Dallas’ Asia O’Hara takes her talents to TV with the premiere of RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 10 on March 22
Asia O’Hara has been a big name in the drag community, especially here in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. Now the rest of the world will have the chance to see why when Asia competes on RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 10.
The show premieres Thursday, March 22, at 7 p.m. CDT, on VH1, and Asia took some time out of her hectic schedule to answer a few questions for Dallas Voice, and help her fans get ready for the show.
Dallas Voice: You have your own business designing costumes and dresses. How did you get started in that? What other jobs have you had/do you have? Asia O’Hara: I used to teach high school color guard and would always design the costumes for my teams. I gradually started designing for other teams, and then I started designing my own drag costumes. Then, all at once, the person that made my costumes for drag moved away, and I took a job working at a costume manufacturing company. I felt that that was the perfect time to sit down and actually teach myself to sew. Before long, I left that job and opened my own business, called Helen of Seven, doing costumes for other performance artists all over the country.
In addition to all of that, I have also worked in insurance underwriting, restaurants, cosmetics, textiles and sales, and I have even worked at a wax museum!
How long have you been doing drag, and how did you get started? What are the titles you have won? This March marks 15 years that I have been making a fool of myself onstage! I am not exactly sure how I fell into drag. I always thought that it was interesting, but didn’t have a huge interest in it until I saw my first pageant. When I realized there were these “drag queen competitions,” I was hooked. Since that day, I have been crowned All-American Goddess, Miss Gay USofA and Miss Gay America, to name a few.
Tell me about the O’Hara family. How was it born? I see several other performers in DFW using the name O’Hara, although some spell it with a lower-case h — O’hara. Are you all part of the same family or are there different O’Hara clans? My drag name comes from a local Texas legend named Sweet Savage from San Antonio. She doesn’t actually have a last name, but her husband’s last name was O’Hara. So, when she started having drag children, they took that last name. I officially got the name from Sweet Savage’s granddaughter and my drag mother, Josephine O’Hara. Yes, I am related to some other entertainers, such as Phi Phi O’Hara [who was on Drag Race Season 4 and All Stars 2], but not to others such as Eureka [who was on Season 9 and is returning for Season 10]. It all gets a little confusing, even for me.
Tell about working at The Rose Room. That’s your home bar, right? Are you a cast member or a regular guest or ….? What advantage do you have as an entertainer — and on Drag Race — when you have a “home bar”? Yes, The Rose Room is my home bar. I have been employed there since 2005 and have been a full-time cast member since 2009. The biggest advantage to having a home bar, especially one like the Rose Room, is that you have exactly that: a sense of “home.” You have people to argue with, to love and to hug, to cry with; people that miss you and randomly show up at your house when you disappear to film a television show!
The support has been vital to the growth of my career. I have recently heard one of my fellow Season 10 castmates saying how heartbroken she is that she doesn’t have the support of a home bar. It just reminds me how lucky I am to have The Rose Room.
What made you decide to audition for Drag Race? The leading killer of art is complacency. It was time for me to push myself to a new level and to get down and dirty again in the world of drag. I am always trying to find and push my limits in drag, and the end goal is always a moving target for me.
Was it harder/easier than you thought it would be? What was the biggest surprise? It was a lot harder than you can ever imagine! You have to forget everything you thought you knew about drag and approach everything with an open mind. The biggest surprise for me was finding strengths I didn’t know I had, and finding weakness that I had trained myself to forget.
Dallas is known for its outstanding drag queens, in terms of lip syncing and dancing, etc. We are home to LOTS of pageants and pageant winners. But a lot of the challenges in Drag Race aren’t centered around dancing/lip syncing. Do you think that makes the show a bigger challenge for the “pageant queens”? Absolutely. The thing about pageants is, they are like a test. You can study and prepare for them. You know exactly what will be expected and exactly what you will be graded on. Drag Race is the exact opposite. There is no true way to fully prepare for it because you never know what they are going to throw at you.
And, just when you think you have studied enough, you realize the test is on chemistry and not on physics.