HOLLY HARKNESS
(Holly) My name out of drag is Gavin Lesnevich—L-E-S-N-E-V, as in Victor, I-C-H.
And then my drag name is Holly Harkness.
(Holly) She/her for both.
(Holly) Yeah, that’s kind of an ever-changing thing. But I very much like men—very into men.
I say I’m gay sometimes, but I’m a trans woman, so… it’s just like, whatever.
My view on womanhood is that—yes, there’s male sex and female sex—but then there are the cultural connotations to those things, which are completely made up.
So I try not to put a lot of pressure on myself to act super feminine, because I feel like that’s limiting.
Ever since coming out as a woman, I’ve actually felt more comfortable embracing the “masculine” parts of myself because I’m secure in my womanhood, you know?
And I think drag was kind of the catalyst for that.
It’s like that whole Susan Sontag Notes on Camp thing—when someone is doing camp, they’re not a woman, but a “woman.”
So, I am a woman—no quotation marks. In drag, I am a “woman”—quotation marks.
And that’s different for everyone. I don’t like to be what people call “fishy”—which is honestly a horrible term. I like to live a clown life. No, I think she’s… “bitty bitty bum bum” is fine. I think she’s a huge part of who I am.
She’s everything I’ve ever wanted to be. She’s kind of just… imagination personified.
She really is my childhood imagination personified.
(Holly) Yeah, just witchy, nasty, constantly being big and bold and loud.
And I think branding myself as a “nasty,” not generically pretty queen has given me the freedom to not worry about looking beautiful.
If my lash is off, it doesn’t bother me—because I know I look nasty, and that’s the point. There’s not a lot of that. Like, I love the older drag queens—you look at queens from earlier eras. They weren’t necessarily “pretty.”
I like to look weird.
It was COVID times when I started. And my mom—she said, “Everyone has to learn a new skill. What do you want to learn?”. And I said, “makeup.” So she bought me all the drag stuff.And then, like, a few wigs. I was kind of doing it casually at first. I had these huge lashes, so my name was Linda Lash for a minute.
But then WandaVision came out—with Agatha Harkness. And I loved Kathryn Hahn.
I immediately connected with that character because I thought she was so me.
Everything I loved about witchiness was kind of put into one person. And her outfit is so cool too—just the whole look. Love it.
Also, making yourself a witch… you can be, like, a Macbeth witch, or like a gross, chaotic… I don’t know—there’s just so much more agency and freedom when you’re this wild, “ha-ha” thing, you know?
And I like that. So I made myself Holly Harkness. Holly, just because… well, at first I was Harley Harkness. But you can’t really say that—it doesn’t roll off the tongue.
I liked Harley Harkness because I like Harley Quinn, but “Holly Harkness” just sounds better. It’s more showgirl-esque.
And that’s what I wanted to be—just a nasty, bitchy showgirl.