Like so many queer kids before her and so many since, Violet Chachki noticed the rigours of gendered indoctrination young. Leaning towards drag, Chachki says, was “escapism, yes, but also therapy”. She attended a Catholic elementary school in Atlanta, Georgia, where “everything was really uniform”. “Even wearing a boy’s uniform, I still somehow stood out. You’d look at me and say, that person is not the same as the rest of those other guys, in exactly the same outfit.”
A curious, bright child with vaulting early ambition, none of it made sense to her. “I had to repress, early on, as a child, those messages of ‘guys don’t walk like that’, ‘guys don’t talk like that’, ‘only girls do this’. Really, it was about channelling all of my anger and frustration.”
