Ad Astra, Lady Bearica

Former Lawrence residence Lady Bearica Andrews returns to visit the town she credits as being “formative” to her growth

It was a fabulous homecoming as Lady Bearica Andrews sprinted into the Jazzhaus and dispersed a burst of energy through the second-floor Massachusetts Street performance hall that has housed drag shows for the past seven years. Bearica had no opportunity to perform here when she was a Lawrence resident, before she became a noted performer and internet celebrity who creatively combines themes of drag and professional wrestling.

Bearica, known outside the drag community as Jason Alan Harris, says shows like the Jazzhouse event hosted by MsAmanda Love (Nate Stitt outside of drag) represent the best in their art form.

“I think the diversity of talent is great,” Bearica says. “MsAmanda brings in great queens. She’s such a great host, and she’s created something that didn’t exist in Lawrence before.”

MsAmanda, in turn, says bringing in Bearica adds a“distinction” to her stage. Bearica’s style as a bearded queen also brings a “nice change of pace to the shows,” according to MsAmanda.

A 1999 graduate of Chanute High School, Bearica moved to Lawrence in 2002 to study theater at the University of Kansas. She dropped out the following year, but continued to live in town, becoming a self-proclaimed “Mass Street townie.” She describes Lawrence as being “transformative” to her personal development, and it was in Lawrence where she attended her first drag show, the University of Kansas Brown Bag Drag event, hosted by the group now known as Spectrum KU.

As her 25th birthday neared, Bearica took one more class at KU, then made the difficult decision to complete her theater studies at California State Long Beach.

“When I left, I always described [Lawrence] as a comfy couch. So it was really hard to get out,” Bearica says, “but I’d lived in Kansas my whole life. I’d always wanted to leave, and so I knew I wanted to go back to school. So I took that as my impetus for leaving.”

After graduating from Cal State Long Beach, Bearica moved to New York in 2013. It was there—while dancing at aclub to Lady Gaga’s “Applause”—that she realized she wanted to perform in drag.

“It kind of just took over,” Bearica says. “It started with us just dressing up and going out, and then somebody asked us to perform.”

Gradually an identity emerged: Lady Bearica Andrews, a name that pays homage to Lady Bear, a queen out of San Francisco, and former pageant queen Erica Andrews.

For Bearica, entering the world of drag was about more than having fun.

“It allowed me to communicate with an audience in a way that I hadn’t been able to on stage or in film or whatever, and I just fell in love with that rush of it,” Bearica says. “Drag definitely gave me an opportunity to, one, be in control of my art, and, two, solve some issues I had with myself. And so I met that goal right away. It was great.”

Appearing in the New York drag scene soon led Bearica to meet similar souls in DJ Accident Report and Ariel Italic. Together, the friends and colleagues form a group they call the Nobodies. The trio have worked together for five years and currently host the YouTube show and podcast “Nobodies Watching Wrestling.” The show dissects professional wrestling through the lens of drag—two entertainment genres not commonly connected, but ones that the Nobodies easily bridge.

“There’s reveals in drag,” Bearica says. “They do reveals in wrestling. There’s bad guys and good guys. There’s not necessarily bad guys and good guys in drag, but there’s different characters. People play characters.”

As the Nobodies help evolve what they describe as “queer wrestling spaces,” they have also broadened their shows to provide opportunities for other queer performers and the burgeoning identities among the drag communities.

“When I first started doing drag, people were confused as to how I did drag with a beard, or why that even made sense,” Bearica says, going on to list the numerous varieties of modern drag, where nonbinary performers, men and women take on a range of drag queen and drag king personas and are not confined to traditional polar-opposite gender swaps. “The separation of masculine and feminine in drag … is dissolving,” Bearica notes, “which is nice to see.”

While there is an abundance of drag in New York (though, according to Bearica, it still needs to expand), returning to Kansas is a way to bring what she’s doing back home.

Bearica returns to Kansas for a gay pride event in the small town of Independence each year and says that she feels that in Kansas there is noticeably “more desire to see what you’re doing.

“I feel like everybody gets disenchanted in New York, and they’re like, ‘Oh, there’s more opportunity to get to see drag,’ so they don’t appreciate it as much,” Bearica says. “I feel more appreciated outside of New York City.”

Back in the Jazzhaus, MsAmanda says that return performances by artists such as Bearica bring more than a “burst of energy” to the audience.

“People emulate who they see before them, and we don’t always see that,” MsAmanda says of the bold stage presence of Bearica, a kid from Chanute, Kansas, and former Jayhawk who is now front and center in drag.

Adapted from article by Kari Williams and Fally Afani that appeared in the winter 2019-2020 edition of Lawrence Magazine.