16 | QSALTLAKE MAGAZINE | SNEAK PEEK AT UTAH PRIDE
Qsaltlake.com |
Issue 298 | APRIL 18, 2019
A Sneak Peek at Utah Pride Headliner — BY MICHAEL AARON
AJA
Utah Pride
announced that one of the headline acts at this year’s festival will be queer musical artist Aja. If you’ve heard of Aja, it’s probably because they were on season 9 of Ru Paul’s Drag Race and last year’s All Stars 3, but you might not know that Aja is also a singer/songwriter who has dropped nearly two dozen songs, 15 of which on a new album released in February. Aja is the stage personality of 25-yearold Jay Rivera, who was adopted and raised by a single Puerto Rican mother in Brooklyn. They claim to be of Moroccan, Egyptian and Libyan descent.
DRAG At the age of 16, Aja was drawn to drag almost as a lark. “Honestly, I was watching the
second season of Drag Race with my cousin and she was like, ‘you could do this.’ I looked over at her like she was crazy,” Aja told AM New York. Aja said they threw on a cousin’s wig and heels, and entered in Manhattan drag competitions at venues like Posh Bar, Stonewall Inn, Metropolitan bar and the now-shuttered Sugarland, a place where “weirdos and club kids” reigned supreme. Aja said that drag was therapeutic and changed their life. “I used to suffer from really terrible PTSD and when I started doing drag, I stopped having panic attacks very quickly. They went from being very significant to very minor and then they just stopped,” they said. Moving out to be on their own at 18, Aja lived as a trans woman for a year and then took the term genderqueer. After coming in 9th place on Ru Paul’s Drag Race, Aja began to eschew the term “drag queen.” “My decision to release the phrase ‘drag queen’ has less to do with opinions in the mainstream media and more to do with my personal decision as a queer person,” Aja told them. “When I started making music, I had a lot of gender identity issues through my writing, and I thought it would be more comfortable for me to say I’m a queer artist who puts on hair and makeup, and if people want to look at it as drag, they can. I don’t consider myself to be a drag queen for the sake of not confusing my own identity.” Aja said that a number of Ru Paul alums should embrace the term queer artist more readily than drag queen. “There are other performers in the community who do other art forms, who I would consider more
PHOTOS: TANNER ABEL
a ‘queer artist’ than just a ‘drag queen.’ For example, Violet Chachki: she knows her burlesque and her perception of gender is so blurred that I can’t really just say ‘drag queen,’ so I feel more comfortable saying queer artist. “Or someone like Sasha Velour, who curates these big shows and spaces for queer people — I would never want to reduce titling her as just a drag queen. Even someone like Bianca Del Rio, who’s traveling the world doing comedy, she’s doing more than just being a drag queen. These are people who are taking their talents and showing them through drag in the media.”
MUSICIAN Aja began posting music online as a teenager as a way to get their point of view out there and continued to make music as a way to be heard. In February, Aja released their most ambitious music collection, Box Office. Aja says the track placement of Box Office is in sequential order of the events in their life, highlighted in the music, and plays out as small stories, all connected to make one larger narrative piece. In the music, one should get a sense of the real Aja. “In the album, I’m really just being myself and putting forward who I’ve always been. I feel like I’m not scared to, and I really hope people listen to it and realize they can just be themselves,” Aja told Canada’s IN Magazine. “I feel as a queer person in hip-hop, or music period, there’s sort of pigeonholing where people want you to be a certain way, look a certain way, act a certain way, and I’m just not. I don’t fit that mold, and it’s a mold I’ll never fit. I’ll never be like, the sassy-person-of-colorqueer-artist, I’ll never be that. I can only be me. So I really feel like it was more important for me to just be myself.” Some may believe that it would be hard or scary for an artist that reveals so much of themselves through their music. “Honestly, it wasn’t that hard to be open. I think the real battle to overcome when you’re just trying to be yourself and transparent is understanding and knowing that people are going to judge you positively and negatively. It will be personal but at the same time it doesn’t matter because when you’re being yourself, you know, it’s just the most important part of living. Just being you and being an
