Shangela is one of RuPaul’s Drag Race’s most iconic personalities. One of the greatest moments in the show’s history was when she burst out of a box at the beginning of Season Four as a repeat contestant, after effortlessly annoying the shit out of everyone in season three.
Often dismissed as a ‘loudmouth’ and ‘unpolished’, underneath the sass, the mug, the bag, the moves and the hair is an extremely talented and perceptive queen.
James Egan caught up with her before she hit London to judge G-A-Y Porn Idol to get a better idea of who Miss Laquifah Wadley really is. What followed was both hilarious and insightful. Pull up a chair, have a read and leave your mothers AT HOME.
First off, congratulations on the Supreme Court decision for marriage equality in the US!
Well thank you, now all I gotta do is find a husband!
Just throw on a dress and walk up and down the boulevard, see if anybody bites.
Oh, I’m ready, I got the dress.
We’ve actually met before the last time you were in London, backstage at a performance. I told you I worked for a magazine and you said, “Good, cuz you know mama likes to READ.”
I remember, I was with Dusty O! Lovely to talk to you again!
So you’re coming over to G-A-Y Porn Idol?
Yup, I’m gonna be there on July 9th and I am so excited! I’ve never worked at G-A-Y before and I always love coming to London. There’s such a great energy and the fans are so die-hard. I’ve been told it’s where the party goes DOWN.
Bring the dress, you can find a husband here.
Honey, I’m ordained. I’ve married two couples this year in California. I’ll do it. You can come be my witness.
No problem. Hand on the Bible.
Exactly. Or at least hand on the QX Magazine!
Are you coming here in a box? That seems to be your usual mode of transportation.
Well I don’t know, honey, it depends on if Jeremy Joseph wants to pay the shipping costs!
Have you been warned about what you’re going to see at G-A-Y Porn Idol? When Alyssa Edwards was here she said that she had seen a lot of shit in her life but that was the best thing ever seen.
I spoke to Lance Bass, I said “I wanna see tits!” Lance said “GURL. Get READY gurl!” So I am READY.
You are the only RuPaul’s Drag Race contestant to have returned approximately one thousand times.
A thousand and one, yes.
How do you feel about being the most prolific Drag Race contestant?
I’m just thankful that the RuPaul gods have smiled on me so many times! I’ve had a great opportunity to basically grow up as a drag queen in front of the viewers. When I first entered during season two, I’d only been doing drag for five months. I was the baby. Over the last four years I feel like I’ve worked really hard and grown a lot. I just hope to inspire people to never give up and honey, always believe you can come back. Even in a box.
You were quite a straight talker on the show, you kind of just let everyone have it.
The thing about me is I’m not mean-spirited. But Shangie has a mouth, number one, and number two: I keep it real. When people meet me in person, they say “Oh my God, you’re exactly the same in person”. I think that’s a compliment because everything about me is genuine. Nothing was scripted for me.
One of my favourite moments is when Carmen Carerra was telling everyone that she was friends with Jennifer Lopez and you were not having any of it.
At the time, I just didn’t feel like everything was adding up. Now, yes, she has taken photos with J.Lo before and she may have hung out with her. But in the moment, the stories she was telling weren’t adding up! You know, I’m Nancy Drew, honey, I was sniffing it out. I was like “Y’all smell that? Smells like LIES to me”.
Something in the milk wasn’t clean.
The milk wasn’t white, honey, the milk wasn’t white!
Now, from what I understand, the first time you ever did drag was in high school for an English project.
Yes. Our teachers gave us the opportunity to do a creative project over the book Huckleberry Finn. I decided to re-write ‘Proud Mary’ by Tina Turner and perform in drag for the class ‘Huck and Jim: Rollin’ Down the River’. The teacher loved it so much she invited me to come back and perform it for three other classes. I don’t know if, now, looking back on it, she was just having a good laugh but either way it was fun.
So that gave you the taste for it.
I have always wanted to and always have entertained. I love seeing people laugh, enjoy a show. I love to be entertained, so that’s why I love watching people like Tina Turner or Beyonce, because they bring such fire to the stage.
It’s magnetic, you can’t take your eyes off that energy.
That’s exactly it honey, you’ll get sucked into my galaxy!
Your song ‘Werqin’ Girl’ is a bit of an office anthem here. How did that materialize?
I wrote the song originally for the show Dance Moms. They used one of my songs ‘Call Me Laquifah’ for the first season. So for the second season they asked if I had another song, they wanted to keep the whole Laquifah thing going. I said “Oh sure, of course I do!” Honey. I didn’t have NOTHING. But I said “Uhh just let me dig through all the music I have and find something appropriate”. Bitch, I got a pen and I started writing. Within two days I had recorded ‘Werqin Girl’.
Originally the song was called ‘Ho-fessional’ but we thought that might not be appropriate for nine year old girls.
Do you know you have your own Wikipedia page? That essentially means you’ve made it.
You know me, I’m humble fish, I come from a small town, Paris. Not France, Texas. So to be in ‘celebrity life’ now, being in Los Angeles, I still get shocked when little things happen like having a Wikipedia page or when I got verified on Twitter. I was like “Oh my god, I’m like Kim Kardashian!”
Do you find the whole idea of celebrity quite surreal?
I look at it as a gift. I’ve been all around the world in the last two months: Dubai, UK, Australia, South Africa, Canada. Because of the popularity of Drag Race you’re immediately able to connect to people. That’s the most amazing part of this whole thing.
I’m able to take drag to somewhere like Dubai where, culturally, it’s not openly accepted but there is a community, there are people who need to feel represented, that’s amazing. We’re part of something special. There’s only what, seventy, eighty Drag Race girls in the world? And out of those there’s only about twenty of us who have…how should I say this… Have such busy schedules.
That’s a kind way of putting it.
That’s what I’m working towards!
What was performing in Dubai like?
Obviously knowing what the region is known for in terms of attitudes to gay people and drag… you want to feel safe. But the minute I got there, stepped off the plane, saw all of those people straight and gay dancing along to ‘Uptown Fish’…it was great. For that moment, we were all loud and proud.
We take it for granted, but so many people around the world don’t have the freedoms that we have. As a gay community we still have other work to do, we’re not all there yet with equality. We’re getting there, we’re moving in the right direction. There are a lot of places that are way behind and don’t have those freedoms.
We just had London Gay Pride last weekend and there’s sometimes a negative reaction to it in the gay community. There are people who don’t think it’s necessary anymore. I think they miss the point that the very fact that we are able to have Pride is something that is extremely important and valuable. It gives people in places where that’s not the case a sense of hope and unity.
There’s a lot of missing the point going on. I think we can do more as leaders in the drag community, the gay community, period. People who say we don’t need gay pride anymore? That’s dishonouring all the people that fought for it.
We’ve had it easy. Fifty years ago you were weren’t even allowed to kiss each other in public. So much fighting has been done to even have Pride. You can’t disregard all the work that people have done and what they lived through just because you were born in a time where things were more ‘normalised’.
People say things like “Oh I don’t wanna be a part of that, that’s too much.” No honey, no. You could turn around and it could be gone.
It’s important for people to know about things like Stonewall and the campaigners who have paved the way, because otherwise they get complacent and progress doesn’t happen.
People get so…assimilated. They think to themselves “okay we’re all equal now”. No. We’re not, trust me, we are not. Even I don’t know all the history, there’s so much more that I could learn and pass along. As leaders in the gay community we need to be thinkers, educators and role models.
I mean, shit, I’m Laquifah, the post-modern pimp-ho, honey. I’m not, as Tammie Brown would say, “walking children through nature” but we all have a responsibility. It’s important that we remember that.
• Shangela is judging G-A-Y Porn Idol @ Heaven (Under the Arches, Villiers Street, Charing Cross, WC2N 6NG) on Thursday 9th July, 10:30pm – 5am. Free entry wristbands available at G-A-Y Bar
