Overview:
Denver drag star Yvie Oddly talks about her career, her love of Pride celebrations and why she has lived in the area for so long.
A bright green hot wheel with a black fur tail drives through the doorway, slithering around the floor. Yvie Oddly storms into the Werk Room, where contestants prepare for the runway, in a matching green dress with enough gold jewelry to open a pawn shop.
“Move over, ladies, this race just took an odd turn,” Oddly said with a devilish smile. It was clear the game had shifted.
This was Oddly’s introduction to the world on season 11 of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” She won hearts with her beautifully eccentric looks, infectious laugh and overall charm. After winning, she took her charisma, uniqueness, nerve and talent back to the very city that she got her start in: Denver, Colorado.
With several trips around the world and an “All Stars, All Winners” competition in 2022, Oddly has become a household name in the world of drag queens. However, this hometown hero didn’t create this persona overnight.
Spilling the tea, Oddly shared that she began her drag career at the age of 18, performing at a Valentine’s Day event on Auraria Campus in Denver. To prepare for the show, she bought the prettiest dress she could find in the cheap section of Ross, wore her only heels and painted her face.
“I put it on over my school clothes and then walked around and went to my classes that day for the first time in public, in drag,” Oddly explains. “And my life was forever changed.”
Part of what was difficult in the beginning for Oddly was the lack of exposure to the world of drag. She reflects that as an 18-year-old, Thursday nights at Tracks were the only hint of an inviting space for her. That was part of her push to try drag and find community.
“I put my name on the list because I have always been an artist, and it took me a long time to grapple with the fact that I’ve always been some sort of queer,” Oddly said. “So I knew that putting queerness at the forefront of my art was gonna change my life in ways that I didn’t want to like.”
After this experience, Oddly jumped into the world of drag, performing at every event in Denver possible. In 2014, Oddly auditioned for the Ultimate Queen competition at Tracks (now called the Ultimate Drag Competition) and did not make it. This was a tough blow, as Oddly felt her style of drag was being misunderstood, a theme that has followed her throughout her career.
“Nobody had the ambition to be greater than an entertaining drag queen on a Friday night,” Oddly said. On “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” there were so many kinds of queens with unique styles and brands, but that wasn’t what Oddly was seeing in Denver. She was frustrated by this lack of vision and wanted more weird, strange queens like herself.
The next year, Oddly won the competition. The Ultimate Queen competition prize was a guaranteed six-month residency in Drag Nation, which means that Oddly got to perform at Tracks for their bigger shows that featured touring queens. This opened the networking gates and laid the groundwork for getting on “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”
Oddly starred in RuPaul’s Drag Race season 11 in 2019, and the rest is her-story. She was consistently a top contender throughout her season and stood out with her unique takes on runway themes and quirky wit.
Where many queens of her fame have opted for living in larger cities like Los Angeles or New York City, Oddly has a deep love for Denver and its ever growing queer spaces.
“I feel like Denver’s just become the city that I needed growing up,” Oddly said. “And that’s magical.”
Oddly explains that when she came out in her teens, Denver had very little to offer for queer people other than Tracks and Pride month celebrations. She distinctly remembers Pride month being this time where all the queer people she never saw represented in her day-to-day crawled out of the woodworks.
“Pride has always been that place where, at least in my heart, it’s nice for a city full of people who are just blending in, or living or trying to exist,” Oddly said. “Being like, ‘No, we take up space,’ and just our existence in itself is a protest.”
Though Denver has always been a refuge for people in the surrounding redder states, Oddly shares that she’s been blown away by how much Denver has grown in her lifetime. When she tours the U.S. doing shows, some cities have one LGBTQ+ bar or even one night that’s queer at a straight bar. Hearing stories about how these cities used to have more queer spaces but they all got shut down, only furthers Oddly’s appreciation for Denver when she comes back.
“How many places in the U.S. right now can claim that they just opened a new lesbian bar?” Oddly said, referencing the opening of The Pearl. “That is so wild to me. In a culture that is being sucked away anywhere else, Denver just casually has one.”
With that, Oddly hopes that her story and Willow Pill’s, the only other winner of “Drag Race” from Denver, inspire Denverites to push the boundaries of what Denver has for queer people.
“If you think big enough, if you work hard enough, and if you try and explore what it means to be yourself in the wildest ways, you’re going to be representing this place way better than anyone could,” Oddly said.
