Sorcia Warhol Makes Her Return To New Haven

Sorcia Warhol performing at SAMESEX in Bridgeport in summer 2019. Lucy Gellman Pre-Pandemic File Photo. 

The track bounces. Sorcia Warhol's vocals come in, making Susan Tedeschi's “Little By Little” into her own. Her voice undulates and climbs, skyrocketing right into the chorus. A listener can close their eyes and see Warhol whipping around, hips swinging in tight, low-slung jeans and a wavy blonde wig. 

Little by little, I'm losing you I can seeeee/And bit by bit, your love is slippin' away from me.

Warhol's Adaptations, Volume I is part of the drag queen's long-awaited return to performance after almost 18 months away from New Haven. After releasing the EP earlier this spring, she is planning to perform at Arts On Call this weekend. The series is a program of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas. 

She will perform two afternoon sets at Artspace New Haven on Saturday. Adaptations, which was recorded at Sans Serif Rec. in New Haven, is available on Bandcamp.    

“I think drag for me is about using this sort of shocking, unexpected power through being a boy dressed up like a woman,” she said on a recent episode of WNHH Community Radio’s “Arts Respond.” “It sort of throws people back on their heels, and they don't sort of know how to respond. And I feel like that is a great opportunity to sort of really jump in.”

Warhol's quest for queer visibility—and use of performance to get there—has been decades in the making. When she is not in drag, Warhol is the photographer Daniel Eugene, whose work includes the series #NHV Drag and Drag\Racing among others. After years documenting the city’s vibrant drag community, Eugene slipped into it a few years ago at Dragapalooza, a fundraiser for the Imperial Sovereign Court of All Connecticut.  

It has been a balancing act to make space for both Warhol and Eugene, she said. For years, Eugene has been documenting the world of stock car racing, from opening day concerts and vroom-vrooming cars to post-race hoedowns across the state and New England. It’s a universe filled with “fuel and rubber and crashing and speed” that he was drawn to as a kid, after racing quarter midgets in Meriden.

Even as he fell in love with the sport, Eugene wasn’t sure how “to reconcile my queerness with this hyper-masculine aspect,” he said. There was no LGBTQ+ role model he could look to on the national scale, much less in Connecticut. NASCAR icon Hurley Haywood was still in the closet, where he remained until early 2018. So was NASCAR's Stephen Rhodes. After Rhodes came out in 2001 and continued to race, there was a silence around LGBTQ+ professional drivers that lasted for almost two decades. This year, Devon Rouse broke it when he raced with the American Race Car Association (ARCA) at the Daytona International Speedway.

"As a queer person, I've always felt outstanding,” Eugene said. “Exceptional. And I don't mean that in a positive way. I've always felt odd. Queer in the literal sense of like, left of center. Even within a community. And it's made me so passionate and intense about self-expression.

“I always admired the feminine power. I am a goddess worshipper, like I revere the sacred feminine. And I always felt angry, annoyed to the point of angry, that even as a kid growing up, as a boy, I couldn't access that power. I'm like, I feel it in me. I feel that sacred power." 

During those years, Warhol was always in there—she was just humming steadily beneath the surface. She was there when Eugene joined the New Haven Oratorio Choir, and learned that ensemble performance was as much about vocal blending as it was about solo work. She was there when he helped organize an arts festival dubbed Fauxchella in Bridgeport in 2012. She was there as he became part of the group Kindred Queer, a collaboration with the artist Xavier Serrano and a rotating door of fellow musicians.

And ultimately, she was there when Eugene hit the racetrack, and started talking to attendees about being openly gay. In addition to documenting stock car racing and post-race hoedowns—"pallets of wood and bud light and miller light for days"— Eugene has performed the Star Spangled Banner in rainbow suspenders, sometimes with a rainbow-printed bandana spilling out of one pocket or shirt that reads #NHVDrag. Warhol is never far away in that world. In the year before the pandemic, it wasn’t uncommon for her to be at a gay bar performing one night, and at a fuel-scented track the next.

"It's like, sort of a limb of my being,” Eugene said. “And that limb just happens to have nails on and nice hair."

Now, Warhol is growing her footprint in Adaptations Volume I, a title that suggests more music is on the horizon. When she was selecting works, she pulled on her love of storytelling across genres that included R&B, pop, country and soul. The first volume includes vocalists Etta James, Susan Tedeschi, Aretha Franklin, and Mariah Carey.

She said that she thinks of the works as more than covers—her goal is to make them her own. She is especially fond of country music from the 1980s and 1990s, which she called transportive.     

Warhol added that she is excited to return to live performance. On Friday and Saturday, she will appear at Arts On Call, a program of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas that sends artists to small, pandemic-safe performances throughout the city (read about a recent one in the New Haven Independent). Saturday afternoon, she will perform a double header at Artspace New Haven at 50 Orange St.

“It feels wonderful," she said. “It's gonna be so fresh. You grow so much when you are kept from something that is normal to you. In the absence of that ... there's so much to do through performance, and I'm excited for the opportunity to get back to that in a way that these circumstances had made very unique."

To listen to the episode, click on or download the audio above. Catch her performing at 3 and 5 p.m. at Artspsace New Haven this Saturday. Adaptations Volume I is available at Bandcamp here.