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The Pride Union drag show preliminaries were the first time Austin Rose showcased their Disney villain-inspired drag live. But Rose had been performing drag since their freshman year, posting their performances on TikTok.

Rose already had an interest in drag, but when they started their freshman year in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic they found themselves stuck at home. After finally getting everything together to perform in full drag for the first time, they turned to the app.

“I put myself in drag for the first time and I had nowhere to go with it,” Rose said. “I was just in my house and so I put myself in drag and I filmed a TikTok and thought nothing of it.”

His videos would end up going viral. One video currently has over a million views and over 300,000 likes. Following the popularity of the video, he continued to post videos of their drag persona Vera Kewl doing parodies, covers and more open verse challenges. They have amassed a large following on TikTok with over 50,000 followers.

Rose performed at the 21st annual Pride Union Drag show on March 23 in the Schine Student Center Underground. The event was hosted by RuPaul’s Drag Race star The Vixen and welcomed all student drag performers of varying experience.

Before drag, Rose had always taken inspiration from their sister, playing the same sports and starting theater. Rose’s sister was important in helping them choose their drag name — while his sister preferred more pageant-like names, Rose enjoyed names that had a play on words. The two compromised with Vera Kewl, a mix of both styles.

“I wanted my sister’s approval because I love my sister and we’re very close,” Rose said. “I liked the names that were really funny, like the pun names like……Liz Ard. But my sister liked all the names that were pretty like Alexis Diamond…. something pageanty and gorgeous. So we found somewhere in between with Vera Kewl.”

Rose knew he wanted to participate in the drag show after seeing the finals being advertised last year on South Campus. While they were too late to participate last year, they made sure they didn’t miss their opportunity this year. They even auditioned for fewer shows at Syracuse Stage in order to have more time to participate in the competition and focus on more film-based projects.

Rose is an acting major, but also makes music. Rose said they think their voice adds a lot to their drag persona. The deepness of their voice adds to their comedic routines while still showing off more of their musical talent, which they said helped frame their drag persona. Vera Kewl draws from the eccentricity of the Disney villains Rose grew up with, and their deep voice helps highlight an overdramatic evil villain persona.

“In drag, my voice being a lower voice is like my biggest asset because it’s a fun juxtaposition to the look that I create to have this deep, powerful voice,” Rose said

As an acting major, Rose gets a lot of experience playing around with characters, but what he loves about drag is the way that he gets to put aspects of himself into the character. Rose said they enjoy going over the top with their transformation. While in their day-to-day life they embody more of a pop-punk aesthetic, in their drag they try to have a more high-feminine look that draws mainly from characters like Ursula and Maleficent, they said.

“I would say that the importance of drag, what it embodies, is the idea of transformation,” Rose said. “You are a person becoming either someone else or a heightened version of yourself. Some inner part about yourself is then highlighted and shown to other people. That’s really what gravitates other people to watch that, to enjoy it as a form of entertainment.”

The preliminaries were the first time Alice Meyer, Rose’s friend and a musical theater major at SU, saw Rose perform in drag. While Meyer had followed Rose’s rise to popularity on TikTok, she said she really enjoyed watching the live product and seeing it all come together in person.

“Austin is really funny and I think that comes through in their mixes and the songs that they choose to do,” Meyer said. “For the preliminaries they did “Funky Town” and it was this mixture of what’s become the typical drag performance that you would see on drag race and then also these sort of comedic fits. I think their drag is a little bit of everything, but it goes through the filter of who Austin is.”

Meyer said she has admired all the work and planning that Rose has put into creating this fully fleshed-out drag persona. She has watched them put in the work, from going on thrift shop trips to using their musical knowledge to mix songs and include comedic aspects in their performance.

Austin Rose performed as their drag persona, Vera Kewl for the first time on March 23 in the Underground of the Schine Student Center.
Megan Jonas | Contributing Photographer

Freshman Kaitlyn Kushner was at the preliminaries and loved all the different aspects Rose brought to the show.

“I really liked Vera Kewl’s performance,” Kushner said. “I think that they did a great job of engaging and energizing the crowd throughout the song. I also think their name was very fitting because Vera Kewl’s performance was definitely one of the coolest of the night.”

Beyond the ability to finally present his drag to a live audience, Rose also said they value Pride Union’s show for the safety aspect. While their parents have always been supportive of them, they were still concerned about their safety when walking in unfamiliar places in full drag.

Having a drag show that is so accessible and in a space that he is familiar with eases some of the safety concerns he and his parents had, Rose said. Rose appreciates how the show gives performers of all kinds the chance to get their foot in the drag world door.

“Walking around in full drag is scary,” Rose said. “Walking around in public and full drag, I get really nervous. Even walking around campus in drag or in anything that resembles drag I always have to make sure I’m with my friends or with anyone, just to walk over to a performance venue and that was the one thing my parents were concerned about.”

Having friends like Meyer with them at the show helped them have that feeling of safety while also giving them a support base within the audience. Meyer said that she loved being there to support Rose, but also because they could see aspects of their work within their major shine through their performance.

“They’re (Rose) really good at telling a story and creating a character,” Meyer said. “I think in their first preliminary performance you could tell exactly who Vera was, what each, specific, weird little moment was that they created. It’s a lot of the stuff that we work on, in our major, sort of manifesting through in this really cool way.”

Rose enjoyed watching Disney films when they were younger and was especially intrigued by the villains that always had a glamorous feel to them. As they grew up and researched the origins of Disney villains more, they were interested to find out how many are queer-coded – so much so that Ursula’s design is inspired by Divine, a famous drag performer from the ‘90s.

“Growing up and seeing these fabulous characters, I’m like, ‘why would I want to be Ariel when I could be Ursula?’” Rose said. “She has a bit more vavavoom to her. I also played a lot of Disney villains in middle school and those were the characters that I could embody this powerful larger than life personality and use my deeper voice to my advantage.”

Published on April 19, 2023 at 11:44 pm