She gets what he wants.

I remember clearly the first time I met Angel. I had arrived at the auditorium to a line that made showing up an hour early feel of minimal effort. Promotional posts for the show on social media had been clear: Good seats will go fast. Lightning speed, actually. Once I was comfortable in my spot 11 rows deep, the lights flashed, the music began, and Angel sashayed onto the stage. Wearing a black, sequined cupcake dress and blonde wig that ran the length of his spine, he looked like he'd just stepped off a Run the World Tour stage. He was going by his stage name, Angel Dust, that night. The audience cheered so loud I couldn't tell my friend next to me how happy I was that we had come to the drag show. I felt like a Melrose Avenue paparazzo as I waited in the meet-and-greet line for a photo. I had never seen a ten-minute-long Beyoncé medley choreographed with six backup dancers, and I hadn't looked away. As Angel would later explain to me, any good drag performance must be three things: captivating, conceptual, and original.

"It's not good when people are on their phones," he said. According to Angel Zayas, his legal name, a performer is not captivating until every eye in the room is on them, a skill he achieved only with grit. In the adolescence of the 24-year-old's career, he competed in drag competitions up to three times weekly at local Los Angeles bars, consistently placing last or second-to-last in the contests. His efforts in those days came with little praise and smaller pay.

Not even Vanilla, Angel's drag mother, offered much encouragement. Drag queens often begin their careers under the close guidance of a more accomplished, supportive drag queen, or drag mother. "Meh," Vanilla said after one of Angel's early performances at Ithaca College in upstate New York. "You just aren't captivating." After the pair met at a campus meeting for the university's queer student alliance of which Vanilla was the president, Vanilla invited Angel over to play Super Smash Bros. and soon became Angel's best friend. He didn't become Angel's mentor until later, as Angel originally was uninterested in pursuing drag.

Angel and Vanilla in Los Angeles in 2016.

Years earlier, Angel said that a girl at his "liberal but not progressive" high school approached him in the hallway one day and told him there was a show he should watch with her. "It's called RuPaul's Drag Race," she said and offered a synopsis. "I would never watch that," Angel quipped. He told me that he was afraid of the consequences of being associated with drag. "I was so afraid of being gay," he said. "I didn't want to be any more marginalized."

When Angel finally began performing, he wanted to be the best. Vanilla said Angel used to call him after every performance and ask, "What do I need to work on?" Like all good mothers, Vanilla helped his child however he could, including the time he lent Angel money for groceries after Angel transferred to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles from Ithaca five years ago. Still today, Angel sends Vanilla footage of his performances for critiques. "His journey has been really amazing," Vanilla told me.

Angel's first drag performance at Ithaca College.

Angel's journey has been made possible by the generations of performers before him. He is part of a long-established subculture that has thrived for decades. Billy Wilder's 1959 classic Some Like It Hot was one of the first commercially successful representations of drag in cinema, though it viewed men in dresses as nothing more than a punchline. At the same time, police raids increasingly were threatening the refuge real-life drag queens had found in underground gay bars in cities across the country, culminating in the 1969 Stonewall riots. The drag scene emerged from gay men's desire for self-expression and their inability to fit in with existing mainstream cultures.

Today, drag is mainstream. People of all sexual orientations, genders, and ages turn to drag as a well to exercise complete creative freedom. As the artist becomes the art, queens choose to be who they want how they want. "I get to be a supermodel, a dancer, an actor, a social media influencer, a manager, a CEO," said Angel. "All in one being."

Angel said that to be captivating, you have to play to your audience. He remembers vividly the night he "blew the house down" with Jennifer Hudson's "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going" in a drag competition a few years ago. The audience, growing tired of the predictable bubblegum pop music, craved a ballad, and Angel delivered.

That certainly wasn't the first time he'd tailored his performance for a specific audience. He knew that he was gay from an early age and, with his Catholic, Puerta Rican-Nicaraguan parents in mind, thought it'd be best to maintain a low profile. "The comments [in the house] weren't necessarily pro-gay growing up," he told me. Though he always hid some aspects of his personality and interests, he felt freer to be himself at school. There, he was outgoing and opinionated. At home, he was reserved and usually buried in a video game. "If you were to ask my mom and my teachers who I was," he said, "they'd describe different people." Still today, Angel occasionally catches himself deepening his voice when speaking to his mother. Despite one's best efforts, however, "You may not be captivating every performance," Angel said. Drag, like every art form, is completely subjective, and not one that will please all audiences.

Angel had come as a surprise to his parents, one his father wasn't willing to receive. Raised by a single mother of five in Rochester, New York, Angel didn't see much of his father growing up, which made a call from his father one summer day all the more unexpected. The next morning, his father drove upstate and spent the day with his son.

Angel on his fourth birthday, December 4, 1999.

Angel hoped the gesture meant he'd be seeing a lot more of his father. "Then he skipped town the next day," Angel said. The special day had been his father's way of saying goodbye before moving to Florida with another son whose mother had recently been incarcerated for child abuse. After several years without any word from his father, Angel got a Facebook message from him. Their conversation soon soured, and Angel closed the line of communication. "You have to know what the audience wants and what you want," said Angel, "and find a balance between those things."

Great drag performances are also conceptual, something Angel realized long before he learned what drag was. In eighth grade, Angel's school hosted a talent show. Hoping to recreate the Lady Gaga Glee episode by which he'd recently become infatuated, he put his name on the sign-up list. While his peers sang Broadway songs and showcased basketball-dribbling tricks, Angel belted a live version of "Bad Romance" in a homemade full-length gown constructed entirely of stuffed animals with three backup dancers recruited from a pool of classmates. No one could have predicted what that day would have led to. "Angel is just being silly," his teachers and peers said. Even Angel admitted that he participated in the show "for foolishness," but, "I low-key kind of loved it," he said. He loved it so much, in fact, that it inspired him to pursue theater in high school and an acting degree in college.

A concept often begins with a queen's look. Stellar visuals are of paramount importance and are seldom easily realized. Angel is proudest of the look he served for USC's 10th annual drag show last October, which Angel, assistant director of the university's queer student alliance, played a large role in orchestrating. He presented to a designer his ideas for a look inspired by K-pop fashion and sprinkled with nods to Michael Jackson and Beyoncé. Like all of Angel's couture looks, the custom, red vinyl jacket-meets-gown-meets-leotard number was not cheap.

"I've always said that if I didn't do drag, I'd be rich," he scoffed. After I observed for the first time his three-hour-long routine to get ready for a performance, I believed him. I gasped as my mental calculation of the cost of his outfit and makeup eclipsed a thousand dollars. "Covergirl don't cover boy," he explained. I was doubly shocked to learn how little money, on average, drag queens earn on the job. Angel estimated that of the limited number of gigs in L.A., only about a third of those are paid and hardly any of them pay well. He said that clubs may ask queens to do three numbers for $50 a night. "And three numbers mean three outfits." Like many service workers, a drag queen's earnings largely are dependent upon tips. However, he said that tipping culture in L.A. generally is poor. "That's why so many people are working nine-to-fives during the day," he pointed out. "To actually pay the bills."

Angel is no stranger to the hustle, engaging in the practice early. He said his mom did her best to raise him and his four brothers given their circumstances. "It's hard when you get pregnant at 16," he sympathized. Harder still when you've delivered three children by age 18. As the baby of the family, Angel didn't endure the brunt of their poverty. "But I know my siblings ate out of fucking trash cans growing up," he said. "Hard shit."

"I never want to be in a position where I'm living that reality again," he told me around 9 o'clock one Monday night in the third-floor lobby of the student housing building for which he's a Residential Manager. We met so late, because Angel had needed time to get back to his apartment after a full day of classes and customer service center shifts. "The better you can hustle, the less you're going to struggle," he said. "I have to keep going up." And I believed that he would.

What the investment in drag can lack in financial return it often makes up for in social capital, at least in Los Angeles. "The second you're a drag queen in West Hollywood, people respect you," said Angel. "If you're a heavyset, random guy walking down the street, you're judged." He remembered several occasions on which people who had vied for Angel Dust's attention later had not given boy Angel the time of day. The juxtaposition of the two experiences has led Angel to question, "Why does boy me even exist if [he's] not important?"

But he has always believed that God has a plan for him. Angel is not a believer in organized religion, but he does believe in what he recognizes as the two fundamental principles of all religions: "Love, and don't be an asshole." He prays for his friends, for his family, and for guidance. "I believe He'd stop me if I was on the wrong path," Angel said. "And it's so clear this is the right one."

All drag shows must be creative, according to Angel. He concedes that the pillars of drag performances, lip syncs of popular songs, however, are inherently unoriginal to a degree. "But how can you take this song and turn it into your own song?" he asks himself before designing a show, including the February 2019 show he filmed for his first Drag Race audition. For that show, he merged the worlds of Cardi B and Princess Peach, one of his favorite video game characters.

"I thank video games for my entire life," Angel said. Video games were his favorite childhood pastime, and he said they taught him to read. After countless hours of playtime, Angel entered first grade at an eighth-grade reading level. That jumpstart led to a scholarship awarded to Angel in the sixth grade to attend a preparatory high school.

Video games are also how Angel Dust got his name. One day, while playing Xbox with his twin brothers seven years his senior, Angel was forced to create a screenname. Not knowing which name to choose, his naturally mischievous brothers, decided for him. "Dust," they said. "Angel Dust!" Naïve to the cocaine reference, Angel agreed. The name stuck.

Angel with his sister and twin brothers in 1999.

In addition to Princess Peach, Angel's motley inspirations have included anime villains, classic royalty, and Hello Kitty. He has embodied creativity, and people have noticed, including RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars alumna and star of Netflix's Dancing Queen Alyssa Edwards. After Angel's epic Beyoncé number, Edwards pulled him into her dressing room. "You have to do this," she implored, referring to Angel's drag career. "You could be good."

Angel also caught the eye of BuzzFeed this spring. The media conglomerate selected Angel and nine others to be part of its first-ever "class" of content creators. When he got the job, it wasn't just a personal win. "I don't see people like me in the media that often," he said, speaking of his intersectional queer, Latinx, and plus-size identity. "Fighting for that representation has always been my battle." BuzzFeed audiences soon may see even more of Angel, as he currently is workshopping a series centered around him.

Now, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, as drag queens compete for virtual gigs and rely on tips via Venmo, Angel is thankful for the ability to create content for BuzzFeed from home. He's more thankful still for the ability to employ other queens as guests in his videos. "If this were a video game," he told me, "I don't know about the other stats, but my luck stat is off the chart." Angel will 'draguate' with a Bachelor of Arts in Theater degree on May 15, becoming the first in his family to receive a post-secondary degree. "If this is the first class ever," Angel had written in his application for the BuzzFeed creator contract, "I will be the valedictorian."