Members of the Daniels drag family pose for a photograph during their"Daniels Family Values" drag show at the Heritage Restaurant in Shamokin, Pa., Saturday, April 16, 2022. They are, from left, Xander Valentine, aka Gwen Bobbie; Harpy Daniels, aka Joshua Kelley; Alexus Daniels, Tequila Daniels, aka Tony Nahodil, and Trixy Valentine, aka Jacob Kelley.
Here two very old traditions mingle — and mostly happily, it seems, in contrast to the fierce political winds ripping at drag performances and the broader rights of LGBTQ+ people in red states from Utah and Texas to Tennessee and Florida.The other, back to before Shakespearian times, is drag, a loud, proud and seismically flamboyant artistic expression of gender fluidity. Not plain, not simple, but also bedrock, rising above ground only in culturally adventurous cities.
Harpy Daniels, Trixy's twin, is a U.S. Navy sailor who’s had three deployments on the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan. Soon that seaman, Petty Officer 1st Class Joshua Kelley, who just reenlisted, moves from a base in Norfolk, Virginia, to one in Spain, with plans to pack a wig “and maybe one or two cute outfits but nothing over the top” for Harpy-style shore leave.
Alexus hit high school and upped her Halloween game. She soon entered her first drag performance in the small Pennsylvania coal town of Weishample. “I’m not a man,” Kelley says. “I never will see myself as a man. And I don’t see myself as a woman, either. But I see myself as beyond that.” Until 2011, the armed forces applied the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which accepted LGBTQ+ people only if they stayed mum about their sexual orientation.