Anthony Hudson

The views and opinions expressed by speakers and presenters in connection with Art Restart are their own, and not an endorsement by the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts and the UNC School of the Arts. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Anthony Hudson might have earned the tongue-in-cheek title of 'Portland's premier drag clown' even if he were not the Oregon city's — and perhaps even the country's — only drag clown. He has delighted and terrified Portland audiences in equal measure as his alter-ego Carla Rossi for over 12 years, performing carefully honed satire in a variety of venues, including the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art.

At Portland’s historic Hollywood Theatre, both Anthony and Carla program and host “Queer Horror,” the only LGBT horror screening-and-performance series in the country. Anthony also co-hosts with writer Stacie Ponder the queer feminist horror podcast “Gaylords of Darkness.”

A member of the Confederated Grand Ronde Tribes, Siletz, he recently was one of four Indigenous artists to present work in an exhibit titled “Always Here” at The Arts Center in Corvallis, OR. In the exhibit, he and his fellow artists separately and collaboratively created conceptual pieces that upended perceptions of what Native art can or should be.

Anthony also wrote the solo autobiographical play “Looking for Tiger Lily,” which he has performed in theaters all over the country and has toured internationally, from Melbourne to Vancouver. He is currently adapting the play into a book.

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Anthony explains how he developed Carla Rossi and her particular flavor of drag performance and describes the joys and dangers of being an outspoken queer clown when drag in particular has become such a dangerous cultural flashpoint.

Choose a question below to begin exploring the interview:

• How is a drag clown different from a drag queen?
• What is Carla Rossi’s origin story?
• At what point did you realize, “Oh, this is the fullness of what I was meant to be”?
• I’m guessing there’s not that many drag performers who have an Indigenous background. Could you talk about that?
• Do you think Carla as a character moves the needle at all on Indigenous representation? Have you ever performed here in front of a largely Native audience?
• Clowns, especially satirical clowns, can deal with some scary stuff. What is the scariest thing Carla or Anthony, either of you, has ever done or tackled?
• At this moment in your artistic life, given what is going on, how do you think your art is going to accommodate your safety? How do you think that’s going to change your artistry?
• Do you have a big-picture project in the next 10 years that you’re dreaming of?

Pier Carlo Talenti: I want to get clear on terminology. How is a drag clown different from a drag queen?

Anthony Hudson: Ooh, great question. This is something that came up because I was talking with Rémi Baert, who’s a French academic who’s studying drag clowns. He pointed out to me that in the last 10 years, he’s been focusing on drag clowns, but he had never seen the term before he had encountered my work, which makes me curious. I’m like, “Did I actually coin this term?” 

I started performing as Carla in 2010. For me, my attraction to drag was always not in the idea of female impersonation but in the idea of just miscellany, of an assemblage of different gender options and manners and behaviors. I wanted to really challenge and hack the idea of drag and follow in the footsteps of some people that, I think, use drag more in terms of … genderfuck really was the term that I came up with around 2010 in Portland with the drag that was happening here. It was messy; it was not how you expect it to look. 

Through my mixed identities, I’ve always said that Carla, she’s my way of expressing that sense of confusion and mixture that I have and that people apply when they try to figure out who I am or what I am. I do drag as Carla because I want someone who walks down the road and sees her randomly to be as confused by her as I used to feel about myself.

For me, in drag clown, there’s still an element of reference to drag queen. I still am OK if I get called that, but it’s definitely more of an intentional act of clowning and of really playing with the idea of drag versus adhering to the show-woman show-queen pageant-Vegas idea, what you see in “To Wong Foo,” “Some Like It Hot,” “Priscilla Queen of the Desert” and “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” It’s not pretty [he laughs], and I’m not trying to be anything I’m not. I’m only trying to be every potential I could be and laugh at the same time.

Pier Carlo: What is Carla Rossi’s origin story?

Anthony: Oh, there’s several! Her origin story is that she was born from the primordial stew and came slithering out, and in an intro not unlike the opening sequence to Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” she got in a fight with some monkeys. [He laughs.] No, I like to think of Carla as an immortal trickster spirit who has existed throughout time that is just there to haunt and taunt humanity at her every whim. 

In terms of Carla, for me the origin story was I had always wanted to do drag. I’d always wanted to perform. I wanted to act, I wanted to sing, I wanted to do standup. I grew up watching Robin Williams and watching “Looney Tunes,” and I loved voices and voice-acting, and I loved doing impersonations. I also wanted to do theater. I wanted to direct; I wanted to write. I did so many different things. I also drew. Drawing was a primary medium of mine for the first 20 years of my life. I’d always wanted to do all these things, but I never really knew what the outlet was. I think society, capitalism, tells you that you have to be one thing. You have to be one easily identifiable, boxable, marketable thing that can be categorized and then sold.

Around 2008 or 2009, I met Jinkx Monsoon here in Portland, the winner of “Drag Race.” She just won it a second time. She was a Portland girl back then, and her drag looked much different. This was a couple years before she got on “Drag Race.” We started hanging out, and I just kept going to her shows, show after show after show. I saw a person that was doing all those things that I’d always wanted to do.

After I had a relationship that fell apart — partially thanks to Jinkx; it was a relationship that needed to fall apart — I just had this explosion. I had been living what I would call a small life. I had moved away from my hometown, Kaiser, OR, this little small town that was just connected to Salem, the state capital. Moving from there to Portland and challenging myself to go to art school, I still was coming with the trauma of growing up in a small town and getting death threats and being one of the only out queer kids. I think I lived in hiding. I’d just scale along walls in the hopes that no one could see me or threaten me. I worked at the mall at Bath and Body Works and didn’t do anything, instead of going to art school like I’d always planned. 

Pier Carlo: Oh, this was once you got to Portland?

Anthony: This was once I got to Portland. Sorry, I went out of chronology. And it's after I had been there for some time that I met Jinkx. And then that explosion came out of that, where I then went to art school. I started doing drag. I started going out to parties. I started performing with a friend, and we would paint ourselves white. We would put on these different voices and we would act like different people. 

Pier Carlo: It sounds like you were already experimenting with masks.

Anthony: Yes, and I didn’t know it at the time! I thought this was just a fun way of putting on some temporary armor that I didn’t even understand was armor and just going out. It was a means to go out and to not be the person that I had been for so long. 

Then one of our first nights out on the town, we jumped onstage in drag in whiteface during a performance at PICA, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, during a performance at their Time-Based Art Festival that happens every year. This is something I would never do today! Well, would I? Maybe. But something I would not advocate today. And yet we did it. Then they asked us to come back the next night. Then people started asking us to come do shows and to show up at their parties. We became club kids for a while. This was towards the end of the club kid movement, if they still even have club kids. 

Next thing I knew, it turned into this persona, what I used to think as a persona, which I now understand as a more evolved form of myself, a more ultimate form of myself.

Pier Carlo: How long did it take for you to realize that? You said that initially it was about denying the person you had been. At what point did you realize, “Oh, this is the fullness of what I was meant to be”?

Anthony: This has only been a realization that I have begun to let exist in my brain as something real. This is only something that I’ve been understanding in that way for the just the last couple of years, really. 

In 2016, I made my solo show, “Looking for Tiger Lily,” which was the first time I performed as myself. That was after performing relatively anonymously as Carla for five years. While playing this horrible Karen from Lake Oswego, OR, I would start to hear well-meaning Portlanders boo me. And I realized, “Oh, people don’t know who I am yet, and that’s why they don’t understand why I’m pretending to be this horrible racist white woman.” So I realized I needed to make a show about who I am really and why I am performing as her. It wasn’t until I did “Tiger Lily” that I began to really understand she is me and this is a whole aspect of how I interface with myself culturally, sexually, publicly. This is a means for me to experiment and negotiate and to wear all these facets of myself. 

However, my partner would tell you, because he started dating me in 2010 at the same time as Carla was born — 

Pier Carlo: [Laughing] Wow, that is a tall order!

Anthony: [He laughs.] I don’t know how this happened; I don’t know how he’s with me; I don’t know how we stayed together! He had so many clear outs in those first couple of months there, the first couple of years. He would always tease me because I would say, “No, Carla’s just a project.” I thought I was this cool, drunk art student, and I thought I was doing this massive, incredible spectacle-art and was challenging expectations. I thought it was just a project. He would laugh at me on dates, and he’d be like, “No, she’s you.” And I fought that for years, but ultimately it came back to bite me as the pure truth.

Pier Carlo: I’m not an expert in a drag culture, but I’m guessing there’s not that many drag performers who have an Indigenous background. Or I could be totally wrong. Could you talk about that? My understanding is you’re half German, half Indigenous, right?

Anthony: Yeah, my mom is German. They were German immigrants. They left Germany, went to essentially Ukraine and then came to over to Kansas and then to Oregon, to the same town my dad was growing up in in the 1900s. My mom ended up in Oregon about 1950. My dad grew up at the Chemawa Indian School, which is not far from Keizer, OR, where my mom moved. His mom was a dormitory matron there, and his father was a member of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, although that didn’t happen until the ’80s when tribes were restored. And his mother is Siletz.

So I have this mixed inheritance. That was fascinating for me to come to understand, to see myself different from other people while also looking like a lot of the people that I’m different from, growing up in a weird, small, meth-y Mormon town. 

I think it was pretty early into performing as Carla that I started having dreams where I was painting myself white like her but I wasn’t getting white enough. I couldn’t get coverage. I would still see through it. And I was like, “Huh, well that sounds like a heavy-handed metaphor!” [He laughs.]

I realized over that time as I began to bring her into school … because my teachers at art school would be like, “OK, well, you’re supposed to be an illustration major, but you’re sleeping on all of your finals, and you’re coming to class late with makeup in your hair. What’s going on?” Then they challenged me to bring that work into school. 

Pier Carlo: Oh, because I have to say that even graphically, Carla is fascinating! She looks like she fell face-forward in a Joan Miró painting.

Anthony: Yes, I love that! And she didn’t pay for the damages.

Pier Carlo: She ran away. 

Anthony: Yeah, the bold, illustrative lines that I would draw, that fully comes through in Carla’s face. Also my love for goth and Siouxsie Sioux comes through in her face. 

But I realized as I was working on it that, “Yeah, this is a place where I can interface with all these aspects of me and with also what it means for me to be a person who’s also Indigenous.” When first I came out to my parents, my dad took me aside, and he was like, “You know this is sacred and this is actually a normal thing, right?” And I was like, “What?” And he’s like, “You’re a Two-Spirit.” I had never heard that term. I was an incredibly lucky 14-year-old where that’s the conversation I get with my father. He was extremely accepting, extremely loving. He came prepared. He brought me an academic paper. One of his friends, who was a professor on Native Studies, had a student turn in a paper on Two-Spirit. He got that from his friend and gave it to me, and he really helped educate me as to who I am — I’d learned what it meant to be gay on AOL before that — and then he taught me what it means to be Two-Spirit.

Pier Carlo: Did he know any Two-Spirit people in the town or in his culture?

Anthony: No, not that I knew of. I had a cousin in the tribe who was gay, and then on my mom’s side, I had my uncle, Uncle Joe, who was the very first person I came out to when I was 13 or 12. But other than that, I didn’t really know any people in my life except for my uncle and my cousin Brenda. 

In school, I resented the idea of a binary, and that’s how I read Two, as the idea that one has male and female spirits, but you can look at it as multiplicity too. Over time, I began to understand that Carla was my way … . I’ve never been one for... I’ve been too shy to commit to powwow dancing or get regalia. Something my dad said to me when I was complaining about how I didn’t know any of our traditions was, “Well, this is traditional for you.” And I began to understand that Carla was my way of honoring all of myself as a Two-Spirit person. She is my way of walking between worlds. 

I think drag in general has a correlation to priestessing or to shamans, to medicine people, to healers. These are people that put on regalia and offer teachings, oral history, storytelling. They offer this to their people, and they bring community together. I think drag does a similar thing as medicine people in that way. In terms of Two-Spirit or Indigiqueer drag and performance, I’m still learning a lot.

Pier Carlo: Indigiqueer! Did you make that up, or is that a term?

Anthony: That’s a full on-term, Indigiqueer. I think it came out of Canada. I’m not sure about that. A lot of our modern terminology came from up north. Two-Spirit is one term. It’s a modern sort of Pan-Indian term that was established in 1990 by a council of queer Natives. Indigiqueer is another term that we can use. It’s a little more open-ended than Two-Spirit. Two-Spirit has a certain reference point; Indigiqueer is a little bit more in general. 

A lot of people don’t know this, but Trixie Mattel is Bad River Ojibwe. I just recently saw her posting about that, which is kind of exciting because she doesn’t talk about that often. I think she often gets claimed as white, or people look at her in that respect. The incredible poet, Joy Harjo, anytime I see her — because I’m lucky enough to know her — anytime I see her, she always asks me about Trixie, and I’m like, “Yes, thank you, Joy. I know you love Trixie.” [He laughs.] 

Then there’s Landa Lakes. Oh my God, everyone needs to look up Landa Lakes. Just like the butter with the Native mascot. They used to have a Native mascot, the Land O’Lakes Butter Lady. Landa is a fantastic Native drag performer who’s down in the Bay Area. She always does the Bay Area Two-Spirit Powwow every year, and she’s just fantastic. 

There’s quite a few of us out there. I saw some that popped up on RuPaul’s “Canada’s Drag Race.” I have yet to watch that show, but I don’t really watch the “Drag Race.” There’s more and more of us popping up, and it’s really exciting.

Pier Carlo: Do you think Carla as a character moves the needle at all on Indigenous representation? Have you ever performed here in front of a largely Native audience?

Anthony: Oh, yes! And that is my favorite thing to do. 

Pier Carlo: Tell me how it goes.

Anthony: It is so exciting. When I do “Looking for Tiger Lily,” the solo show by myself … well, I guess the solo show is by myself. [He laughs.] I guess that’s a Freudian slip. I was going to say, “When I do it for an all-white audience,” but it feels like I’m performing it by myself for an empty room.

Because there is that thing where arts audiences — and we’re trained, we’re taught to do this — predominantly white arts audiences sit down and are quiet, anthropological. We watch it. “Oh, you don’t want to disturb anything.” We play the role expected of us. We are going to just be passive observers. Every now and then when I’m performing it, I’ll hear somebody go, “Oooh, hmmm,” and that’s about it. But the show is a comedy, and often when I perform it, it is met with very little laughs, even though I know the show is funny. I think there’s a question of, “Do I have permission to laugh at this culturally? Do I understand why this is funny?” I think those questions come up. 

But when I perform the show for an all-Native audience … . I’ve done this at Dartmouth with a night of primarily Native youth. I’ve done this in Vancouver, Canada, and I’ve done this at the Talking Stick Festival. I’ve done this with Indigenous folks in Melbourne and at the YIRRAMBOI Festival in Australia. When I perform it for Indigenous folks, it is met with hootin’ and hollerin’, nonstop laughter. I’ve always said the best laughs you hear on the rez. Nonstop laughter. People talk to me and talk back and respond as I’m telling these stories. That is how the show is meant to be experienced. 

When I come out and start performing, when I say, “All I really want in this life is to be a sad, pretty little rich girl,” and then I come back out onstage and I perform a Lana Del Rey number, the audience goes nuts, and everyone starts snapping. Because this is another secret about Native people: We all love Lana Del Rey, regardless of her wearing that war bonnet. People lose their minds, and that’s how the show’s meant to be experienced. So when I perform as Carla for a Native audience, because that show’s primarily Anthony, but when it’s Carla, it is absolute hysteria. It’s Black Friday at Walmart. It is so fun and so life-giving.

This is one of the main reasons I love performing also for Native youth and for Two-Spirit groups and clubs at schools. It is so empowering. Also, they are just as salty as Carla is, and so they will also critique me. They’ll talk shit. They make me laugh. Yeah, I think there’s less of a putting the performer up on a pedestal and looking at them as an object from afar and more like, “You’re part of my community, and now let’s make this interactive, clown.” And I love it.

Pier Carlo: Now, clowns, especially satirical clowns, can deal with some scary stuff, as I’m sure you do. What is the scariest thing Carla or Anthony, either of you, has ever done or tackled?

Anthony: Oh, that’s a great question. I am the hostess of “Queer Horror,” Portland Oregon’s premier horror screening-and-performance series where we do one-acts before a horror movie that has a queer bent to it.

Pier Carlo: Before each screening, there is a written one-act that is performed?

Anthony: Yes, yes. It’s like our “Saturday Night Live” crossed with church. It’s church for people; I’ve heard so many people say that. It’s church for me, and I get to be the high priestess. It’s so fun. It’s my favorite thing to do. I think it’s been called “a goddamn Portland treasure” by the Portland Mercury, one of our weeklies here. It’s really special. 

Horror does show up in my work, but really queer horror is a special project. Horror is my hobby and not as much my artform, but getting to do that show as Carla, I get to add to her hats. She gets to also be a horror hostess in the style of Elvira or Peaches Christ when I get to host that show. It’s really fun.

But in terms of actual horror, what is the scariest thing I’ve done? I think it was 2017, 2018, at some point within those years, I performed a Drag Queen Story Time in Portland. It was the most well-attended Drag Queen Story Time. They had a hundred kids there. They had standing-room-only people out the door. It was a blast. 

Afterwards, we had a dance party on bubble wrap to Cher. The librarians came up with this idea of this bubble wrap. They covered an entire floor in a room with bubble wrap and put on Cher because Cher’s my power queen. We’re having a great time. We’re dancing on bubble wrap. The kids push me over and they jump on me. This library takes the cutest picture in the world of these kids just crushing me. And then we post it. And then next thing we know, like the State of Oregon burning down in a summer, all of a sudden it’s wildfire. It is on every conservative media outlet. There is story after story after story after story calling me a pedophile, calling me an abuser, a groomer. “Here’s this drag queen fondling these children.” I made the front page of Breitbart. I didn’t notice this until I was working on a video about this. Breitbart, their headline was, “Library removes photo of children fondling drag queen.” [He laughs.] 

Pier Carlo: So you were the victim apparently!

Anthony: That’s what I said! I was like, “Well, there you have it. You just said it yourselves. I’m the victim.” But it was horrific to see the way that these people manipulated and abused and twisted this image and exploited these children and misgendered and honestly dragged my name through the mud with slurs. There was one article — I actually saved this headline because I loved it so much — that said, “Any minute now, we’ll see a headline that says, ‘Tranny clown opens portal and sucks children into another dimension.’” 

Pier Carlo: Oh my God, can you make that movie?

Anthony: Right? I’m like, “Call Roger Corman. I need this to happen.” But it was just grotesque and awful. 

I don’t think people understand that drag is an occupational hazard, just the act of doing it. When I went out to do the art-museum gig recently, to do that workshop again after not having been able to do it during the pandemic, I went down there, and before I even could get into the building, I had to call them and be like, “OK, I’m parking my car. Come meet me and walk me in.” Before, I used to just walk from my house down to a gig, and I’m not going to do that anymore. It’s not safe.

Pier Carlo: So let’s talk about this. At this moment in your artistic life, given what is going on, how do you think your art is going to accommodate this? Clearly you’re being more careful, but how do you think that’s going to change your artistry?

Anthony: Honestly, I’m being more careful around the show. I’m being more careful in my Anthony life, but Carla is only becoming more toxic. She’s becoming more incendiary. She’s putting herself on the cross and screaming awful things at white people. She’s sitting on a plunger while a Breitbart headline points out the awful things that she’s been involved in. She is so unapologetic, so in your face, so loud, so bitter. That last show that I did, “Carla Rossi Does Drag,” my best friend came to it and said, “I have never seen you do anything like that. I loved it. You were so bitter.” And in that moment, I was like, “I did it. I’ve honed in on what I want to do.”

Carla is the place where I get to wear my feelings as someone that has to put on a nice face, that has to sell my art, that has to try to get booked, that also has to code-switch and appeal to people. Sometimes throughout my career, I’ve had to demean myself, I’ve had to make myself smaller, I’ve had to try to fit into spaces that weren’t designed to fit me. Carla is just the inverse of that, where she is now occupying all the space that I never felt safe to occupy. 

I think there’s a psychological thing there. She’s what I do instead of therapy, which isn’t good. [He laughs.]  But when all of this is going on in the world, she is just going to become that much more empowered. And I’m grateful for that.

Pier Carlo: Do you have a big-picture project in the next 10 years that you’re dreaming of?

Anthony: I have a couple. Since 2019, I’ve been working on a series called “Clown Down.” The first one was Carla gets crushed under a cabinet that she’s installed in her home but she hasn’t mounted on the wall. So she’s showing it off, and it immediately falls and crushes her. She’s stuck under a cabinet for an hour. And then last year I premiered “Clown Down 2,” where we open with Carla stuck on a rock in the middle of the ocean. We have no idea how she got there. She is stuck on a rock in the middle of the ocean. It’s about climate change and the end of the world. It’s a puppet show.

Pier Carlo: Oh, of course it is.

Anthony: Of course it is. In the “Clown Downs,” I just get to be absurd. I get to exist in the Carla-verse. I work with David Eckard, who’s a brilliant performance artist and sculptor and activist, and he was one of my professors at school. He builds my sets for these shows. And then my friend Matthew Leavitt wears a zentai suit and brings all the puppets to life. This is usually the three of us putting on these shows. Plus I have a couple friends who do an act called “Liberace and Liza.” They’re Liberace and Liza impersonators. It’s the best act in Portland, but they also cameo in these shows. I want to do a part three, a third one where Carla’s on the moon, it’s just her alone on the moon, and it’s about the Apocalypse. 

Then I’m working on a long-term project over the next couple of years with my tribal museum and with my friend Felix Furby. I’ve been working on adapting “Looking for Tiger Lily” into a memoir over this last year. While I was working on that, I started to research queer indigenous histories within our region, and I found some incredible material. Then I started working with my friend Felix, who had also been researching these histories for the last several years. Now we’re working on creating an exhibit, collecting all of our research and our findings. It’s an exhibit honoring, in particular, one queer Indigenous ancestor that we have who was a Tualatin Kalapuya doctor. 

That’s premiering ideally within the coming years, and we want to work on a group art show and all these other aspects to go along with that.

Pier Carlo: The museum’s committed to it?

Anthony: Yes. 

Pier Carlo: And where is the museum?

Anthony: In Grand Ronde. The Chachalu Tribal Museum.

Pier Carlo: Wow. That is not something they would have agreed to necessarily 15, 10 years ago maybe. It feels like a big deal, doesn’t it?

Anthony: It feels massive. And every person we talk to about it is like, “This feels massive.” The museum themselves, they’re like, “This feels massive.” It just feels like now is the time. We’ve been applying for different funding opportunities to help make it even bigger and more possible. 

Something that the folks at Chachalu have pointed out is in this era, especially when we’re looking at trans people and drag performers being attacked and legislated against, it’s really important that we understand that this is traditional for us and this is something that’s sacred for us. The belief that queer people aren’t part of community comes from settlers, that comes from capitalism, that comes from assimilation. That’s not part of our value. Now we have an example of an ancestor, an elder from the 1800s who lived on the rez, who was respected by her community and gendered with the correct pronouns, and it’s massive. So we’re working on that. 

Then while working on the book, I’ve uncovered a couple things about my ancestry and how it connects to Oregon’s history as a whole and some of the first people to establish the state as a settler state. I’ve learned some massive things that I think will form an unofficial sequel to “Tiger Lily” that I’m working on right now. That’s just in the very beginning phases, but it’s a deeper show about my ancestry, about who I am and the lineage I fall into with my ancestors.