she said, “I don’t know what I would have done.” 

Growing up, Danni was a shy kid with stage fright. Talking to her now, I could hardly imagine this, but she recounts struggling with social skills in middle school, saying “a lot of kids didn’t like me, because I was gay, or, at the time, realizing who I was.” As a way to make friends, she leaned into comedy, making people laugh and becoming the “class clown.” “Making people laugh is like feeding people,” Danni says, “it’s a way of bringing everybody together.” At home, she also loved singing and secretly wanted to be an entertainer, inspired by her all-time idol Demi Lovato– but she was still shy, and would only ever let her mom listen to or watch her. 

In high school, Danni decided to join chorus and theatre as a way to face her fears. She remembers her first solo, and feeling like her “heart was about to burst out of her chest,” but that there was something in the uncomfortableness of being up on stage that “felt right.” Over time, she grew more confident, saying that performing “always made me feel like I could do whatever I needed to do.” During that time, she came out to her family and friends. Performance continued to be an outlet. “Performance was an escape, it wasn’t just Danni, it was something bigger…My body was being used to make people happy, or make people feel something, and that made me feel good… Singing and dancing were things I could go to and always feel safe doing.”

After graduation, Danni and her mom moved to Michigan, the Covid pandemic started, and Danni found herself missing the joy and community of theatre and performing. In lockdown, she binge-watched RuPaul’s Drag Race— she tells me then that she always knew about drag, but that watching that show was the first time she’d ever given it so much time and attention. The more she watched, the more she saw herself in the queens like Tatianna and Jiggy Caliente. Alongside resonating with them, she also was inspired by them. Recounting a sort of ah-ha moment, Danni told me, “Jiggy Caliente was a dancing queen, and I was like, ‘Well, I’m a big girl, and I like to dance!’... So when I saw Jiggy Caliente doing the splits, that was so inspiring, because that’s not something you get to see all the time… That sort of put it into perspective for me, and I thought, ‘I could do this.’”

As lockdown loosened, Danni began exploring drag by going to local shows. At the same time, she also began experimenting with her own personal look: growing out and dying her hair, buying women’s clothes, and wearing makeup. She tells me that she had thoughts about being trans, but figured she was “just a femme boy” and that drag makeup and costume would be a sufficient outlet. But drag makeup felt different, she said, like she was “putting something on.” In her everyday makeup, she felt confident as herself. It was that distinction of feeling that made her realize, “you know what, I am trans.”  

After she moved back to Atlanta, her drag style began to develop as she found herself becoming part of the drag community that had her “best interest at heart…supporting [her] and wanting [her] to win.” The community, she says, is so pivotal, and “without each other we would be nothing,” crediting her drag sisters as the reason she’s kept with drag and gotten better. I asked about the impact of drag shows being competitions, curious as to how it could inspire such camaraderie at the same time. Danni said that, really, “we’re not in competition with each other, we’re in competition with ourselves.” Danni said that in the drag community, the minute you focus on someone else is the minute you lose your performance. Trying your best for yourself is the real challenge and effort. And with the way she speaks so confidently and kindly as the proof, I understand: Drag is not about putting something on and showing off— it’s about bringing something out of you, and allowing it to be seen. 

In the end, Danni says that she’s come to understand herself better from drag because “you do things you would never do outside of your real life…and then you improve in your real life because you can try those different things.” She admits that she’s taken her signature drag style– contour and ponytails– outside of itself and now sports those looks in everyday life. She exclaims that she thinks everyone should try drag, that we all have a “little bit of queen” in ourselves. Drag, she says, is an experience where you “overcome your own body– you’re not yourself anymore, you’re a different person– you can be anybody in drag!” And maybe, I think, by being anyone, you can also learn who you are.