NINA
WEST
PRACTICE
WHAT YOU
PREACH
KINDNESS AND POSITIVITY AS A WAY OF LIFE
Written by Alan Uphold
Photographs by Paul Robinson
Critically acclaimed Los Angeles photographer, Paul Robinson, has created a 12-part series of photos and articles featuring twelve LGBTQ individuals who have used their notoriety, their celebrity, or their downright chutzbah to affect change in the LGBTQ community.
The series, named “Twelve Soldiers,” will feature Paul’s photographs and a profile of a different social justice warrior each month.
In addition to Paul’s incredible photos of the twelve featured soldiers, his company, NEFT Vodka will donate $1,000 to the charity of choice for each of the featured soldiers.
June is Pride Month around the world, and if you don’t know why we celebrate pride during the month of June, you should. In short, there is a bar in New York called the Stonewall Inn that was frequented mostly by drag queens, cross-dressers, and young effeminate people of color. In June 1969, the bar was raided by police, but for the first time, the patrons fought back. Pride Month commemorates that raid and the four days of rioting that followed. Google Stonewall Riots and read the whole story. As a tribute to those brave souls who fought back, this month we feature a drag queen.
ANDREW LEVITT (AKA: NINA WEST)
If you subscribe to Shakespeare’s notion that you can “kill someone with kindness,” then Andrew Levitt (also known as drag persona, Nina West) is positively slaying it.
As an actor, singer, musician, author, activist, and comedian, among other talents, Andrew is one of the most famous drag queens on the planet.
Indeed, his character, Nina West, was the most googled drag performer in the world in 2020 with more than 7.8 billion searches.
The thing that Andrew is best known for among drag performers and fans alike is that he’s just a super nice guy. In a country where opponents of drag are increasingly spreading fear and hate, Andrew’s demeanor is decidedly the opposite.
He promotes and exudes kindness in everything he does—even going so far as to write a children’s book about the importance of being kind to one another. Perhaps it comes as no surprise, then, that Nina West was voted Miss Congeniality on Season 11 of RuPaul’s Drag Race.
So how does a little kid from a conservative farm community in Northeastern, Ohio, go on to become one of the most famous (and most kind) drag performers in the world?
His story is a bit unconventional, if not outright surprising.
“It was never us versus them.
It was just US, because I didn’t know anyone
else that didn’t think the same way that we did,”
Andrew grew up in Greentown, Ohio, just north of Canton. His family was very active in Republican politics. In fact, his grandfather was county chair of the GOP. Andrew attended a conservative Catholic high school where he was a member of a Right to Life group as well as the Young Republicans. He even attended the 1992 GOP Convention in Houston, TX, and got to meet President George H.W. Bush and his wife Barbara.
Thinking back on that time in his life, Andrew recalls that he really didn’t know anything about the world outside of his small community where everyone pretty much thought and believed the same way.
“It was never us versus them. It was just US, because I didn’t know anyone else that didn’t think the same way that we did,” he said.
That uniform point of view, however, did not stop Andrew from realizing fairly early in life that he was not the same as his classmates.
“I knew I was different somehow, and it was different in a way that the other kids seemed to imply was a bad thing. So I tried to excel in other ways. I got good grades in school. I was a competitive swimmer. I tried really hard to be a people pleaser. I was just trying to make my parents happy.”
If a young Andrew felt that there was something special about him, he may not have been the only one to recognize that about himself.
“Both of my grandmothers loved the theatre. When I was in the third grade, one of them gave me the cast recording to Phantom of the Opera, and I listened to that CD non-stop. It was as though my grandmothers recognized something different in me, and they opened my mind up to opportunities in the theatre.”
By the time Levitt was a teenager, he began to accept his differences even if he wasn’t ready to tell anyone quite yet.
“I think I realized in high school that I was gay, but I didn’t make any big proclamations about it. It was the day that my parents dropped me off at college that I decided that I would just be honest about myself. I thought, if anyone asked me, I would just say I was gay.”
Unfortunately, that didn’t sit well with some of his fellow students.
“I was the first openly gay person to run for student government at my college, Denison University. This caused some controversy on campus.”
One day, Levitt was drawing chalk art in the quad and some fraternity guys came by, spit at him, and called him “fag.” The situation escalated from there. The same epithet was carved into his dorm room door. He began receiving threatening phone calls with messages like, “We know where you live” and “We’re coming for you.”
Finally, one evening, they made good on their threats. One of the students came running down the hall saying that non-resident students were trying to break into the building through a basement window.
Andrew hid in another room while the intruders roamed menacingly around the halls looking for him until security showed up and escorted them out. One student was expelled and two were suspended, but it was an incident that shook him to the core.
In a spontaneous recounting of the event on his season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, he became very emotional. He hadn’t intended to share this experience with the world, but he doesn’t regret having done it.
“I’m not even sure how that happened,” he said. “We were just talking and all of the sudden I’m opening up to these other contestants with cameras rolling. Even though I’ve been through therapy, and I thought I had dealt with those feelings, in that moment it really hit me hard again.”
“The first time I ever saw a drag show,
I was so scared! It was so foreign to me.”
The summer after college in 2001, Levitt moved to his parents’ home in Columbus, Ohio, and began working to save enough money to move to New York City. He had big dreams of pursuing a career in musical theatre. But the horrific events of September 11 changed all that. Andrew decided not the make the move.
“Unfortunately, there were not a lot of opportunities to perform in Columbus, Ohio,” he recalls.
There was one thing, however, that he thought he might be able to do that did involve performing and was actually accessible in Columbus.
A few months earlier, in his senior year at Denison, Levitt had participated in an annual tradition that started some years before. The night before finals week, some of the students dressed up in drag and put on a show.
“The first time I ever saw a drag show, I was so scared! It was so foreign to me. I had never seen anything like it. I was like ‘Ahhhhh…what the hell is this?’ I had never seen anything like it.”
But he and a friend decided that they would muster the courage and participate in the drag show their senior year.
Turns out, Andrew was pretty good at it. His theatre major allowed him to play a character on stage, and he played it big. One of the people who attended that show was a drag performer named Virginia West, and she saw real talent in Andrew. So months later, when Andrew decided not to move to New York, it was Virgina who gave him the idea to become a drag performer and offered to be his Drag Mom.
“She said to me, ‘Why don’t you just do drag here in Columbus? It’s just like theatre. You’re just creating a character.’”
And with that Andrew Levitt’s drag queen persona, Nina West, was born.
In the years that followed, Nina West became one of the most popular drag performers in Ohio.
“A lot of people don’t realize that I was making a lot of money doing drag long before I ever appeared on RuPaul’s Drag Race. I was writing, producing, and starring in five or six shows every week. I bought a house with the money that I made doing my shows!”
Before RuPaul’s Drag Race, the way that most drag queens came to be known outside of their local communities was to participate in a national pageant. There are four major pageants in America that used to be the most important way for female impersonators and drag queens to make a name for themselves to a wider audience.
Those pageants are Miss Gay America, Continental Pageantry, Gay USofA, and Entertainer of the Year.
In 2008, Nina West was crowned the winner of the Entertainer of the Year Pageant.
The following year when it came time for Nina to relinquish the crown, Andrew got an email inviting him to participate in a brand new television drag show that was being cast in Hollywood.
“I thought to myself, ‘Meh, not interested.’ I mean I had just come off of a year as the reigning Entertainer of the Year, and I didn’t really have any interest in participating on a television show on a new cable network.” [The show premiered on LOGO Network.]
Then in 2010, as former title holder of a prestigious national pageant, Levitt was invited to judge the California Entertainer of the Year Pageant, and he happened to be seated on the judging panel next to David Rose, one of the producers of RuPaul’s Drag Race.
“He said to me, ‘I really think you should try out for the show.’ So I thought what the heck?”
The problem was that rather than performing as his authentic Nina West character in his audition tapes, Levitt was trying to mimic the performer who had
“I think my experience in college
was one of the driving forces behind me wanting to form
this foundation and for wanting to help the specific
charities that we support—especially the youth charities.”
won the season before. He ended up auditioning for the show eight times until he finally ran into one of the show’s judges, Michelle Visage, whom he knew from previous drag events. She told Levitt that he needed to stop trying to imitate the other queens.
“Just be yourself,” she advised.
On the ninth try, Nina West was cast in Season 11 of RuPaul’s Drag Race.
Although Nina West finished sixth on the show, she was voted Miss Congeniality and instantly became known as the queen of kindness.
“When I got eliminated, as I was leaving the stage, I just said, ’Go big, be kind, go West.’ I didn’t think there was anything particularly revolutionary about that sentiment. But I suddenly became labeled as this kindness queen.”
From that point on, Nina West’s popularity only continued to grow.
In September 2019, Levitt became the first performer to ever walk the red carpet in full drag at the Emmy Awards. It was at that ceremony that the season in which he appeared won five Emmys.
Nina returned to the show as a special guest in 2021 and was anointed “American’s Sweetheart” by RuPaul herself.
During the COVID lockdowns of 2020-2021, Levitt, like most entertainers, had to make serious adjustments to his normal routines and performances by going online. He started doing Drag Queen Story Time on YouTube as Nina.
Initially, the response was quite positive. Parents and kids alike were charmed by Levitt’s character Nina West and her upbeat message of kindness and positivity.
Up until that point, however, Levitt was primarily a stage and screen performer. He wasn’t yet a seasoned online personality.
That quickly became a problem when word of his performances gained the attention of the wrong crowd.
“Stupidly I was reading these stories live in real time. I hadn’t considered the consequences. I started getting chat bombed by these awful conservative trolls who were posting really ugly things in the comments thread. So, then I started recording my readings, and they doxed me. People found out my personal information and started showing up at my house with air horns and were screaming at the house—trying to disrupt my recordings. It was like my college nightmare all over again.”
That experience ended up becoming the impetus for another credit in Andrew’s very long resume: children’s author.
In 2022, his manager approached him about writing a book. Some of his other contemporary well-known drag queens had already published works like coffee table books, but that didn’t feel right to Levitt.
Andrew suggested to his manager that he write a children’s book instead.
After all, in addition to his Story Time segments, he had already racked up children’s credits like a top-ten children’s album as well as numerous television appearances on Nickelodeon’s Blues Clues. Nina had also appeared in several Disney+ specials for Pride one of which included an adorable duet of “Rainbow Connection” with Kermit The Frog.
So Levitt released the children’s book entitled, “The You Kind of Kind.” As the jacket cover describes it, the book is intended to offer children “a magical adventure to discover kindness in the world—especially the kind inside of you.”
“I had all of these friends who were same-sex partners, and they were getting married and having children, but they didn’t see a lot of representation of
“RuPaul’s Drag Race has really
changed how we consume drag.
I’m lucky to be of the generation that was raised
in the bars where it was a sense of community,”
their families. My book isn’t inherently a gay book. It can be enjoyed by every kind of family. More than anything it’s meant to be a message of kindness and positivity and acceptance.”
One of the most substantial things that happened to Andrew after Drag Race was when his life seemed to come full circle. It harkened back to when he would go to the theatre with his grandmas and back to when he made the heartbreaking decision not to move to New York to pursue a career on the stage.
He was featured for two years as Edna Turnblad in the 20th anniversary touring company of Hairspray. For Levitt, it was a dream come true because, as he said, “The stage is where I really truly feel at home.”
Levitt’s list of credits is as varied as it is long (you can see his full list of credits at www.ninawest.com).
One of the most significant things that sets him apart from other drag performers is the fact that he has created his own charity, known to be one of the first of its type.
“I was doing all of these shows in Columbus to benefit local charities—softball team, swim team, line dancing group, Columbus AIDS Task Force. They were great events, but I realized that they were relying on drag artists to host or participate in their events.”
Andrew says that many shows would end with a finale performance in which the audience was told that all money raised would go to a local group.
“We would get a whole trash bag full of cash that we would just hand off to the charity. It was becoming so big that we were raising thousands of dollars at these events.”
Of course, Levitt knew these organizations and trusted them to use the money wisely. But with so much cash being raised, he wanted a way to legitimize the giving and have some control over where all of that money was going.
“After one of these big shows, one of my friends said
to me ‘You need your own foundation. And I thought, ‘Yes! Of Course! I’m a pretty smart guy. We should do this.’ So we created the Nina West Fund…which later became the Nina West Foundation.”
Among the charities her foundation supports are Kaleidoscope Youth Center (an LGBTQ youth drop in center), Trevor Project (an LGBTQ suicide hotline), Point Foundation (an LGBTQ scholarship program), and Sage USA (an LGBTQ seniors organization), among others. Since its inception in 2015, the foundation has raised and distributed more than $3 million to various charities.
“I think my experience in college was one of the driving forces behind me wanting to form this foundation and for wanting to help the specific charities that we support—especially the youth charities.”
In addition to supporting his own foundation, Levitt continues to support other organizations. In RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars He is supporting Trevor Project. he also teamed up with Dolly Parton for “Kindness Is Queen” campaign to raise money for each of their respective charities.
Levitt feels that supporting and uplifting the LGBTQ community is especially important now. Right wing media and politicians around the country continue to threaten, attack and legislate against drag artists’ first amendment right to free expression. Clowns wear make-up, mimes wear make-up, rock bands of the 70s and 80s wore make-up. What is it in particular about drag queens wearing make-up that is so offensive to right-wing agitators?
“We live in really crazy times where everyone is siloed off in social media in their own specific echo chamber. I don’t think that people sit and listen to people that are different from them anymore. It’s dangerous.”
Yet, Levitt remains optimistic and hopeful.
“RuPaul’s Drag Race has really changed how we consume drag. I’m lucky to be of the generation
“I think being nice to one another
has to go beyond the simplicity of it all.”
that was raised in the bars where it was a sense of community,” he said. “It’s where we gathered, it’s where we drank, it’s where we met new people, it’s where we entertained one another. It was our safe space. And the need for those spaces is so important.”
“So as [RuPaul’s] Drag Race continues and as people see short clips of the show on social media platforms, I hope that drag isn’t reduced to just a few hot takes here or there. There is long history with a lot of weight behind it, and we need to honor that.”
With so much negativity aimed at drag performers, Andrew ended with a message for the haters.
“I think being nice to one another has to go beyond the simplicity of it all. Being kind to one another requires that we show up for ourselves first and understand who we are first. Only then can we be able to go up to someone who is different from us and be able to communicate with them-even if we disagree with them. So I’m just going to continue to try to be kind.”
Go big, be kind, go West.
