5 Things Mathematicians And Drag Queens Have In Common
The hidden intersections of math and drag, from a math-loving drag queen
One of the best parts of my job is seeing people’s reactions to hearing that I’m a math-teaching drag queen.
I started doing this completely on a whim 4 years ago. Before that, I just did math and drag separately, like I was Hannah Montana if Hannah Montana was an Asian math undergraduate student by day and a high-kicking drag queen doing the splits at a gay bar by night.
Then Covid-19 came along and turned my life upside down. Maybe it was the boredom of being in quarantine, or my wig was on too tight, but I decided to start posting math riddles on this new app called TikTok. My followers knew me for my wig tutorials and drag videos, but I thought it would be funny to take up my university math homework and tell riddles dressed in drag like I was the kooky old troll under the bridge in Dora The Explorer.
Here was the first riddle I posted:
If a dress and a pair of shoes together cost $100 total, and the dress is $99 more expensive than the shoes, how much are the shoes?
Hint: the answer is not $1!
To see the solution, watch the video!
After a couple weeks, the math videos started blowing up. Like, millions of views.
I think people liked seeing the juxtaposition of a math lesson coming from someone who looks like the total opposite of a stereotypical math professor.
After all, drag is art, and art is fun, creative, silly, and has no rules, whereas math is nothing but rules. The chain rule, the quotient rule, exponent rules, BEDMAS rules…long, complicated, arbitrary procedures you don’t really understand but you know you have to memorize, all for your answer to either be right or wrong with no in between.
…Or at least that seems to be the consensus among people I meet when they tell me about their experiences with math class! Unfortunately there are a lot of problems with math education (and education in general but that rant will have to wait for another day), and people have a grave misunderstanding of what mathematicians and drag queens do!
Here’s my list of 5 things that mathematicians and drag queens have in common.
1. They both operate under forced constraints
It’s easy to see how math has forced constraints. There’s a whole toolbox of math tricks you have to get the hang of, like times tables, long division, addition, fractions, splits, spread eagles, backflips, and flip flops one right after the other. Without a lot of practice, those rules can seem confusing and hard to get used to.
But anyone who’s been to a drag competition knows that drag has rules too. We take our craft seriously! As a drag artist, you have to lipsync your words properly (including all the ad-libs), match your makeup to your exposed skin and pantyhose, and make sure your body proportions look sickening. Your clothes have to fit you perfectly, and your wig should be on tight enough so that it doesn’t fall off while you’re dancing. If the wig does come off, you better have something fabulous underneath like rose petals or another wig.
Another rule: never wear H&M in front of RuPaul.
At top drag pageants, the rules are even more strict. You may get away with looking a little busted at the local dive bar, but if you’re competing for Miss Gay America, you have to look flawless. According to the official handbook, a queen’s evening gown should fall half an inch above the floor, their sleeve should be no shorter than the wrist when the arm is bent and no longer than an inch below the wrist when the arm is hanging straight; tattoos must be covered up, and the neckline shouldn’t be puckered. Even the lining of your dress should be steamed to perfection in the rare case that a judge might see a wrinkle in it while you twirl around. Bare, unkempt nails are unacceptable, and so is dirty jewelry and torn pantyhose.
At the end of the pageant, you can look at your scoresheets, see what you did wrong, and improve for next time. Just like a math exam.
Rules aren’t necessarily a bad thing. In a sense, it’s the rules that make drag a distinct art form, just as haikus are characterized by the 5-7-5 syllabic structure, and Shakespearean poetry is characterized by iambic pentameter.
Forced constraints can be the best breeding grounds for creativity. Dr. Seuss once made a bet with his publisher that he could write a book using a set of at most 50 different words. It resulted in one of his most memorable books: Green Eggs and Ham.
You see, drag performers are constrained to the traditional archetype that people expect to see when they go to a drag show: gender-performance, lipsyncing, exaggerated makeup, and illusion. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel to be a good drag queen. Some of the very best drag performers in the world are ones who simply study the scoresheet, look gorgeous, and perform the house down. Which brings me to the next thing that drag queens and mathematicians have in common…
2. They both practice
We have this notion that everyone who’s good at math is just a “math person”. Numbers simply make sense to them. Look at the movie Good Will Hunting: a janitor with a troubled past is tidying up a classroom at MIT when he easily solves a graduate level math problem left on the chalkboard.
Movies like this endorse the notion that people who are good at math are just geniuses who can understand difficult problems without really trying. Students who get frustrated over their math homework then tell themselves “maybe I’m just not a math person”.
Here’s the real tea: the only way you get good at math is the same way you get good at doing drag, playing the violin, playing basketball, or speaking a new language: PRACTICE!
Save for those with learning disabilities like dyscalculia, being “bad at math” is just how every beginner starts out. Every great athlete was once bad at their sport. Every great dancer started out by learning the basics. Every great drag queen looked terrible their first time in drag. However I am not a great drag queen so my first time wasn’t so bad:
See, I’m a firm believer that gay people are capable of doing anything we can set our minds to. Build a house? I’ll learn how and I’ll do it. Become a football player? Pass me the shoulderpads. You might call it delusion, I call it confidence! You want to become a mathematician? You can do it! You just have to believe in yourself and put in the practice.
I used to do my makeup every day before school so that I could master the basics. That’s how I managed to look pretty good my first time in drag (at least from the neck up).
When I studied math at the University of Waterloo, we were expected to put in 60 hours of work each week, between 20 hours of lectures and 40 hours of studying. The more practice you put in, the more those arbitrary rules and constraints start to feel natural and familiar. Soon you can multiply 1 digit numbers together in your head, like 4 x 8, and then you’ll start to learn tricks for multiplying 2 digit numbers. Your friends will all say things like, “you’re a math genius!” but you know it was just practice.
3. They both break the rules
Sometimes, the rules can be broken with artistic flair. A drag queen might perform a song sung by a man, or mess up her lyrics if it’s entertaining. She might even tear off her wig and heels on stage if she has artistic intention behind it. Some of the most moving drag performances break all the rules. Watch Morgan McMichaels performing “If I Were A Boy” at Showgirls in LA:
It’s the rulebreakers that push the boundaries of drag and keep our artform growing and evolving. That’s the very essence of drag: defying gender norms, defying expectations, and defying authority.
It’s also the very essence of math. Breakthroughs are made by rebel mathematicians who broke the rules and ventured into uncharted territory.
What if we could subtract a larger quantity from a smaller quantity? This was seen as impossible! But it was that insight that led to the discovery of negative numbers.
What if we could multiply a number by itself and get a negative number? Unthinkable! A positive number squared gives a positive result, and a negative number squared also gives a positive result. Then there’s zero, but zero squared equals zero. The thought of a number squared equaling a negative number was once seen as preposterous, but it led to the discovery of complex numbers, which are used throughout the computer programs you use every day.
What if the angles of a triangle didn’t add up to 180 degrees? It used to be accepted as common knowledge that every triangle has interior angles which added to 180, but the person who questioned that assumption ended up discovering a whole new world of geometry, which may be the secret to understanding the shape of our very universe.
We’ll get into the nitty gritty of non-Euclidean geometry and complex numbers another time. In fact, I write about all these mathematical rulebreakers in detail in my book, Math In Drag, which comes out on March 5th, and is available for preorder now!
The biggest mathematical rule breaker of them all may have been the one who asked, what is math? Is math invented or discovered?
In 19th century, mathematicians all over the world embarked on a program to put all our mathematical tools under a microscope: What are numbers? Why does 1+1=2? How do we prove what’s true? How do we trust our proofs?
The courage to break the mold and be true to yourself unites both mathematicians and drag queens in their pursuit of wonder.
4. They both do it for fun
Last year I got the pleasure of interviewing Craig Kaplan, the University of Waterloo professor who helped discover the hat-tile.
Here’s a short video I made about it to catch you up on what makes this thing special.
Here’s a link to the same video on TikTok, which got over 12 million views!
Whenever new mathematical discoveries like these get published, people are quick to ask, “what’s the point? What real-life application does this have?” but the thing is, mathematicians don’t need a real-life application. If we’re lucky, someone finds one decades later. Here’s a link to a video I made about an application of aperiodic tilings to nature!
Real-life applications of math do indeed exist. But it’s not the mathematician’s job to find them. Their discoveries don’t need to make anyone money or make anyone’s lives comfier. They do math because of the joy of adventure, and the thrill of pushing the boundaries of human knowledge. For mathematicians, fun is a good enough application. Art is a good enough application. Just like drag.
There isn’t a drag queen or mathematician on the face of this green Earth who went into this business to get rich. We do it because it feeds our brains and nourishes our souls.
5. They both use metaphor to reveal the truth
Mathematicians may use lines and logic while drag queens use lipstick and mascara. But in both worlds, illusion and metaphor is used to represent deeper truths.
Underneath the many layers of costuming is something very sincere. When queens put on our tights, pads and corsetry, the heavy layers of contour and highlight to change our face structures, we are transforming into the realest versions of ourselves. We’re unleashing our joy, sorrow, grief, and frustration on that stage. Like a phoenix that dies and is reborn from the ashes, we’re rising above years of bullying and shame and spreading our wings as fierce glamazons who just want to dance and fly. Every night, we powder our faces and put on our fake nails, fake eyelashes, and fake diamonds so we can sing about our real dreams, real problems, and real insecurities.
Mathematicians and drag queens operate in abstractions, translating between the real world and the imaginary one.
Mathematicians and drag queens know that beauty isn’t something you can be born with, it’s something you discover for yourself by falling in love with creativity, curiosity, and the thrill of creating something unique.
If you liked this post, you’ll love my new book Math In Drag, available now for preorder!
Love it! Thanks for sharing, and I can't wait to read the book! ❤️