Don’t tell JD Vance, but a church is a great place to nurture a future drag queen. She can develop an arsenal of talents: singing, sewing, working a crowd. And the church itself, with flowers on the altar, stained-glass windows, and the priest raising a gold chalice to his lips, can teach a queen a thing or two about ornamentation, theatricality, and hitting your mark.
“Church taught me that I’m capable of anything I put my mind to,” says Sapphira Cristál, who grew up attending the same church in Houston as Beyoncé and who achieved national fame as runner-up on season 16 of RuPaul’s Drag Race earlier this year.
Cristál will be one of the grand marshals for this year’s Provincetown Carnival parade on Thursday, Aug. 22 alongside drag performer Kevin Aviance and state Rep. Sarah Peake. The night before the parade, she’ll perform with her drag daughter Qya Cristál at Provincetown Town Hall.
Houston felt like a sprawling wonderland of art and music to the young Sapphira, who was born in Bryan, Texas in 1988 as O’Neill Nichol Haynes. “My experience growing up in Texas was different than what I later heard it was like for others,” she says. “I loved it. My mom played classical music for me in utero. When I was a kid, she would take me to the opera, the ballet, and classical music concerts.”
In middle school, Cristál would go to the library and listen to recordings of Paul Robeson singing spirituals. “I was obsessed with his voice,” she says. During Black History Month one year, a classmate was assigned the premier solo, singing “Wade in the Water.” But she was doing it all wrong, Cristál says — there was no oomph to her voice. “So, in the middle of the classroom, I just started singing it.” The music teacher turned around, and the solo was promptly reassigned.
Cristál went on to Houston’s Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. “It was really formative for me,” she says. “I was surrounded by people who took this life seriously.”
After graduation, Cristál enrolled at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., where she studied composition and opera. One night at a gay bar she saw the drag queen Delicious performing.
“When I saw her on that stage, I thought, ‘I need to be a drag queen,’ ” Cristál says. She approached Delicious and asked for help getting started. “She sighed and said, ‘OK, fine,’ ” Cristál recalls. “It was the first day of the rest of my life.”
Drag wasn’t a far cry from opera. “I think all opera is drag,” Cristál says. “It’s so gaudy, it’s so big, it’s so grand, it’s so everything.” Her performances are operatic: wearing a ball gown and a two-foot-tall wig, she either sings or lip-synchs arias while doing splits and bouncing up and down across the stage.
“People who don’t see lip-synching as an art aren’t seeing good lip-synching,” Cristál says. “Proper lip-synching is true connection to music, just like singing.”
Cristál’s lip-synching is mesmerizing. It’s a bit of a mind warp — her gestures are so precise that you find yourself wondering if it isn’t really her producing the sounds. “I’m listening to every beat, every note, every breath and where it comes in,” she told Philadelphia Gay News.
In her version of Puccini’s soprano aria “O mio babbino caro” she flies up and down the scales with preternatural ease. The lyrics are in Italian, but Cristál’s voice conveys the emotions of the song perfectly whether you understand the words or not.
Cristál moved to Boston to study at the Longy School of Music, and in 2011 she found herself homeless. One day, she says, she got a call from Ryan Landry. “He said, ‘Girl, you need to come to Provincetown.’ ” Landry got her a job and a place to live and paid her first month’s rent. Cristál came back to Provincetown for the following three summers.
That kind of caregiving is a staple of the drag community, and Cristál has continued the tradition. She is the drag mother — the term for an established drag queen who “shows a new queen the ropes,” Cristál says — of Provincetown singer and performer Qya Cristál.
“Some drag mothers are literally your second mother,” says Sapphira. “They’ve taken you in, they feed you, they clothe you. A lot of people have lost their families through the art of drag or just through coming out as gay.”
One summer when Cristál was visiting Provincetown, people kept telling her there was a young queen who was the spitting image of her. “I said ‘OK, whatever,’ ” says Cristál. “How much could she resemble me? But then I met her. I don’t usually seek out my daughters. I let them come to me. But Qya had such star power.” The family resemblance is evident: like Sapphira, Qya is a powerful vocalist who knows how to capture and hold the attention of her audience.
Sapphira says she’s excited to reunite with Qya and about returning to Provincetown. “It has an energy unlike any other place I’ve been,” she says. “I want to give Provincetown the performance it deserves.” Expect to see her end her show with a familiar ritual: she asks everyone in the audience to hug themselves and say, “I truly love and accept myself.” It’s Cristál’s way of extending drag’s ecosystem of care — from the stage all the way to the back row.
One Night Only
The event: Sapphira Cristál performs with her drag daughter Qya Cristál
The time: Wednesday, Aug. 21, 8:30 p.m.
The place: Provincetown Town Hall, 260 Commercial St.
The cost: $85-$165 ($45 for under 25; I.D. required) at ptown.org
