Vulcano: I've been a drag since high school, platforms are like flip-flops

Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 19 Mar Drag Vulcano (Isidro Pérez) is proud this Saturday his Drag Queen 2022 band from Las Palmas de Gran Canaria on the same stage where only a few hours before he received the crown. “Finally darling”, he exclaims paraphrasing his fantasy, and with this battle cry a dream is fulfilled and a cycle ends. Drag Vulcano put on his first platforms in high school, in a difficult time for any teenager where his desire to take the band was already shaping up, according to an interview with Efe. “My plastic teacher asked me to dress as drag for the high school gala and that was Vulcano”, a name that tells him that his drag godmother gave him and that is already part of his identity. “That day I won hundreds of fans in high school” and in Gáldar “still remember” my teammates, he says. Vulcano has been performing at the Drag Gala for 10 years, but he is “drag since before he was born”, he says, and he has managed to drag his whole family to Carnival: “thanks to me and, because of me, because of me, because of me, because of me, because of me, because of me, because of me, because of me, because of me De Barrial, Gáldar, is drag “365 days a year, 24/7", and his whole life revolves around this vocation. “There is no career to be a drag, we don't have a drag university, but we do have a series of things that you can study to be one,” he says, and he - he emphasizes - he has gone through all of them: as a makeup artist, in tailoring, theater, communication “and whatever comes next”. “For me platforms are like cholas (flip-flops),” he says laughing. There is nothing to stop Drag Vulcano, “he always arrives by devastating” and this year of reign will be no less. He hopes to “enjoy it, make the most of it”, because it is a moment that has been waiting for a decade, he points out. Therefore, “I receive what comes with open arms”, he says. “Since 1998, when I saw the first gala, I said, I want to live that moment,” he insists. And he admits that he doubted, saying: “I saw that they were adding points and I couldn't believe it”, to the point that, once the count was over, “it was incredible, I just don't have words to describe that moment, I don't even believe it”. The long-awaited band comes after six other galas in which it was already part of the court, “I only had this one left”, he explains excitedly, because Vulcano has been a costume prize and first, second and third runner-up on different occasions since 2016. His greatest triumph has also come with a montage where there were no missing references to the current coronavirus, which explains: “I wanted to talk about the pandemic because we all like to laugh, forget our sorrows, enjoy and make a 'meme' of even the crudest”, and covid-19, he said, was not going to be less. A philosophy is in keeping with some irreverent parties to which he confesses to devotee beyond his character in Drag Vulcano, specifying that he “may stop showing up one day, but Isidro will never stop participating in the Carnival”. Laura Bautista