Everyone remembers when they met Trixie Mattel.
For me it was sophomore year of college, smoking weed on a shitty futon in 2015 while she got dressed up like flight attendant Barbie, and then in person almost a decade later, while working on PAPER’s cover story with Chappell Roan. Others met her in Chicago and Milwaukee gay clubs, years before she hit the main stage, or on the wildly successful, first-of-its-kind YouTube series UNHhhh with longtime collaborator Katya, or on subsequent seasons of the hit drag television show. The list keeps going: The Bald and the Beautiful, a critically acclaimed Queerty-winning documentary, on tour with Katya, elsewhere on YouTube’s Mattel-ian algorithm and most recently, behind the DJ booth at her globe-trotting dance party, the femininomenon-al Solid Pink Disco.
In the business of drag, there are very few like Trixie Mattel, having been the first of her kind for the YouTube generation of creators and performers. And in the near-decade I’ve been following and covering drag entertainers, all the way back to the first time I stepped foot into World of Wonder’s studios, just about everyone has a story to tell. My tour guide during that profile of a famous drag queen derailed by the pandemic skipped right past everything, cutting a straight line to the studio where “the magic happens” on UNHhhh, as she said. No mind the queen launching a new show I was there to speak with. Queens across “the franchise” speak effusively about her generosity and warmth, despite the humorous thorns. She comes up in conversations I’ve had with friends of hers or peers in the industry or even random artist, all obsessed with her style and wit and ingenuity.
She is, at once, one’s best friend in their phone and a singular titan of the drag industry, a double-edged reputation that is both unbelievable and totally impenetrable. Yet nothing could have prepared me for the immediacy she brought to our first conversation a year ago, a total stranger totally interested in another stranger, in the company of some strangers. I noted, at the time, that she carved an unusual chunk of space in a setting like this to ask about me: where I was, how I was feeling, how my week was going. I was totally disarmed then, as I was now, when we found ourselves a full twenty minutes into our conversation before she paused, laughed, and burst out with “Hello again, by the way, it’s nice to see you.”
As Whitney Houston once said: “It’s not, ‘Move out my way, here I come.’ It’s walking through and saying ‘Hello, how are you? I’m so glad you came. Hi darling, how are you doing? I remember you!’ That’s a diva to me, that’s true divaship.”
Trixie’s on the road again with Solid Pink Disco, having made her way stateside from the Australian leg of the tour. Mattel, somewhat somberly, tells me, “The world is so messed up, but I guess this is the way I contribute, because Katya and I always talk about this: ‘The world is so crazy, and girl, what the fuck are we doing?’” She laughs then, admitting that “escapism matters. Spiritually charging your phone matters. Looking away from the TV for a second matters. Solid Pink Disco … We are shooting people up into space like Katy Perry.”
Solid Pink Disco might feel like escapism, but it’s far from shallow, judging by both the immense effort Mattel has taken to curate it and the way she talks about work at all. “Like anything I do, if I get interested, I fall off the deep end. I have to know everything. I’m probably the youngest person who plays the autoharp, like a crazy person. I don’t just go on Zillow, I open motels, like a crazy person.” DJing, a skill she picked up in the pandemic after a career spent hanging around nightlife personalities, comes from her lifelong love of music. Let alone a career in which she’s thoroughly exceeded the limitations on what drag queens are capable of.
I ask after those early starts at music, from her first studio album Two Birds to her recent remixes of RuPaul’s “Supermodel” and “Looking Good, Feeling Gorgeous.” Did she always feel the boundaries of imposed legitimacy? “All these interviews would be like, ‘Hey, it’s your third album,’ and they ask questions like what you just said about drag music, and how do we start to turn the tide on the way people refer to that. Basically creating a situation where I answer a question about the lack of legitimacy that’s suggested when you say drag music.” She takes a moment to consider this, myself flush, before continuing. “I never know how to answer that question other than, like, listen … I was barefoot playing a guitar halfway up a tree in a trailer park a lot longer than I was doing drag. I don’t know what to tell you!” For her, drag and music are “kind of one in the same. And if you asked me at the time, when I was 13, would I rather be sitting and doing it in a pink dress, I probably would have said yes.”
Perhaps her technical mastery and passion for a complex instrument like the autoharp was instrumental in picking up the finer elements of a DDJ, but her relationship to the music runs much deeper than that. Instead of supplanting the country-driven storytelling of her music, DJing has expanded her relationship to it. Before, she was “using a guitar and my voice to talk, right? To communicate. But with DJing, you have an entire conversation with a room full of people using other people’s songs in almost a collage. That honestly is how drag queens work. Drag at its core, for a lot of us, is collage.”
Solid Pink Disco, which began as an idea at 21 and is a globe-spanning party more than a decade later, has infinitely grown in scope since those living room quarantine mixes. This year, she has “costume changes, wig changes when I’m off stage. There’s visuals of my face lip synching while I quick-change. I feel really proud of it, I think it really delivers.” As Mattel sees it, “If you come for a drag show, there’s plenty of drag. Come to dance? The music’s great. Come to just wear your pink outfit and take pictures of yourself? That’s also fine.”
For more on Solid Pink Disco, Trixie Mattel’s favorite RuPaul songs, and more, read our full conversation below.
Your publicist and I were just talking about how gay people ruin everything, so feel free to jump in with any opinions you might have.
I agree honestly! I’ve been thinking a lot about conservatives, and I’m like, I’m afraid they’re going to make a list and start dragging us off somewhere, but also, I’ll make that list for you. I’ll make that list. We’re gonna do The Hunger Games, I can tell you who you should take, I have inside knowledge.
You’re going to be the deep state informant on gay people.
I know that’s a very dark take on a very sad parallel reality. I think we’re all trying to make the best of a bad situation.
Specifically we were talking about gay people leaking everything, and how the RuPaul’s Drag Race finale used to feel like the Oscars.
When Kennedy and I did AS3, shoutout to Kennedy, we filmed a tie. And then the following season, there was a tie, Monet and Trinity, and they didn’t even film a tie. So they’re on some type of shit that we don’t understand. RuPaul is playing chess.
I just wish she’d come down from the ceiling to “Call Me Mother” like, one more time. That entrance through her mouth at season nine’s finale was the fiercest thing.
Nobody is a bigger fan of RuPaul than me. RuPaul and Amanda LaPore, I would throw myself on the railroad tracks today for either of them, and honestly, the older and wiser I get, my initial superficial enjoyment of RuPaul became a deeper respect and only a peripheral understanding of the gravity of a Black man putting on a blonde wig and dressing like a woman in the ’90s. People throw the word mother around, people are like, “Gypsy Rose Blanchard, mother!” Well, maybe not her.
She’s probably the one person in our lifetime who we can say definitively and literally changed the entire world. The entire world is a different place because of RuPaul.
It’s crazy. I also think with RuPaul, we take everything for granted, and reality TV blossomed so quickly from what it was even 10 years ago, RuPaul’s impact won’t even be understood until probably she’s done. Because we’re all actively eating the meal, we haven’t even had to sit and be like, “Wasn’t that so good? That 30-year-long meal that RuPaul let us eat?”
15 years ago, nobody knew who drag queens were. Literally, that was not a thing the entire world knew about. Her tangible effect on real-life politics, the globe? You could go anywhere in the world and RuPaul is the language we speak now.
Honestly, her ability to cross lines into everything. Everyone has put money down with RuPaul as their horse. Everybody gets something out of it. RuPaul just creates and then goes away until it’s time to create again. I could talk about her forever, I’m obsessed with her.
I was reading one of her books, and was reminded of you in many ways, because Ru has branched out into so many different things throughout her career, and you’ve constantly invented a career for yourself, like her. I don’t think anyone had, besides RuPaul, a career like Trixie Mattel. When you were 24, did you ever see yourself DJing World Pride on a bill with RuPaul of all people?
No, I didn’t. But also, I’ve always thought that DJing was so cool. As a gay person, as a drag queen who barely had besties in other drag queens, I spent a lot of time in the DJ booth in my life. Go up there, have my cocktail, talk to the DJ. Matteo, my DJ partner who does Solid Pink Disco with me on tour, he just turned 50. He said, “Before you started DJing, I DJed shows you were in, and you were one of the only drag queens who would come to the DJ booth to say hi to the DJ.” He was like, “I’d never seen that before.”
When you work in nightclubs, you have DJs breaking really great dance music to you on a nightly basis. For free! You accidentally get your minor in dance music, because DJs are always sharing with you what’s coming, and what other drag queens are doing. Not to mention, back in the day, I did a lot of circuit parties, so it would be like, go to work, hear six hours of music. During COVID, I was like, I miss the “thumpa thumpa.” I was trying to Google songs, because I wanted to put together a playlist of house music that I love, that I miss. I was like, wow, I’m not equipped to do this. So then I started deep diving, and pretty much, like anything I do, if I get interested, I fall off the deep end. I have to know everything. I’m probably the youngest person who plays the autoharp, like a crazy person. I don’t just go on Zillow, I open motels, like a crazy person. I bought a club standard setup and put it in my living room and just dumped, during COVID. Dumped hours and hours, every day, looking for music, skill building, trying to DuoLingo myself. Luckily, I’m pretty tech-savvy, because of YouTube. Obviously my background in music helps. But it took something like COVID for me to have all the time in the world to devote to DJing.
A Trak just played for us at a few Solid Pink Discos, and that was so surreal. I had to almost address the elephant in the room. I had to be like, “Thank you for doing this, also, you’re opening for me, I know that’s probably weird.” He is a world champion turntablist, in his teens! I’m like, “This must be weird for you to open for anybody,” but also, this is a room full of gay people, and if you ask them who should be the headliner, they’ll tell you. So to answer your question, no, I never saw this coming, because I loved playing guitar and I loved lip syncing. I did not ever think I would get to go down that road.
Speaking of guitar, you had such a prolific journey with music before DJing. You have albums and music videos out, have toured the music. Do you feel like DJing co-exists with that? Has it supplanted or enriched it?
I grew up playing guitar because we had one, and because I grew up so remote, we didn’t have piano lessons. Not that we could afford it. I recently just watched a documentary, and I won’t say what artist’s it was, but they were talking about how poor they were, but the documentary was full of video footage of them from like, the ‘60s, from when they were a kid. And I was like, “Okay, I believe that you weren’t rich, but I can tell you, as a poor person, we didn’t have fucking video cameras, especially not in the ‘60s at home.” Yeah, we were actually poor. We were on these programs that they try to take away in schools. If we didn’t have free breakfast and free lunch, I would not have had meals, you know? Like, we were really poor, really, poor. So, guitar came to me because my grandpa played guitar, and it just came so easy. I just loved it. I’ve always loved it. I think I played for 22 years now, crazy! It just came so naturally to me.
And I guess when you’re DJing… my musical relationship used to be using a guitar and my voice to talk, right? To communicate. But with DJing, you have an entire conversation with a room full of people using other people’s songs in almost a collage. That honestly is how drag queens work, I think. Drag at its core, I think for a lot of us, is collage. It’s this artist, this movie, this song, this costume, and we’re trying to tell one thing. And I guess that part of it reminds me so much of when I was 21, you know, using Garageband to make mash ups and shitty lip sync mixes. That part of it reminds me so much of DJing, because you’re using other people’s music to talk to people. I’ve had the idea for Solid Pink Disco since I was 21!
Oh, wow!
I always wanted to throw a party that was all pink. And I just never thought I would be the DJ at that party, but I just always had that word in my mind, “solid pink disco” and RuPaul says you have to let the universities give you stage direction.
What was the impetus to start it now? Was it the DJing, and feeling like, “I can do this now.” Was there anything stopping you beforehand?
When I was younger, I thought it seemed like a big thing to take on, but I just had this dream of disco balls and all pink and everybody wearing pink. Sort of like a Barbie core party for adults that felt really girly. I don’t really believe in the gender system, but just the word girly works for me. And I love My Little Pony and Polly Pocket and Barbie and all that. When I started DJing during COVID, I guess it took me maybe a season of DJing to be like, “All right, I want to start building this.” And the first year, it was basically the first time I’d done like, 90-minute, two-hour sets on a regular basis.
How has it evolved this year, since you started?
This year is so much crazier. Because I also do video, I spent a lot more time this year building all the visuals, putting on green screen suits and recording visuals. There’s this artist in Mexico who built all the 3D models. And then you can tell the ones I made, which are a little more unhinged and crazy. I just had a vision of making it more immersive. Some of the influences this year are like early Heatherette. Something that feels very whimsical, and so girly and gay that it goes back around to feeling overtly masculine, weirdly. I mean, this one’s really a love letter to prissy little princesses, whatever their identity is. It’s the girls who are willing to put on the shitty little tiara and the stacked boots and go thrash around. This is for them. I mean, the world has gotten so crazy, and what I’ve learned from Trixie Motel is: there’s something about an immersive environment that makes people really feel like they have left planet Earth.
People walk into Trixie Motel and just cry, they just cry, and they love it. And with Solid Pink Disco, you walk in and everybody is wearing pink. There’s pink lights, pink visuals. The Go Go’s are in pink. And I really tried hard to create a set that speaks to people who maybe don’t go to dance events all the time. I wanted there to be a through line that felt really familiar and very Trixie. So the first movement of it is really disco and sparkly and cowboy disco fantasy. And the second half of it is this darker, cuntier workout section where we’re jumping rope and exercising. There’s a whole exercise section in drag — psycho! We’re doing jump rope, like it’s crazy.
And it’s a summer tour too, so that’ll go really well with drag and the heat.
No kidding. We started the tour in Australia in February, which is summer there, so we’re just following summer. I guess the last couple years, when I did it, it was mostly one outfit and cool visuals. But not necessarily narrative choices. This year was the first time I was like, “Okay, I’m gonna do quick changes. We’re doing numbers. This time we tour with two dancers who do their own numbers and do numbers with me. This year, there’s these famous, famous openers too. We got Rebecca Black, we got Shea Couleé, A-Trak. I can’t believe some of these producers.
I loved your recent video with Rebecca Black, on that note, who I also profiled earlier this year. Such a good album, and such creative energy about her. It’s exciting to see you two collaborating on this.
It’s also really exciting to see people turn around on her, because I don’t really have the gay bone in my body where we just like, love pop girls and fucking hate them. I don’t really get down like that. There’s this whole event that’s occurring to Katy Perry right now I would never participate in, unless it’s Emilia Perez. I just don’t participate in this cycle of choosing famous women and being like, “Fuck her.”
I want to go back to something you said about the club. I’ve been going out for a long time, now that I’m in my thirties, and it used to be that the club was a third place. Now, more than ever, it feels like people are looking for fantasy when they go out. They want to escape from reality, because the world is so bad. I don’t think when I was 21 going out to shitty gay bars, I was like, “I want to be transported to Narnia.” I wanted shitty tequila and to go home with a guy who was probably going to kill me.
I think we must have been going to the same bars. Like, “I’m gonna put on my 2010s makeup and my Lego eyebrows, I’m gonna put on my Jessica Simpson heels.”
My Jeffree Star beat!
I’ve been thinking about it a lot, actually, because I’m a millennial, and I understand that on the internet, we are the road that everybody stops to piss on at this point. But I’m also like, stay mad. Do you know how much fun we had going out? Do you know how happy we were? Do you know that we drank and fucked like we were gonna die tomorrow? You know that we dressed up like the world was ending? There was this time where it was like, everyone was doing this post-hipster thing. It was like, Beyoncé, Gaga, “Video Phone” era, where everything was the highest heels, gemstones to hell, a lot of makeup. We were kind of doing The Capitol in The Hunger Games.
We all looked like Cosmo, the Queen of Melrose, in bedazzled hats and fur and leather and a pair of panties.
I think that audiences now are more discerning, particularly female audiences. Female audiences really understand that if you like something, you have to support it, or it goes away. So girls, in my experience, will see your tours. The day your tour goes on sale, they’ll buy four tickets and figure out who’s going later. They will start buying an outfit that day. They’ll start rhinestoning something. People are just a little more enlightened now, and they want to support something. So with Solid Pink Disco, I wanted to design something instead of just asking people to come. That’s the magic of it, to me. I’m on the posters, and I’m up there, but it is so much more about the people dressed head to toe in all pink with blonde wigs on. They are there and they’re having a great time. I think mostly because of how they look and how they dress, they self-transport? They’re in a room full of people dressed up at a level they would never dress up. It’s not Halloween, it’s not Pride, and there’s something about the color pink too that’s very audacious and daring and removes you from reality a little bit. I’ve learned that the energy, the vibe, is kind of like “Fuck it, it’s the last night on earth.” It comes from the feeling of people almost being in their drag. People get in their drag and they are not a fucking crossing guard or waitress or whatever. They are the queen of club.com/diva.
I was thinking about something you said during the Chappell Roan cover last year, where I think she was going to Kentuckiana Pride, and she said that these shows in places that aren’t LA or New York, where we’re more jaded about things like gayness or the color pink, to some people, it feels more important to them. Do you feel that energy at your shows, because I’m sure it’s something you’ve experienced touring with Katya.
With Trixie and Katya, I felt a bigger responsibility to live up to the expectation of a diehard Trixie and Katya fan, because the people who come to see me and Katya have been watching us since they were teenagers. A lot of them are now post-college graduates who’ve been watching us since middle school. So I felt like almost every night, we had to live up to a decade of their experience watching us on YouTube. Whereas for Solid Pink Disco, it feels … obviously I make money.
But it feels more like, “This is a dark room, and this show is that moment where you pull the curtains open in the morning for a couple hours.” Because I can’t be responsible for what their life is like right now. I can take a lot of responsibility for very potent escapism at a very reasonable ticket price. It is really gay, without feeling exclusive. It doesn’t feel like corporate pride. We don’t want something that feels branded and we don’t want: “Cell Phone Company presents Your Gay Experience.” But we don’t want something that feels too cool, because gay people have a tendency to feel too fucking cool for their own, too. So I just am really proud of it. I can tell that people have an experience that is different from any other night of the year. It’s different from pride. It’s not running on clockwork.
With Solid Pink Disco, especially this year, my goal was to create something that had a major Trixie flavor with the approach and the look and the songs. But again, it has so little to do with me. I’ve found it very freeing because I’m there, but it’s really the audience’s party. There’s a lot more of them in drag than me, and they all know each other in these towns, and I don’t know them. It really is giving people an opportunity to play a very parallel version of themselves for a night. I mean, people come and they act crazy, they fucking lose their mind, they scream, they piss their pants, they fall out, they faint, they get carried out on stretchers, splits, drunk as hell, they flip out!
There’s something about costumes that has really pervaded culture. Chappell had her themes on tour, Beyoncé and now Lady Gaga are the same. You have to get those uniforms six months in advance. People are looking for a place to be outside themselves.
They are. Pink for me has its own vibration. There’s something about it that is even peripheral to pride. To me pink, because it’s like its own thing, when people do pink, they base their whole jush on it. There’s always that girl who wears pink lips every day, or always has pink hair, whatever. It communicates something. It communicates a willingness to suspend disbelief. It communicates a frivolity, and you want people to know that you’re daring. You want people to know that you’re playing a version of yourself for everyone’s enjoyment.
When I worked at the makeup counter, when people would wear bold lipstick, they really became a different person. Something about pink, especially when you get it on little gay boys or girls, especially high femme, sapphic women at these shows… there’s something very female power about a sea of girls in pink making out. I think we’re making fun of femininity, in a way, with how high femme we’re doing it in the show. It gives people a lot of freedom. Like, let’s all dress like little Polly Pocket sluts and thrash around in it. We’re not going to be reduced to gender. We’re all here together, it is a very open space.
Back to the topic of RuPaul, but specifically her music: I loved your cover of “Looking Good, Feeling Gorgeous.” Off one of my favorite RuPaul albums, Red Hot, which has “Are You Man Enough?” and “Coming Out of Hiding”. Have you always been a fan of the music, or was that something that happened to you slowly?
Even though RuPaul is celebrated, Red Hot came out a number of years after Supermodel.
She makes some …. bold …. creative choices on the album.
Bold, bold choices. But the look and the feel of it, I just love the song. If Dula Peep put this up today, it would be a hit song, I love that song.
So much of RuPaul’s music is like that, though, where I’m like, if it was anyone else, people would respect it, but it’s RuPaul. So there’s a joke element that people associate with it.
Totally. I was using a bootleg acapella from “Supermodel” and I was building this remix, and I started to like it so much. Then I did a gig at the Out 100, and Vincint was there singing, and I walked up and was like, I have this remix of “Supermodel” that I’m working on. And I love you, and I know that you love RuPaul. Would you be interested in perhaps providing an original vocal so I can obtain the licenses required to put it on iTunes and stuff for people to have easier access to it?” So then they did all the vocals for that in under an hour. Their voice is so stupid good. It was supposed to be a bootleg “Supermodel” and then once I had the privilege to bump it, the universe was like, here’s Vincint. You spent the whole day on your computer working on this, and now you’re standing here with Vincint. Why don’t you just ask? The worst they can say is no.
I did this story that was a taxonomy of all her Christmas music, and the amount of people who reached out after — people you’d be surprised by! — who said they went back and listened to her music, and they couldn’t believe nobody ever talked about how good it is. I was like, “I think we do?” Welcome to the club of people with actually good taste who respect RuPaul as an artist.
That Christmas shit! “Hey Sis, It’s Christmas” is amazing. Amazing, amazing. It’s one of the best Christmas songs. “I Just Want to Get to You” is so good.
Oh my god, chills!
“The Realness”? I was just at a show the other day, and that part of “The Realness” that’s just the baseline, in C minor? And the other song that’s in C minor is that one that goes, “Get on up!” I was marrying them together at this gig the other night, and I was like, am I going to have to remix “The Realness” with everyone? I might have to. I am just the RuPaul stalker now.
“Main Event” still gets me on my feet. Makes me feel like I’m 20 again.
The beginning is amazing!
I was going to say, do you think we’ve approached a time where we can abandon the moniker of “drag queen music”, which is a stupid moniker to begin with. Because it assumes it’s not “real music”, or places it outside of music.
You know what’s been amazing, ever since I started working in dance music? Dance music is such an inclusive free for all. Dance music is like that Gaga meme: “Afraid to reference or not reference, shit it out.” Does she say shit it out? Puke it out? Whatever. In dance music you can beg, borrow, steal, regurgitate, mimic, reinvent. That’s kind of the fabric of dance music, that it’s a call and response. We’re all hearing each other, and honoring each other by stacking. Like, if you do this, I’m gonna play this card. But when I was doing quote, unquote, real music, I love playing guitar, and I love singing, and I love songwriting. I mean, before I did drag, I thought I was gonna be Bob Dylan, basically. But I don’t have the hair for it, obviously.
You can just buy the hair.
See, I could get away with it! I love that style of storytelling, but I always felt very, “Well, I’m in drag.” I love playing guitar and singing, and I love drag and then when I put them together, it ended up being a little bit more synergy than I expected, because when you do comedy and then you can play guitar, it’s a really good way to work. I love Bo Burnham. I love Sarah Silverman. There are so many musical comedians that I had as proof that that was very possible. But all these interviews would be like, “Hey, it’s your third album,” and they ask questions like what you just said about drag music, and how do we start to turn the tide on the way people refer to that. Basically creating a situation where I answer a question about the lack of legitimacy that’s suggested when you say drag music.
I never know how to answer that question other than, like, listen, I was barefoot, playing a guitar halfway up a tree in a trailer park a lot longer than I was doing drag. I don’t know what to tell you! For me, it’s one in the same. And if you asked me at the time, when I was 13, would I rather be sitting and doing it in a pink dress, I probably would have said yes. But the great thing about dance music is Honey Dijon existing, and Black trans women, Black gay people basically inventing house music. If you watch a ten minute documentary about house music, you learn that it was invented halfway in Chicago and New York, and Black queer people, like everything else, fucking invented it.
It’s an art form that honestly is very: “Come as you are.” Even though it is very white male male-dominated. But it’s funny, because once you put a drum machine behind your music, and you have a wig on, all those questions don’t exist, they just fall away, it makes a lot more sense. When I play guitar and sing, I feel a lot of gravity to tell a story and really be taken seriously. I felt like it was always an uphill battle to be taken seriously. I would look for a review that didn’t say that they were surprised that it was any good. It would all be like that, which is kind of a compliment, because it means somebody went in expecting nothing and you actually had to meet some expectations of that. You’re better than nothing.
But with dance music, it’s very open. I just did Coachella two weeks ago. Using dance music in drag just feels very literate, people have some amount of literacy for that. They’re not going, okay, it’s a drag queen playing guitar, I don’t get it. It’s not a lot to ask, it’s not a leap, and I guess that works in my favor, developing Solid Pink Disco, because when you see a person in a wig, you do want to party. You put a drag queen DJing anywhere, it becomes an event.
Photography: Gabriel Gastelum