Per Sia on Drag, Transition, and Coming Home to Herself

by | Jun 20, 2026 | LGBTQ+ | 0 comments

Per Sia on Drag, Transition, and Coming Home to Herself

Per Sia on Drag, Transition, and Coming Home to Herself

As we continue to celebrate Pride at Bernal Connect, we sat down with San Francisco’s Drag Laureate, Per Sia. She is the city’s second Drag Laureate, following D’Arcy Drollinger, the artistic director of Oasis Nightclub, who became the world’s first Drag Laureate when she was appointed by then-Mayor London Breed in May 2023.

On an afternoon in December 2015, Per Sia sat in front of a room full of neighborhood kids and their parents, holding a picture book and trying not to let them see how nervous she was. She had spent years building a life around hiding pieces of herself in plain sight: drag queen by night, fourth-grade teaching assistant by day, two worlds she kept carefully separate. Now those worlds were colliding, and there was no taking it back.

That first Drag Story Hour reading on December 12, 2015, came about almost by accident. Per Sia had written an article about what it was like to be both a TA and a drag performer, and the piece had gone viral. Radar Productions came calling, looking for someone to read to kids in drag, and Per Sia, who had helped found the program, became its first performer. What struck her most wasn’t the fear of judgment. It was the relief. For once, she didn’t have to hide who she was from the very families who already knew her, day in and day out, as the patient adult helping their kids learn to read.

That tension between visibility and safety, between performance and authenticity, runs through Per Sia’s whole story, one that now spans nearly two decades of San Francisco drag history and, more recently, a public transition she’s chosen to live through openly, in a city that’s watched her grow up onstage.

Per Sia is a transgender woman, drag queen, and educator who spends her weekday afternoons teaching first graders at an after-school art program here in San Francisco. She’s also a first-generation trans Mexican-American, raised in South Central Los Angeles, a background that shapes how she talks about identity, family, and the long road to feeling at home in herself.

Starting at Jet

Per Sia’s drag life began in 2007 at a bar called Jet, in a Castro storefront that used to be known as Detour, a long way from the South Central LA neighborhood where she grew up. She didn’t set out to become a performer. She started out photographing drag queens, hanging around the edges of the scene with a camera instead of a wig. Performing herself began almost as a joke, something she didn’t take entirely seriously at first. But the joke had staying power. It turned into a nine-month run of Sunday night shows that lasted until the venue itself closed its doors.

From there, Per Sia found her way to the old Esta Noche in the Mission, where she became a regular for several years. It was a different drag landscape than the one most folks know today. This was the pre-Drag Race era, before the visual language of drag had been standardized by reality television and YouTube tutorials. At Esta Noche and the other Latino venues where Per Sia came up, most of the performers were trans women, a sharp contrast to the cis-male-dominated, whiter rooms elsewhere in the city. If you wanted to learn how to do your makeup, there was no influencer to watch. You went to the MAC counter and asked the staff to show you in person.

It was a scrappier, more intimate way to learn an art form, one built on relationships and trial and error rather than tutorials, in rooms where drag wasn’t yet a mainstream spectacle but something closer to a community’s private language.

A Health Crisis, and a Reckoning

For most of her career, Per Sia used drag as a way to explore gender expression without having to fully claim it. Drag became, in a sense, a holding space, a place to try on identity before she was ready to live inside it full time. That changed during the pandemic, when two things happened almost in parallel: she found herself moved by Veneno, the HBO Max biographical series chronicling the life and tragic death of Cristina Ortiz Rodríguez, the Spanish transgender icon, singer, and television personality known as “La Veneno,” and she was doing work with Frameline that put her in deeper contact with stories of trans women’s lives. Something in her own identity began to surface that she could no longer set aside.

The moment that made it impossible to ignore came in January 2021. After walking around the city, Per Sia went through a frightening health crisis: broken bones, dangerously high blood pressure, the kind of event that forces a person to take stock of their whole life at once. Lying in the aftermath of that crisis, she arrived at a clarity she hadn’t let herself reach before: she needed to stop holding her identity at arm’s length and fully embrace who she was.

Coming out as trans followed, and the reception was mixed, as these things often are. Many friends and family members were supportive. Her father, she says candidly, is still working through it, still processing, still catching up. It’s not a closed chapter so much as an ongoing one, and Per Sia talks about it without bitterness, simply as the truth of where things stand right now.

Her own experience has changed the way she shows up for the students in her life. As an educator, she’s become someone trans kids and their parents can turn to, not because she has all the answers, but because she’s lived the particular vertigo of figuring out who you are in public. She talks to her students about how bodies and identities change over time, that it’s normal, even expected, to experiment with different aspects of gender and self before landing somewhere solid. It’s a lesson she had to learn for herself, decades into a life already lived in front of audiences, and she now offers it to kids who are just beginning to ask the questions she spent years avoiding.

Ambassador of the Stage

Today, Per Sia carries the title of San Francisco’s second Drag Laureate, following D’Arcy Drollinger, the Oasis Nightclub artistic director who, as the city’s and the world’s first Drag Laureate, set the template for the role during her 18-month appointed term. For Per Sia, the position has turned years of performing into something closer to neighborhood service. As laureate, she sees her role as an ambassador for the drag community, someone tasked with making the case, again and again, for what drag performers bring to the city’s classrooms and community spaces, not just its nightlife.

That ambassador work has taken real shape. She’s developing a storytelling initiative with sf.gov aimed at humanizing the issues facing San Francisco residents, using personal connection to cut through the abstractions that policy debates so often get lost in. She continues traveling throughout the Bay Area for Drag Story Hour readings, more than a decade after that first nervous night back in December 2015.

Through all of it, El Rio has stayed home base. Per Sia maintains a deep-rooted residency and history at the beloved Mission District institution, performing her show on its stage. As a cornerstone of the city’s LGBTQ+ and arts scene, El Rio has given her a patio and stage to return to again and again, for community gatherings, Latinx dance parties, and the kind of advocacy work that doesn’t always make headlines but holds a neighborhood together.

What she comes back to, again and again, is the importance of creating safe spaces: for drag performers, for trans neighbors, for kids meeting identities and expressions they’ve never seen before. In a moment when so much of life happens through screens, Per Sia’s work, onstage, in classrooms, in story circles, is built on something stubbornly old-fashioned: showing up in a room with your neighbors and talking to them directly, face to face, the same way she once learned to do her own makeup, one conversation at a time.

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