Emmonia

“I got my name from my amazing partner Shawn, which, if you have been around the Edmonton drag scene, you’ve definitely seen him. He is a staple here. But he helped me come up with it because we wanted to make a pun name that really represented me. So we thought of the chemical ammonia. And then I was like, Well, I'm an emo pop punk girl. So I'm going to put an E at the front. And then we thought about it. And we're like Emmonia, this sounds perfect. It’s the most fitting drag name I think I could possibly think of. And it was all thanks to Shawn so kudos to him.
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“Getting into drag has definitely completely changed me as a person. I started it and I was like, I'm gonna make this my whole entire personality. If you see the stuff that I do, you could tell it's like literally all I spend my time on now. When I get passionate about something, it's gung ho ans all I do 24/7. So it definitely changed me as a person, I did not have many queer friends before I had just a few. And now 95% of my friend group are queer and trans folks, it's so much more fun. A lot of them are part of the drag community as well. So it's really impacted every aspect of my life. I now have lived with drag performers for the past four years. So it really has shaped me as a person to be a lot more authentically queer and myself.
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“I think probably the most memorable experience was the first Dragula artist that myself and Party Queens had brought down and I got to host that show. It was really insane. Because that was the first time that we had you know, paid money out of pocket to have a performer. Pick them up from the airport did all of that it was entirely our own production. So it was like, that was a really big moment of being like, wow, this is an official thing. I was a year and a half into drag and I was hosting a celebrity drag artist from South Korea. I was like, this is a crazy opportunity. And that was probably the biggest moment for me.”

“I think drag is truly whatever you want it to be. I think, to me, the most important thing about drag is a transformation and it does not matter necessity mean transforming gender or about anything of that sort to me it's the transformation of creating something that is, is you know, bigger than just you out of drag. The the transformation is not always outward, but can also be an inward feeling that you express outward if that makes sense. Like for me drag is about how outlandish can my costumes and performances be how can I continue to push boundaries, but for some performers it's like so much different and that it is them authentically expressing themselves so it's that transformation from out of drag and into drag - whatever that means to you
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