For those of you who don’t know her yet, Dot Com is a local queen who has been performing around the city since 2017. Over the years, she’s captivated audiences with her performances that blend drag and cosplay influences. She’s also the host of NeonBlk, a monthly all-black drag show at Mary’s.
Initially, Dot started her career in the cosplay scene, but only played characters with a similar skin tone to her own, fearing backlash. Her concerns were not unfounded. While the cosplay scene has striven to become more inclusive over time, there are still minority voices that continue to harbor hostility towards performers of color for “cross-dressing.” Dot thought it best to limit her cosplay pool to characters with the same skin tone.
“When I started, a lot of cosplayers wanted accuracy, so they wanted to look like the character, and they took skin color into consideration,” Dot said. Georgia Voice. “So I made a list of characters that I wanted to play and kind of boxed myself in. Like, this character is black, so I’ll do this character too, and this character is black, and this character is black, and I felt really limited.”
After some reflection, she decided that even if it meant risking ridicule, she would still have the freedom to wear the cosplay she had always wanted to wear. When she started attending conventions in her new look, the support from the community was overwhelming. Since then, her confidence has grown with every event she attends.
“I feel like we’ve become so used to thinking we’re not good enough. [so] “We don’t often acknowledge whether we’re good enough,” she says. “When people compliment us, I’m like, ‘No, that’s just someone taking the time, taking the time to tell us how great they think you are. That’s not debatable.'”
Around the same time, Dot was breaking free from another similar constraint. After watching Dax Exclamation Point compete on RuPaul’s Drag Race, she realized she had the freedom to play a much wider range of characters. Up until this point, she’d instead done “boy drag,” performing as a man, to play feminine characters. For her, using feminine idioms to bring out the nuances of her original portrayal felt much more exciting and authentic. Thus, the final piece of Dotcom’s story at the intersection of drag and cosplay was formed.
These changes allowed her to explore a broader, more unrestricted scope while also moving forward as a first step in her ongoing efforts to find true self-acceptance. Though she has consistently hosted shows and found success running NeonBlk, she has often questioned her own self-worth. Growing up in a white cultural environment with parents from Trinidad, she has often struggled with her racial identity. When she started NeonBlk, she struggled with the idea that she was “not black enough” to run an all-black show.
“During the first few years of starting Neon Black, I felt like I wasn’t American enough, or culturally black enough,” she explained. [that] I’ve gotten more comfortable with that. I feel like it doesn’t matter if I feel like I’m black or not. At the end of the day, I’m perceived as black. You know. So even if I don’t understand all the references, I’m just living in America like any other black person. So it’s like I’m just realizing that I’m in the same situation as everyone else, and at least we’re all going through the same struggles.”
Over time, Dot’s grip on imposter syndrome weakened. Though she admits she’s still working on it, she learned that just as she gained the confidence to act without inhibitions, it was also built by the support of her community. The constant warmth and acceptance helped her develop a new perspective: no one is a perfect representative of a group.
“I was really struck by the fact that there’s not just one way to be black,” she said. Georgia Voice“Just like there’s no one way to be queer or one way to be gay, whatever way you are, know that it’s valuable. At the end of the day, I’m not just black. It’s just part of my identity… It’s a weird combination that we all struggle with.”
For more information about Dotte Com or NeonBlk, follow @thedottecom and @neonblkdrag. Instagram.
