Directly from the steel city of Pittsburgh, Lydia B. Kollins brought a gritty perspective and a strong sense of fashion to the RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 17 stage. While she didn’t depart with the crown this season, she departed with one of the first love stories to bloom in the Drag Race Werk Room, with fellow Season 17 competitor Kori King. After presenting some strong fashion on the Main Stage (and even snagging a win), Kollins and I sat down for an extensive chat. We discussed her Drag Race Season 17 experience, what she has learned the most from Kori King, and she gave me some inside tea on those Main Stage lip syncs!
Michael Cook: Many are calling this “the season of the Butthole” in a multitude of ways. What does it feel like for you looking back now?
Lydia B Kollins: Retrospectively, super cool! I cannot be more grateful for my castmates, the fans of the show that enjoy my work, and the fans of the show that enjoy Lydia. It’s just been the most insane creatively fulfilling experience that I could imagine. I feel like everyone says that, but truly it is so hard to grasp, it is so hard to explain; it’s just so cool.
MC: Your runway looks were sartorial and well thought out and you took your critiques in stride. Even your runway look that you performed against Kori King in got some critiques, but had interesting craftsmanship and you were able to sell it on the runway.
LBK: I totally understand what the judges are saying and I hear them, but I would wear that outfit a million times again!
MC: What are your rose and thorn of your RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 17 experience?
LBK: My rose is definitely the connections I think. It has been a very recent development getting to wake up every day and still think “I get to do drag, I get to go to different cities, meet people and do drag”! It is the most brilliant and beautiful thing in the world and I am just super grateful for that. To snatch a win along the way was not too shabby as well! My thorn, I guess getting eliminated right? The Drag Race experience was so wonderful for me, I would have loved it to never stop. To add onto the rose, leaving Drag Race with Kori King and I being so close is a massive plus as well.
MC: I think you are the first two Drag Race competitors in herstory who emerged from the competition as a couple. What was wonderful is that it wasn’t a true focal point of the competition until it needed to be, which allowed you both to compete and stand on your own. You did lip sync against each other at the end in stunning battle, so I have to ask-what would you have done if the lip sync had gone another way and Kori had stayed?
LBK: If Kori had stayed, I don’t think I would have been mad at all, I half expected it that way. She can buck down and perform circles around me. I don’t know if she saw the writing on the wall or if she was taking it easy on me, but I thought it was very sweet. If she would have stayed, I would have been like “Oh well, that was my time”.
MC: Your final lip sync was wonderfully chaotic, complete with scissors and a garment that you could not one hundred percent get yourself out of. Was it your plan to seamlessly (pardon the pun) step out of the dress into the performance?
LBK: (laughs)Yes, that was an unfortunate attempt on part. I had the scissors nestled firmly in my breast cup for a minute with the intent to fully slice that dress open so I could have full range of movement, but that dress was a very difficult material to cut. There was hot glue, it was stitched, there was metal in there and faux fur. I could have brought some sharper shears with me, but I unfortunately did not.
MC: Both your own individual perspective and the Pittsburgh perspective in general are both very unique and it was great seeing that represented on the Drag Race runway this season. What do you think your learned both about yourself and about drag itself that you will be able to take into the next phase of your career?
LBK: I think I learned that what I am doing is enough, what I am doing is entertaining. It has value in the drag world. I always knew that in my own mind, but it doesn’t hurt to have people that you look up to, your idols, re-confirm that for you. I learned more about queens like Sam Star, Jewels Sparkles, and Arrietty, the very perfected, not pageant, but very digestible queens..I’ve learned a lot of tricks that I did not previously know from them. They don’t tell you that pageant queens are down and dirty and literally know every drag trick in the book. I am going to take a lot of pages from Sam Star’s book for sure.
MC: What do you think you’ve learned the most from Kori King from this experience?
LBK: I’ve learned so much from Kori. Kori is my rock, she definitely brings it down to Earth. I get stressed so easily with my drag and if I stressing about my drag and something is not hitting right, or something is out of place, there is this saying that Kori King taught me that has really resonated with me-“They’re gonna get what they’re gonna get”. That is a really valuable piece of information and that has helped me out more than she knows.
MC: You are entering into an exciting new phase of your career, with you and Kori both back in Pittsburgh and Boston respectively. So what do you want to do next?
LBK: Well, other than stuff with Kori, I want to just keep doing drag. Every single day, I want to keep meeting the fans, not just of the show but of drag in general. An end goal-I would love to be in a horror movie.
MC: The horror genre is something that a number of of queens have really been getting into it seems, and it’s a great genre to see them dive into.
LBK: Yeah and film work in general is super cool. Film is one of my first loves and I think it just makes sense to have me in some nasty grind-house schlocky horror movie.
MC: With the success of Bob the Drag Queen on The Traitors this season, you and Kori King on the same season of that show would truly be appointment television.
LBK: Oh my God yes, that would be sickening!
MC: What is the best piece of advice that you have ever received?
LBK: Many people have said it before, I don’t know where it originate from, but it’s to never take anyone’s advice. Always do what you want to do, what is going to make you happy. Actually something that I have been taking with me a lot recently is from Samantha Jones in Sex and The City. She has said ‘If I’m uncomfortable in any situation, even for one second, I will remove myself from that situation”. That has been a world of difference for me; I have kind of taken that to heart.
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