“I was going to say Harvard has a lot of potential for drag, but I’m not sure that’s true. I don’t think it has potential as much as it has enthusiasm, and I hope that that keeps growing. We’ll see what happens,” they said.
—Staff writer Natalie J. Gale can be reached at natalie.gale@thecrimson.com.
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Trevor W. Ladner ’20, Miss Annie Thang
When Trevor W. Ladner ’20 stepped into Visitas Drag Night 2016, it was not an introduction but rather, as he put it, an “affirmation.” For Ladner, known for his popular drag persona Miss Annie Thang, the journey to drag began long before setting foot on campus. More specifically, the journey began back home in Southern Mississippi—in the closet.
“It literally was in my closet,” Ladner said, “I have a desk in my closet at home, so I literally would spend time getting into drag in my closet in my room for like a year or so without my family knowing.” A community theater production of the musical “West Side Story” provided the introduction Ladner needed when his friend in the show, who was also a drag queen, brought him a pair of fake silicone breasts to rehearsal. “I went home, I had a bunch of makeup already because I had been doing theater for so long and so I put on the makeup haphazardly and felt incredible,” Ladner said. “It was a really liberating experience.”
For a while Ladner practiced drag in his closet, sending packages with supplies to friends’ houses to hide his art from his parents before finally deciding to tell them. “I grew up in rural Mississippi and it was something very new to them,” he said. Ladner’s mother was very understanding, he said, but explaining drag to his father took more work. “My dad was an evangelical pastor, so drag was not something that he was accepting of,” he said. “It took a lot of conversation and growth for us to get to a place where he supports me.”
“I essentially became a professional drag queen,” Ladner said. He began performing in local bars, making drag his source of income during high school. The ability to perform drag was very important to him during his college search. “I saw that there was going to be a drag show at Visitas and it sort of was my affirmation that this was where I needed to go,” Ladner said. Just a year later, Ladner himself was up on the same stage performing as Miss Annie Thang for the pre-frosh of the class of 2021. Then, as a member of the Queer Students Association Board, Ladner planned both IvyQ Drag Night in Nov. 2016 and Visitas Drag Night April 2017.
Each performance requires hours of preparation. Ladner needs time to do makeup, shave, exfoliate, glue eyebrows, get pads on, get into costume, paint his nails, and more. “Usually I devote the whole day to really focus on drag,” he said.
Ladner’s favorite number so far has been a Hillary Clinton themed performance he did of “Bug A Boo” by Destiny’s Child during the 2016 election. “I really played up the emails bit,” Ladner said. “It was interesting because performing in a queer space in South Mississippi there are equally as many progressive people as there are conservatives and everyone enjoyed the performance because everyone could relate to it.”
Ladner said it’s important for him to incorporate politics and advocacy into his drag. “Recently I helped raise tens of thousands of dollars to build the first LGBTQ center that will have been built on the Mississippi Gulf Coast,” Ladner said. “Annie likes to do all of those things.”
Additionally, Ladner wants to make sure everyone remembers to tip their local drag queens. “If you want to continue seeing their art and enjoying that entertainment, they have to be able to support themselves,” he said. “So definitely support and tip your local drag queens.”
—Staff writer Allison J. Scharmann can be reached at allison.scharmann@thecrimson.com.