Bedroom Queen to Rugirl: An Interview with Lydia Kollins

Fourteen new queens made a splash in the new season of RuPaul’s Drag Race this year, marking the show’s 17th season with water-themed promo shoots and a twist where Michelle Visage will be dunked into a water tank, just like at the state fair, in order to save two queens from elimination. The cast includes more trans queens than ever and is as diverse as we’ve come to expect from the show. Katy Perry and Doechii joined the panel of judges in the show’s first and second episodes, respectively. The queens are participating in challenges such as a talent show, a Monopoly-themed fashion ball, and a musical challenge where classic Drag Race moments were reimagined in music form, but there will certainly be more to come for these queens.

Recently, I had the privilege of catching up with my old friend and RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 17 star Lydia B. Kollins. I know her from years and years ago, nearly a decade at this point. We both used to be a part of the “teen queen” community on Instagram, and at the height of its popularity in the late 2010s, there were several competitions being posted with a format similar to Drag Race‘s elimination style. Lydia participated in one such competition that had expanded to a video format on YouTube, Drag Showdown. This was the first video-based teen queen competition, and Lydia took it by storm, placing top three in Season 3 of the competition. Now, Lydia is taking the Werk Room by similar storm with hopes high and a will to win.

At the time of this interview, Lydia had just returned from DragCon UK, where she seemed to fit in well among the aesthetics of the area. “I kind of give London,” she confirms when I ascribed her as someone I’d definitely see walking around in the U.K.. She will also be returning to the U.K. this spring to do a show at Heaven, an iconic London gay nightclub. Prior to that, she’ll be making stops on tour in New York, Nashville, and Seattle among others. She’s certainly going to be keeping busy, but no planned stops in Denver yet, sadly.

Reflecting on the olden days of yore when we were all unhinged teenage drag queens posting our looks on Instagram for attention, Lydia appreciates the ability to get more eyes on her art and to have ascended from fake, amateur reality TV to real, actual reality TV. She laughs when I jokingly suggest she’s already used to the fame, seeing how popular she always was online. “It’s the same old Lydia, it’s just a lot more eyes on her,” she says of her newfound fame. She is indeed the same queen I know from the teen queen era. She’s always been crafty and creative, a little clever, and, as she puts it, “Muppet-y.”

Lydia takes her name from Lydia Deetz from Beetlejuice, and her aesthetic runs in a similar vein. “Tim Burton, first and foremost, the girl with the blue skin,” she says of her fashion inspiration. She also loves runway shows from the 80s, 90s, and 2000s with some of her favorites being Mugler and an apparent guilty pleasure for Gucci. As for her performance style, she gives emotional acting while serving Bride of Frankenstein vibes. “Freshly reanimated,” she calls it, and attributes her performance style to being “her first time able to walk.” As I have seen firsthand, though, Lydia also knows how to serve a fierce face and cunty vibes with her strikingly gorgeous and severe mug. “It’s a little alarming, (…) but I love telling a story with my performances.”

Indeed a story she did tell with her Drag Queens Got Talent number in the first episode, where she and her puppet had matching sparkly red outfits that tore away burlesque-style. What is that story, you may ask? Well, it’s the story of Lydia’s love for making her own drag and being crafty. It certainly stood out among other performances in the talent show as a unique showcase of her point of view in drag.

Growing up, Lydia’s creativity and love of drag was nurtured by the loving support of her mom. “She was such a strong, safe, comforting presence in my life. If anything was wrong, I would look to my mom.” She also describes her mother glowingly as a glamorous and gorgeous woman. Lydia also looked up to Lady Gaga, whom she describes as “the mother of all little gay boys.” When asked about her first performance in drag, she calls it “terrible” and describes a number set to “Abracadabra” by the Steve Miller Band where she played a rabbit coming out of a giant cardboard hat. “There were, like, four people in the audience,” she says, but I still catch a hint of nostalgia from the twinkle in her eye.

Ten years ago, Lydia discovered the teen queen community on Instagram and became a bedroom queen trying to make it big in the scene. And she did, with memorable runs on drag competitions like Instagram’s Queens Purgatory, among others. Lydia and I look back on teen queen competitions and drama now and laugh, but they were serious business back then, with the “Pretties” clique running the entire scene and other sagas of obnoxious teenage drag queen behavior.

There are also several iconic moments that became memes, such as a queen lipsyncing outside in her backyard before her mom bursts out the door and shouts about how “the neighbors don’t want to see this shit.” “There’s no one out here right now,” the young queen protests. “Well OBVIOUSLY they have windows!” the mom retorts back in an instantly classic, endlessly replayable exchange. Lydia and I reminisced on a few moments like this and, in some ways, we miss them dearly.

Lydia does indeed attribute the teen queen community and its competitions to her competitive nature now, and feels like the teen queen experience helped shape her into the queen she is today. “I definitely learned a lot,” she says. Now, the approach is a more old-fashioned process where her sisters and daughters learn to do drag backstage and onstage, whereas former bedroom queens such as Lydia and myself were sitting in our rooms honing our crafts, earning us the label “bedroom queens.” Lydia reveals that even to this day she has trouble finishing an outfit, a problem that has plagued her since the days of bedroom drag. “Making an outfit from the front is the easiest thing, but getting the back done is another story,” she tells me. However, as she says, you can always shove a safety pin through it.

Lydia’s favorite look she did as a teen queen is her Cannibal Holocaust-inspired look featuring a pole impaling the queen from her mouth to her butthole. Speaking of Butthole, which is what her middle initial stands for, she adopted that nickname thanks to that costume … we hope. But before that, as a teen queen, “I was Lydia Chlamydia,” she laughs. She still talks to some of her drag friends made during the teen queen era, and her best friend of all time is a queen named Alice Blue. She describes the teen queen community as a “microcosm” and says the process of creating her own work gave her a sense of what competition feels like, and lit a fire under her to reach new heights. “It definitely (…) got me in the mindset to want to compete,” she says of the community.

Overall, Lydia is a new rags-to-riches story on Drag Race where a bedroom queen is thrust into the spotlight of being a famous celebrity drag queen, and Drag Race is just the start. Lydia jokes about fist fighting Suzie Toot on national television, alluding to some possible shady drama or perhaps just a friendly rivalry. In Season 17, in three of her own words, Lydia will be serving concepts, kookiness, and stupidity. I’m sure Lydia will be not only camping it up and serving devastatingly beautiful looks on the runway, but stealing the hearts of queer Americans who watch the show all over the country in the process, just as she originally captured the attention of Instagram in the early days of her drag.

Photos courtesy of MTV and Paramount