About eighteen months ago, I heard Sasha Velour on a Vulture podcast interview, and I was so struck by her ideas that I immediately added The Big Reveal to my audiobook library (long before I even made time to listen). The delay turned out to be worthwhile: The Big Reveal: An Illustrated Manifesto of Drag is not simply a memoir — it’s a richly layered exploration of drag’s history, theory, and the personal journey of one of its most lucid voices.
Velour traces drag’s roots across time and cultures, from shamans’ rituals to ballroom houses, and frames drag as a poetic force of resistance and reinvention. She interleaves her own journey — a child who experimented with gender expression, the drag artist she became, and the challenges she has faced — with scholarly research, archival finds, and vibrant illustration. She dissects the definition of “drag,” considers its colonial and transgressive contours, and asks: What does it mean to perform gender? How has drag historically been censored, embraced, or co-opted?
She resolves that if she made a quilt of drag, it would include pieces from "a stretched hide from a shaman’s tent, silk from Gladys Bentley's tuxedo, sequins from Divine’s wiggle dress, hair from RuPaul’s wig. Each of us is just a small fragment of a larger picture, whether we admit it or not.”
And the core revelation: “Sasha Velour was made like a quilt … it took community to finish me up, weave me together, see me as whole, and push me out into the world.”
Velour’s view of drag is expansive: inclusive, messy, and always part of a larger conversation about queerness and art. Her prose is incisive without being academic, accessible without flattening complexity.
BookTrib calls it “a quilt, piecing together memoir, history, and theory into a living portrait of an artist and an art.” The L.A. Review of Books notes its timeliness in a moment of rising political attacks on drag culture.
As a parent of a trans woman, the book enriched my understanding — not by preaching, but by opening new frames of reference through historical depth and personal honesty. After I listened, I bought a copy for my daughter immediately.
My verdict: The Big Reveal is worth your time — part manifesto, part archive, part love letter — and, for anyone wondering how drag fits into queer history, it functions as a kind of essential textbook.
Sources:
https://www.vulture.com/2023/04/sasha-velour-on-drag-bans-rupauls-drag-race-predictions.html
https://booktrib.com/2023/04/06/the-big-reveal-sasha-velour/
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/among-the-rose-petals-queer-possibility-on-sasha-velours-the-big-reveal/
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