![]() “I still was not out at this point,” Alexus says. She soon entered her first drag performance in the small Pennsylvania coal town of Weishample. “I was just having a day!”Īlexus hit high school and upped her Halloween game. “I had no idea that it was drag or gay,” she says. With Cyndi Lauper and the Pointer Sisters blasting, she would wrap herself in knitted blankets to lip-sync and dance for her family. Among them:ĭaniels’ first memory is of her great-grandmother’s jewelry box. The Associated Press followed the Daniels family for more than a year. “And drag now can be a place or a thing to show people like you that you don’t have to go to the cities. “There was a curse being a queer person in a rural town - the curse is that we’ll move … because there’s no one like us here, there’s no one that can understand us. “I never had a person like me growing up,” Trixy said, “and now I get to be that for everyone else. Soon that seaman, Petty Officer 1st Class Joshua Kelley, who just reenlisted, moves from a base in Norfolk, Virginia, to one in Spain, with plans to pack a wig “and maybe one or two cute outfits but nothing over the top” for Harpy-style shore leave.Īpart from the twins, the drag performers in this circle are family by choice, not genes. Navy sailor who’s had three deployments on the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan. Jacob Kelley, who performs as drag queen Trixy Valentine, is an LGBTQ+ activist and educator with a master’s in human sexuality. A bill was introduced in the state Senate aimed at banning drag shows in public places, but it remains stalled in a committee with little prospect of advancing.Īlexus Daniels, the matriarch, was the child of a coal miner and a textile worker who was “born with a female spirit.” She works at the local hospital as an MRI aide tech. So far, no bans have surfaced that curb the Daniels family’s performances. Their trouble is more apt to come from politicians who are increasingly passing laws restricting what they can do. Yet the Daniels drag family is firmly woven in the fabric of the larger community in this area, where voters went solidly for Donald Trump, a Republican, in the last election. ![]() Not plain, not simple, but also bedrock, rising above ground only in culturally adventurous cities. The other, back to before Shakespearian times, is drag, a loud, proud and seismically flamboyant artistic expression of gender fluidity. ![]() One tradition is the view of family as mom, dad and kids, plain and simple. ![]() Here two very old traditions mingle - and mostly happily, it seems, in contrast to the fierce political winds ripping at drag performances and the broader rights of LGBTQ+ people in red states from Utah and Texas to Tennessee and Florida. In a string of towns running along a coal seam, the sparkle of small-town drag queens and kings colors a way of life rooted in soot, family and a conservative understanding of the world. Or they’re reading in gardens to children dressed in their Sunday best - Dolly Parton’s “Coat of Many Colors” is a favorite book for performers and kids alike. Or they’re lighting up local blue-collar bars and restaurants with Mimosas & Heels Drag Brunches for bridal parties, members of the military, families and friends. They’re hosting sold-out bingo fundraisers at the Nescopeck Township Volunteer Fire Co.’s social hall, packed with people of all ages howling with laughter and singing along. (AP) - Deep in Pennsylvania coal country, the Daniels drag family is up to some sort of exuberance almost every weekend. ![]()
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