First, a word from the king himself…
The self-proclaimed “transsexual rockstar of Cleveland”— The Twisted Transitioner (he/they) is a captivating drag king/thing and rock-n-roll runway powerhouse, performing with experience in dance, theatrics, and burlesque and taking influence from nu-metal and rock music and culture. Twisted is based in Cleveland, Ohio, but has performed across the state & beyond. Twisted was voted 3rd place for Cleveland Scene’s Best Drag King 2024 and has also performed successfully in multiple local drag competitions across northeast Ohio.
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Lucia Z. Liner: Where did the name Twisted Transitioner come from? Where did it all begin for your persona?
Twisted Transitioner: So I started drag kind of on a whim. I was a junior in college and my school was doing a drag show for students, and they had called in some guests - Robin Fierce (RuPaul’s Drag Race season 15 contestant) was the big one - and to pad out the show, they were like “do any students want to perform in drag?” And I was like, “Yeah, why not?” I had been doing some amateur burlesque lip-sync stuff at my school for a while, and I was like “I’ll try my hand at drag.” I knew very little about it, I hadn’t really watched Drag Race, I only really knew about it from what burlesque stuff I was doing.
Then I got the Google Form and they were like “what is your drag name and what song are you performing?” And I was like “Crap, I don’t know and I need to figure this out quickly.” I had very recently gotten very into listening to Korn, so I was like “a lot of drag names are punny, some of them are dirty, but some of them sound like the name of a person.” What I knew about my persona is that I didn’t want it to go in a binary gender direction. I didn’t have a persona fleshed out at that point, so I needed something that was a blank slate. So I took the song that I wanted to perform and parody it and make it into my drag name. At that show, I performed “Twisted Transistor” by Korn, and my drag schtick is that I’m a trans person doing drag, and doing very genderfuck-y drag, so I switched “Transistor” into “Transitioner” and the drag name was born.
LZL: I don’t quite remember how I first heard about you, but when I did find you on Instagram some time ago, I saw the name and had to be like “wait a minute, let me read that again.”
TT: It is always fun when, after I perform, people are like, “Ohhhh!” Something clicks, something in their heads.
LZL: What happened after that first show at your college? What made you want to go further beyond just a one-off.
TT: That show was really fun, I did it with my close friends, some of whom are still doing drag-related things. I made $7, which is really funny. I’m originally from Texas, I moved to Ohio to go to school. That summer between junior and senior year, I stayed on-campus to do a summer internship. I was super bored, I needed something to do other than my internship, and one of my advisors who is a professor in the sociology department and the women's studies departments had written a book about gay bars. He said, “Hey, I know the board of people who are putting together Lorain County Pride and the venue they use for the drag show is our school's music venue. If you want, I saw you perform at Drag Ball, I can give you the email of the contact person so you can see if you could perform.”
So I cold emailed them, told them that I was new to drag but had been performing for a long time. I was like “you don't have to pay me, I would do a number for funsies, because I really liked doing this thing a few months ago.” They were like “absolutely,” they put in touch with the queen that was putting stuff together. They had a drag show one night, then the next day they had an outdoor festival with drag shows happening intermittently throughout the day. I put together numbers and a costume. Any time I wasn't doing things for my internship, I was practicing in the dance room in the gym, I was rhinestoning this sailor jacket that I still have. I was super into it.
Pride weekend comes around and I have the time of my life. They did pay me, which was extremely generous. I get to meet some local performers who were all really nice, I got to perform with Riley Poppyseed, who is an incredible drag king.
LZL: I love Riley.
TT: He's the best. People were coming up to me and being like “you're really good at this! This is your first big event in drag?” I'm like “Yeah, this is my big debut, I cold emailed to get here.” They're like “you need to keep doing this” and it all snowballed from there. I hopped into this open stage in Cleveland and won, then I applied to be on an eight-week competition that's hosted in Kent. I ended up placing fourth and did another competition after that.
I have a very 110% personality, so when I get into something and I have people encouraging me and telling me I'm good at it, and I feel like I'm doing a good job and having fun, I just give it everything. It was a very fast process of just jumping fully into the pool and doing drag stuff all the time.
LZL: The first time you came onto my radar was with Kingpin.
TT: Yeah, that was about a year ago now, which is crazy. I did that on the heels of finishing Zephyr, which was the first competition I did. Those are some of the best memories that I've made so far in drag to this point, that competition was amazing.
LZL: To that end… there's of course Drag Race, Dragula, Camp Wannakiki, all of those. There's been this growth of and desire for more king representation. How do you see, if there would be, say, a king equivalent to RuPaul's Drag Race, playing out? Should there be some equivalent?
TT: I think there are a lot of interesting points being made. Should king drag just go on Drag Race? Should king drag get its own thing? The strongest points in either corner as far as kings on Drag Race are that it would be an unprecedented platform. We have had kings on Dragula and Camp Wannakiki, and they perform really well. But people that only watch Drag Race or only familiar with drag because of Drag Race… there's a whole two-thirds of the drag world that they're missing by only watching Drag Race. They're only seeing a little bitty piece, because Drag Race has its own issues with representation of not just kings but of everybody, and I feel like what's nice about the smaller competitions is that you get a wider scope. So it would be an unprecedented platform, but the judges on Drag Race get judged enough for how they judge queens.
(Author’s Note: This interview took place before the announcement of Revry’s upcoming drag king competition series King of Drag, to be hosted by Murray Hill. I’m not saying we spoke things into existence but I’m also not saying we didn’t.)
There's also the argument that it's RuPaul's Drag Race. It's not America's Drag Race, it's not Twitter's Drag Race, it's not People Who Go To Drag Shows’ Drag Race. At the end of the day, the entire competition is set around the perspective and opinions of one very famous and very rich drag queen. Most kings I know are like “even if Drag Race did become an available platform for us to go on, I don't know that I wanna go on it and get judged.” I know that if I was a queen, my stuff wouldn't necessarily fly on Drag Race, so there's that too. In a perfect world, we'd get a drag king show and it becomes as big as Drag Race, but that will never happen because of misogyny.
I'll continue to dream, but I feel like a lot of very specific historical moments had to happen exactly the way they did for Drag Race to become as popular as it did, and I'm not sure that could happen again.
LZL: You mentioned your style not flying on Drag Race. So what was it about nu metal that made you want to build your brand and identity around it?
TT: To me, at least, and to a lot of people, drag is the art of performing gender and the multitudes of gender, and the ways in which gender is bullshit a lot of the time. A lot of rock and metal music, specifically nu metal, was very interesting, and I found myself being like “I want to lip synch to these songs, I have fun concepts I can do to these songs,” because so much of the identity of what nu metal is, at least that classic “what you think of when you think of nu metal,” misogynistic and pushes this idea of masculinity that is absurd. A lot of songs and lyrics mess with themes of sex and gender roles in interesting ways. And a lot of rock and metal music is inspired by experiences of being and feeling like an outcast, being bullied, being seen as lesser by society. Even though it maybe isn't, people can look at it and be like “that's a queer genre,” and that's what it has been to me.
Part of drag is making a recognizable brand quickly. That's how you get to do cool shows and get bookings. So to come out and do songs that people like but haven't been performed in drag is a fun and exciting thing. It opens the door for people who haven't seen Drag Race, who have this misconception that people only do lip synchs to pop music or whatever. And that can't be more patently false, you can lip synch to whatever the hell you want. So that's been a fun part of it for me, pushing the genre misconceptions about drag, because I think there’s a lot of untapped potential in nu metal as far as a genre that we think about doing things with gender and sex, which is the whole point of drag.
LZL: What would you say is the draggiest nu metal song out there?
TT: Drag has subgenres of performance. For example, there are dancing queens who are high-energy with flips and tricks and stuff. So for me, that's like doing System of a Down. I have a number to “Violent Pornography” that is very fun and also very sexual in a way that a lot of high-energy drag performances can be. There is ballad drag, they call it the “park and bark,” where you stand in the center of the stage and lip synch a song with perfectly articulated lip-synching ability. And there are plenty of fun nu metal ballads; there's a whole laundry list of Staind songs I want to do one day, but you have to just stand there and pretend you're singing your heart out, or slowly walking elegantly while grabbing people's money.
Then there's also funny, goofy, jokey drag. I'm not huge on making mixes, splicing together clips from a movie or a famous Vine or viral video, but the potential there is limitless for goofy things with different nu metal songs. There's a great show that happens in Boston at Jacques’ Cabaret that Throb Zombie (Dragula season 5 contestant) is in called System of a Drag. And the clips I've seen from those shows are crazy, you can do all kinds of things with it.
LZL: Yeah, going through System of a Down's catalog, there are a lot of songs that could be batshit insane performances, and that makes me smile in ways I cannot articulate.
TT: One rare time I did a mix, I did “Toxicity” mixed with a metal cover of “Toxic” by Britney Spears, and that was very fun.
LZL: I gotta know, which cover was it?
TT: I had to dig for it, cuz there are a lot. It was A Static Lullaby's version.
LZL: Thinking of bands like Mushroomhead and Mudvayne, is there a connection between pageantry and Midwestern angst?
TT: Oh yeah. Part of the fun of drag and of nu metal, or really any kind of performance, is getting to feel like the center of attention and platforming. Expelling this energy that you have, whether it be angst or otherwise. I think drag specifically takes that queer angst, feeling traditionally looked over and misunderstood, and it generates creative energy that you can then take that pent up rage and do something. The longer you do drag, the more the line blurs between yourself and the persona you put on stage.
People aren't afraid to get really personal with it, especially as time goes on. Even when I'm in full drag, my makeup is a full transformation. My face looks completely different, and it's inspired by corpse paint anyways, but I have this personal side to it. Even if you go up on stage wearing a mask or a costume, your performance is going to be grounded in who you are under that, as is your persona.
LZL: I have to know about the testosterone gel runway from the Kingpin finale.
TT: That outfit is one of my favorite things I've ever done. The thing about competitions, and the reason I did two of them back-to-back, is that they light a fire under my ass. They push me creatively and I work well under time limits, so I love that heat and pressure on me. The gown itself came from the runway prompt. We had a main event of the competition, which was to highlight and strengthen aspects of drag king performance. So we had one week where we all made mixes and performed them, we had a lip sync battle. Then there were also runways, because how you look and the costumes in drag are important.
For the finale of the competition, the main event was a talent show, and the runway prompt was “anything but suits.” When they're punching down at drag kings, they're like “I'm not gonna book a drag king, they all dress the same, they all wear suits and that's not interesting.” Lies and slander. A lot of us took it in the direction of “finale extravaganza,” and we all went balls to the wall with it. Not only did none of us wear suits, we all did something intricate and completely different from one another. It was like “show us the best of what you can do that's also creative.” I don't know how long I'd had the idea in my head, but I'd been drawn to making campy outfits out of objects. Ive been drawn to costumes that did that. For Zephyr, I did a costume that transformed me into a fortune-telling machine. I wanted to do something that plays with gender, something that is elegant and fancy and makes me feel gorgeous and like a million bucks. And I was also coming up on my six months on testosterone, and my whole brand is that I am unabashedly trans.
So I thought “you know what would be hilarious? If I transformed my body into a testosterone pump, since that's how I do the gel.” A lot of folks do the gel, but it's not as represented as the injections. I did not sew a gown from scratch, if I could have I would have. I picked a gown I really liked, bought a hat and some gloves and a capelet to imitate the curved shape of the bottle. That's why I picked a mermaid-y kinda gown that poofs out at the bottom to imitate the shape of the bottle. The cap is a boxy kinda thing with a pump on it and I rhinestoned the hell out of it. I painted a label that I sewed onto the gown that looked like a blown-up image of the label. I made a piece of the hat out of cardboard. I was up until 7am the morning of the finale finishing that dress. After I was done, I fell asleep until noon, then got up and got ready to go. All-nighters are bad, I don't like to do them, but I was like “I don't wanna sleep until this is done,” and I was proud of the finished product. It read really well, the judges really liked it, the audience was gagged. I'm so terrible at secrets and I wanted to keep it under wraps as long as I could so that everyone was like “Oh my god, he's a bottle of T!”
LZL: On the Instagram post with that gown, you asked folks to comment what ballad you should do in it. What ballad did you end up doing?
TT: I don't wear it often cuz it's a pain in the ass, but both times it was for special occasions. The first time, I did a show for my dear friend Marquis Gaylord at Dunlap in Cleveland. He put together an all-trans cast for a show for Pride and I did “Creep” by Radiohead in it. Then a week and a half ago, we did a benefit for TransOhio at No Class in Cleveland and I did “This is the Day” by The The. Neither of them are nu metal but I thought “Creep” would be fun. And the song for the benefit had a serendipitous meaning for me.
LZL: I mean, “Creep” is nu metal-adjacent, it's in the neighborhood.
TT: Yeah, fair enough.
LZL: What is your take on modern nu metal? We just saw Linkin Park come back, we're seeing legacy acts reunite like Nonpoint and Creed, System of a Down just announced some shows.
TT: I think twenty years later, maybe we've become more self-aware? A lot of the reason these bands are coming back is that there's a new wave of people interested in them thanks to TikTok and social media. A lot of random songs have blown up on there, like you’ll be scrolling through and be like “was that Deftones?” Then the kids are singing Deftones and you're like “this is crazy.”
What’s also interesting about the newer generation of fans of this music is that we're not afraid to call out misogyny. We're not afraid to call out if the singers are shitty people. There are more discussions of the moral and ethical dilemmas of “do we separate the art from the artists?” than we did twenty years ago. We're also seeing a lot more exciting representation with more women and queer people in the genre. We're realizing that those things were there the whole time and these are things that excite me. It's kind of sad because like, we had this specific image of what the genre looked like, and now some random 14 year old on TikTok is listening to this music, now what do I do with this? But it's a whole new world of possibility.
LZL: What’s your take on the reformed and reunited Linkin Park?
TT: I’ve been… this is gonna sound rough, but I’ve been like, “do I listen to this or do I just listen to their first three albums on repeat?” It doesn’t help that people’s opinions have been either that they love it or they hate it, and I don’t listen to the radio much anymore. I’m in my own little bubble on Spotify, listening to my own little songs every month. I need to bury that and listen to the new album, but I think I’m in a stage of denial because Linkin Park was the first band of the genre that I was familiar with and listened to, as an angsty 11 year old. That and Flyleaf, because I grew up Christian. I need to cope and maybe get out of the denial hole and give it a listen.
LZL: On January 26th, you have the show Divorced Drag Rock at No Class. What are you trying to accomplish with that show?
TT: Over my year and a half or so of doing drag, I feel like I’ve been dipping my toe into performing a lot of this genre that people would now call “divorced dad rock,” the fun slang term that’s come up in the last few years. I’ve been into it in and out of drag and curating a playlist of trashy and good and just trashy songs. I’ve had friends come up to me after shows and be like “I’ve never seen someone do that song in drag before!”
I’ve had this idea in the back of my mind where, if I could host and cast a show under any theme, this is what it would be. It’s a fun thing to shit on, but people genuinely like this music and it’s nostalgic for them, plus there’s a lot that falls under the umbrella that people would listen to. And there’s a lot that is iconic in the genre that is underrepresented in drag, and has such good potential in drag, serious, jokey, and otherwise. I half-produced a show at No Class before, I did a birthday show there in February, so I reached out to Emma, the owner, and asked her, and I said “there is no other place that I could see this show happening.” She responded with “this sounds like a hoot, sign us up.”
So I assembled a crack team of some of my favorite fellow drag artists who represent a wide variety of what drag is and what drag can be, and gave them the prompt: divorced drag rock, perform it. I’ve been getting whisperings of what songs some folks are gonna do and I’m pleased. I’m still nailing down what song I wanna do, but I’m cooking. I think it’s gonna be a very fun event.
LZL: And you’ve only been doing drag for a couple of years?
TT: My start date was around June of 2023, so this was my first full calendar year of doing drag. I jumped in the pool real fast, jumped into the deep end.
LZL: Where do you want to go from here? What is next for The Twisted Transitioner? How twisted are we gonna get?
TT: The answer is “extremely!” My drag New Year’s resolutions are… I wanna design merch for myself. Whether people will buy it, I don’t care, but I’ve wanted to make stickers for myself. This past year, I’ve gotten to do big shows with really cool people. Traveling is fun and the idea of traveling for drag – I mean, this is technically a hobby for me, but also kind of a side hustle, but I dunno how much of a side hustle it can be when I’m turning around and spending the money that I make on it on more of, not to mention going and watching it as an audience member. It’s a hobby that pays for itself… barely.
There are some things that I’m applying for next year. There’s a big drag king showcase in Seattle called the Emerald King’s Ball and I really wanna do that. There’s also, it recently happened, the Austin International Drag Festival. I applied this year and didn’t get it, but I want to apply again. I want to do drag in my home state cuz I think that would be cunty. I want to get on a plane and go do some drag.
One of these days, I would like to be a widely-beloved drag king, but the fear factor kind of stuff… I mean, the most natural path is to get really good at crafting and making costumes and audition for Dragula, but I’m not good at the fear factor kinda shit. I couldn’t imagine putting a maggot in my mouth or bungee jumping, so until I feel like I’m good enough to get into the final four without being in the bottom… and also with Camp Wannakiki, the main two aspects of it are 1) you’re nice and fun to be around and 2) you’re funny. I’m nice and fun to be around. How funny I am and how funny my drag is is… not much. A lot of Ohio kings have gone on that show and done pretty well. But today, Cleveland, Ohio, tomorrow, the world! Social media is so fun, and I love pretending that I’m a microniche gay celebrity on there.
LZL: Well, with TikTok, these days, who isn’t a microniche gay celebrity?
TT: See, you’re feeling my microniche gay celebrity fantasy right now!
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You can find The Twisted Transitioner on Instagram and Linktree.
