San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
FLORIDA MAN: THE DRAG STAR GOING DEEPER
Lady Voldemort debuted in August 2018 at a Harry Potterthemed drag show in San Francisco’s Mission District. Back then, she was just another in the long line of campy characters that Florida Elizabeth Man had brought to the stage.
This femmedout version of the Harry Potter villain with the same reptilian face was a crowd favorite that night, but it wasn’t until a few months later that she truly caught on. At Oasis SF, Lady Voldemort did a striptease to Ariana Grande’s “Dangerous Woman” ( revealing fishnets and cartoonishly padded hips under her robe) before having a wand fight with Harry, only to wind up making out with him. Vigorously.
That night, the crowd went wild — and so did the internet. Eventually, the performance made it all the way to Grande herself. “Never knew i needed this,” she tweeted, “but now that it’s here, i only know my life in two chapters ... life before sexy voldemort stripping to dangerous woman and life after sexy voldemort stripping to dangerous woman.”
Throughout 2019, Florida Man’s profile in the competitive world of drag grew as she flew around the country and occasionally overseas to perform. There was a sense that momentum was building toward an epic, maybe even careerchanging 2020. What did she have planned?
“My God, that question sucks,” she says. “At the very beginning of the year, I went to go film ‘ Britain’s Got Talent,’ and there’s a chance I would have been back over the summer filming that. And I also had a European tour scheduled for the month of October that would have paid for my rent for the whole year.
“I was definitely going into 2020 being like, ‘ This year is going to be the best year ever!’ ”
Instead, the bottom fell out and live drag was all but canceled. So Florida Man responded the way a lot of other performers did — she started streaming. The shows were imperfect, she says, but they offered a small “source of relief” for both the performers and the audiences. Plus, the money was good, at first.
“There was this initial rush of ‘ We have to support our artists,’ ” she says. Eventually, though, contributions dwindled and government aid ran out. In June, Florida Man decided to take a break from drag.
Still, she says, 2020 has been one of her “best years.”
“I think I’ve come out of this with a lot of growth that will be better for the long term than the short term,” she says. “As an artist, we got an opportunity to explore how we respond under different constraints, and I think that is a really powerful thing.”
This year grounded and clarified both her perspective and her performance art. “It’s so much more fulfilling for me if I’m having earnest conversations about topics that I care about and things that feel like they mean something.” It’s not that she’s done with comedy or levity, but “I’m not as afraid to go deep anymore.”
And if she started the year looking to Europe, Florida Man is ending it feeling more connected to San Francisco, the city that made her.
“I had some viral recognition. I was getting booked all over the country. But what I was really missing out on was that local connection, the local scene that literally built me up to be the person and the performer I am,” she says. “Those are the networks that held tight. … They’re the ones who had my back when I was spiraling, when I felt like I didn’t have a place.”