During the week, William Thomas Daniels III is a boy's boy. You can find him in a hoodie and sneakers playing basketball on the court or at home watching the game. But every Friday and Saturday night, William trades in his sneakers for heels and sweatpants for skin-tight dresses any woman would kill to pull off.
On stage, Daniels brings the female illusion of Miss Kick-N-Split, Jessica Spaulding-Devereux; a name chosen to honor a friend who died and his drag family who taught him the ropes of the business.
When a slot in the cast opened at Town, Shi-Queeta Lee called Daniels to see if he would fill in. With his dance background, Daniels was the perfect fit to offer a new shtick to the group.
Daniels has been openly gay since he was 8 years old. His parents divorced when he was 9 and when his younger brother came along at 13, he started dressing in drag.
"When I first started, I did it for attention. I figured what better way to piss my parents off then to dress in girls' clothing."
Using a cousin's I.D., Daniels would sneak out of his house and attend the local clubs in his hometown of Richmond, Va. dressed in drag. Growing up, Richmond was known for its high crime and murder rates. Jessica became Daniels' defense mechanism.
"She's my fighter I guess. I would fight and not remember it, so that was Jessica. But I got through it, after all, I'm still here. What doesn't kill us makes us stronger."
Daniels entered his first drag pageant at 18 years old and took home second place. By 21, he had taken home his first crown and continued to take the pageant scene by storm, winning 14 drag competitions, including the very competitive Miss International Queen pageant, in 2002. But behind the lipstick and lashes, Daniels was struggling to find his path.
At 25, he found himself in solitary confinement at the Prince George's County Jail for a charge to sell counterfit drugs. The charges were dropped within a month, but the experience left him with a new outlook on life.
"I was a bad kid. I would fight the boys out in the street in heels and everything. 30 days in lock-up changed all that. I had nothing to do, but sit and think, draw pictures and realize how much I had done wrong and why I was here in the first place. I was hooking up with the wrong people and I caught myself before I got too bad."
While Daniels reevaluated his friendships, his relationship with his family, with exception to his mother, has remained over-all stable.
"Honestly, the only one one has a problem with it is my mom. Me and mommy don't speak right now and I couldn't tell you why. Mommy is just being mommy. For her, it's OK for anyone else to be gay, 'just not my son,' which is alright. She's entitled to her opinion, but she should come around soon because neither of us are getting any younger and God forbid something happens to either one of us and the other is sitting around to wonder, what if." said Daniels. "But my daddy is my best friend. Love my father to death. He would do anything for me and he is my biggest support, as far as family support in drag. If I go any further than New York to perform, daddy gets a phone call so he know where I am in case anything happens. When he sees me dance on stage, he's in the audience going 'That's my son, I paid for that.'"
For Daniels, Jessica is a completely separate personality-so much so, that he feels there was a time when Jessica began to take over his life and his body.
"That's not me on stage. That's Jessica. She's a whole other entity. She came about during the whole little transsexual moment I had-thought I was going to be a woman, but not so much," said Daniels. "Jessica wanted this body, badly. I took the hormones and everything, but it just wasn't for me."
Daniels feels secure with who he is now, but is sometimes surprised by the misunderstanding of drag queens within the gay community.
"I feel like drag queens get put down the most. Even when it comes to dating guys are like 'oh you're a fem boy,' and I always say I'm not the most masculine, but I'm not the most feminine either. My daddy may have raised a sissy, but he didn't raise no punk."
Above everything, Daniels wishes he could be seen for who he is as a person, not just as Jessica.
"People don't think. I don't know why people believe we're the same person on stage as we are off stage. If someone goes to see Wicked on broadway, they don't think the girls are at home casting spells, so why is it any different," said Daniels. "Jessica is a character I like to emulate. When I go home, she goes in the box."