Anoma Lia
July 2018
Anoma Lía is a drag performer in San Juan. In this intimate episode, she tells her drag origin story, transforms into her performing persona, and sings before an adoring audience.
Transcript
AL: My outfit tonight is the board game “Operation,” and it’s fully detachable so I’m gonna play with myself — double entendre — to a Celine Dion song. I have a bread basket, obviously, and I have butterflies in my tummy, and I have extra ribs, a broken heart, and a wishbone.
AL (1:23): My name is Anoma Lía, and I dress up as a woman two or three times a week. I started 2016, and I used to do Rocky Horror with a queen named “Nancy Cótica” (?). She got me into drag, and the rest is history.
AL (1:56): So for me, getting ready usually takes 2 hours. Putting on the wig, the tucking — If I’m gonna tuck that night. I usually try to DIY something in my outfit or, like, a couple of hours before I’m hot-gluing. I wish I could sew, but I can “hot glue” the house down. Drag is art; we’re combining painting, we’re combining live performance, we’re combining music, we’re combining a lot of things — neatly packaged in a person.
AL (2:34): The drag scene in Puerto Rico right now, it’s kind of…divided. The drag that I do, it’s considered “alternative” – like, not pageant. Pageant is very perfect, there is a lot of competition. Alternative girl, it’s more rough around the edges, and DIY, it’s kinda like a term for “ugly.”
AL (3:04): We already had, like, our financial issues before María since – factually – Queer people are more likely to be poor. But María came, and we were living basically day-to-day. We were like, “We need to charge our phones, because we need to know where they are giving free food, we don’t have any food today. We need to scrounge up any money that we have to at least buy something.” I wanted to leave, but at the same time, I do believe anything that happens to us makes us stronger, so I stayed. And a lot of places closed, but we’re slowly but surely getting back to the semblance of what it was.
AL (3:55): When you don’t have a lot of things, you share what you have. It’s basically given from what you have, not from what is left. Como que dicen dicho, “No es da de lo que taso, es da de lo que tienes”
(4:11) [“Barbie Girl” by Aqua playing in background]
AL (4:18): Alternative drag, and drag in general, is political in its essence. And we have a lot of performers who fill out the spectrum in gender. So we have trans people, we have gender non-binary people, we have intersex people. So it’s political because those people have it really hard, and it’s a very new thing, seeing a lot of very young Queer university students, knowing that they have a place to go, be their true selves, and not be treated badly for expressing themselves.
AL (5:20): Our drag, it’s a product of our times and our circumstances. We are opening doors, and I, like, really enjoy it. I really like the sense of community, and I really like giving a voice to people who are usually not given a voice.
(5:49): [Heart Monitor Beeping over speaker]
[Applause]
