“I was doing theater for a while and I think that was the turning point for me. It helped me realise my sexual orientation in a positive way. It taught me to be comfortable with myself. Understanding my sexual orientation was a process. I had to understand a lot of things about myself; what comforted me and didn’t. But most importantly it taught me to accept myself and then letting the world know who I was. I came out of the closet in 2014, but it wasn’t until close to a year to let others in my social circle know. It took me 6 months to draft a mail to my parents and let them know that I am gay and that I wanted to perform as a drag queen on stage. It wasn’t easy, I didn’t just wake up one day and make a decision to come out of the closet. It was a process. There were consequences to the decision I took, the road ahead was definitely not flowery. I wasn’t privileged in anyway. I lost a lot of friends and my parents didn’t speak to me for a year and we were fighting. Through the entire ordeal, I think they finally realised that there was a lot of hurt going back forth between us a family and started making attempts. My mother asked me, “Who is a drag queen?”. I had to explain the concept to her – “They’re just performances of a man dressed up as a woman on stage”. “So why don’t you get paid for it?”, I said “I will if I go abroad.” “Why are you here then? You should go there!”, my mother insisted. As much as there were consequences to coming out of the closet, there were also positives. It was a beautiful journey, I became more assured of who I was and what I wanted to do.

Whenever people see me as Maya the drag queen, they think I am a transgender or a cross dresser but in my day to day life I’m not like that. They keep misinterpreting who I am onstage and who I am in real life. They make assumptions that the person is on their way to get a sex surgery or a gender transformation. It’s not like I’m against them, I’m all for it and I fully support it. There are people who believe they are stuck in the wrong bodies, but not me. I’m very comfortable with my body, I feel like I’m born into the right body. ‘Drag’ is a performance art. It’s been there for years together in India, I don’t even have to talk about its presence in the west. The biggest examples being traditional Indian dance forms such as Kathakali and Theyyam. If you look at old Bollywood films such as Mughal-E-Azam, you will see instances of drag performances albeit the man donned a role of a eunuch. When you compare the time and nature of the environment during which Mughal-E-Azam was released in – it was a rather huge deal. However now, we’ve reached a point where toxic masculinity is bursting out in our society. It’s reached a point where it has become harmful to not just to me as a drag-queen performer but also to the entire LGBTQ community and heterosexual women. It’s a good fight to be a part of actively and participate in. I don’t let myself be let down by it because I’m a warrior. That’s my thing.

Right now I have a handful of friends, I can count them with my fingers. I think it’s a good thing because they are perfectly fine with who I am, they’ve seen me in different shades. In the beginning, they weren’t able to understand me. Questions like, “Why are you like this?” came into the picture. They had a different perception of who they thought I was and who Maya was. I created Maya, I can do whatever I want to with her persona. If you understand me for my off-stage person, as Alex, I think that’s absolutely perfect and that’s what they’re doing today.

Apart from dreaming about how I’ll be meeting RuPaul; the guy behind RuPaul’s Drag Race and building my own drag race show in India – my other long term dream has been getting my parents to watch my drag queen performance on stage. I see them cheering for me, rooting for me when I go on stage and don my role as Maya the drag queen. I want them to say and feel with pride, ‘Hey, that’ our son on stage. He’s doing something he believes and that’s what’s right!’. Right now they’re conflicted, because they’re still struggling to come to terms with me being a drag performer. They are constantly affected by the stigma that goes through them, they’re of the opinion that such a thing isn’t socially acceptable. Naturally, they are driven by the fear that it is a social problem and that society isn’t going to accept me or what I do. There have been times when they’ve been hurtful, but I’ve learnt the art of taking things with a pinch of salt and moving on. I don’t hold it against them, I just move forward with positivity. It took me 25 years to come to terms with who I am. It might take my parents longer to fully accept me or it might take them much lesser even. You know, close to two years ago there were times when my mother would scream at me and say that I am not supposed to be performing as a drag queen. But things change, she was packing make-up, some sarees and all the other accessories I needed …