Boo.
"Once upon a time, there was a little dead girl dug up from the cornfields of Newton, Iowa. She was discovered by a much more gorgeous, blacker, beautiful, famous drag queen and her career took off. Oh lord... I've created a monster... you better burn, witch!"
- —RuPaul, intro to "This Club is a Haunted House
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Aaron Coady, known professionally as Sharon Needles (born November 28, 1981), is an American drag queen, performer, and recording artist.
She is best known as a contestant on the fourth season of RuPaul's Drag Race where her distinctive "spooky" look, quirky personality, and consistently good performance led her to become a fast fan favorite and eventually win the season, earning the title of "America's Next Drag Superstar". During her tenure on the show, she was famously in a long-term relationship with fellow drag queen Alaska Thunderfuck who subsequently placed as a runner up in the show's fifth season. She is the drag mother of season ten winner, Aquaria.
She is also a recording artist, having released three albums to date; PG-13 (2013), Taxidermy (2015) and Battle Axe (2017), along with one EP, Spoopy which was released in 2019. All three of her (mostly self-penned) albums managed to get into the iTunes top ten download chart during their week of release and were met with very good reviews from mainstream publications, something of a rarity for drag musicians.
In honor of her accomplishments, her home city of Pittsburgh awarded her the key to the city and declared June 12 as "Sharon Needles Day". She was also named as one of Out magazine's 100 most influential LGBTQ+ people of the year in 2012.
Selected filmography
- RuPaul's Drag Race (2012) as herself / contestant
- RuPaul's Drag U (2012) as herself / drag professor
- FEARce! (2012) as herself / host
- Good Behavior (2017) as drag performer
- The Queens (2019) as herself
Discography
- PG-13 (2013)
- Taxidermy (2015)
- Battle Axe (2017)
- Spoopy EP (2019)
Other Appearances
- Christmas Queens (2015)
- Christmas Queens 2 (2016)
- Christmas Queens 3 (2017)
- Christmas Queens 4 (2018)
Sharon Needles provides examples of the following tropes:
- The Ace: Sharon is one of the biggest aces in the herstory of RuPaul's Drag Race, being the first ever queen to win four main challenges in one season, a feat that wouldn't be equalled until five seasons later, by Shea Couleé. She is also the show's only ever queen to date to achieve all four challenge wins solo, rather than share any of them with another queen. In 2021, Out magazine placed her at #1 in their statistical ranking of the US Drag Race (regular season) winners based on her track record in the show.
- Arch-Enemy: She famously had an extremely bitter (and sometimes explosive) rivalry with fellow contestant and season four runner up Phi Phi O'Hara on Drag Race. The two later buried the hatchet and became friends, even parodying their rivalry in the video for Sharon's song, 'Battle Axe', where they engage in a campy Dynasty style catfight.
- Ballad of a Sex Worker: "412/724 Whore," one of her pre-Drag Race singles, is about being a prostitute in Pittsburgh.
- The Cameo: She makes a hilariously memorable cameo as none other than RuPaul herself in Willam Belli's song and video, 'RuPaulogize'.
- Catchphrase: She has quite a few; "Happy Halloween everyone!", "Boo!", "Hail Satan!" and "If in doubt, freak 'em out", the latter of which is her Survival Mantra.
- Drag Queen: Of the campy, comedy and alternative/horror varieties rather than the pageant variety.
- Halloween Songs: A majority of her songs (such as 'Dracula', '666', 'This Club is a Haunted House', 'Dead Girls Never Say No', 'Wendigo', e.t.c) are horror themed, but she has a couple that are more expressly Halloween themed, her cover of 'Every Day is Halloween' by Ministry from PG-13 and 'Jack-O-Lantern' from Battle Axe. She then released the EP Spoopy during the Halloween season in 2019 which contains a cover of the perennial Halloween favorite, 'Monster Mash' and other covers such as 'Purple People Eater' and 'Devil with a Blue Dress'.
- Hemo Erotic: The music video for her song 'This Club is a Haunted House' climaxes with a blood orgy in a nightclub. The end makes it clear to point out that, "No club kids were harmed in the making of this video"!
- Hollywood Satanism: She often signs autographs with her catchphrase "Hail Satan!", despite actually being an atheist."I'm not a satanist, I just play one on TV!"
- Horrible Hollywood: The video for her song 'Hollywoodn't' explores the dark side of Hollywood with Sharon portraying the tragic starlets Elizabeth Short (a.k.a. The Black Dahlia), Sharon Tate and Jayne Mansfield.
- Hot Witch: The glamorous, leggy and sexy witch is one of Sharon's signature looks, as seen here◊, here◊ and here◊.
- In-Series Nickname: She was infamously dubbed with the moniker, "Party City" (after the chain of discount Halloween costume stores) by Phi Phi O'Hara during the most infamous of their fights in Drag Race after Sharon herself dubbed Phi Phi as a "Tired Ass Showgirl". Alaska also referred to Sharon as "Noodles".
- Lady Swears-a-Lot: She is very potty-mouthed (even more so than most drag queens), even getting told off for the habit during the fourth episode of her season of Drag Race, despite the fact that the show itself is also notoriously potty-mouthed. Her third album, Battle Axe contains two tracks ('Brain Dead' and 'Cocaine & Fuck') whose lyrics include one Cluster F-Bomb after another.
- Nightmare Fetishist: As the self-described "Queen of Halloween" (after Elvira dies of course!), Sharon adores anything and everything macabre, creepy and grotesque which is often reflected in her "spooky" style of drag.
- Official Couple: With Drag Race season five runner up (and All Stars season two winner) Alaska Thunderfuck, until they broke up in 2013. At the time they were known by Drag Race fans as the "Royal Couple of Drag".
- Pronoun Trouble: When she and Alaska were together, people stumbled over what pronouns they should use to describe them together; 'boyfriend', 'girlfriend', 'boygirlfriend', 'husband', or 'wife' were the usual choices. Sharon herself referred to Alaska as her "girlfriend with a penis".
- Punk Rock: She is arguably the most famous punk drag queen in the world, displayed through both her style in and out of drag, anti-establishment views and also her sometimes notorious behaviour and rather twisted sense of humor.
- Punny Name: Her name is a pun on the phrase, "sharin' needles".
- Refuge in Audacity: Sharon has a notoriously twisted sense of humor and revels in joking about potentially controversial subjects (such as race, religion and gender) that most other drag queens and comedians won't touch, rather unsurprisingly when you know that she counts both controversial punk rocker GG Allin and comedian Joan Rivers as two of her biggest inspirations. This has occasionally gotten her into some hot water over the years, in 2013 she even managed to get kicked out of the country of Austria for telling jokes about Adolf Hitler, something the Austrians are famously Serious Business about.
- Signature Laugh: She has a very distinctive and what can only be described as maniacal laugh (a cross between RuPaul and the The Cryptkeeper in her own words) which features prominently in near enough every one of her songs. Fellow drag queen Max attempted to imitate the laugh when she impersonated Sharon in season 7's Snatch Game (without much success) and other queens such as Trixie Mattel and Katya have imitated and playfully made fun of the laugh.
- Significant Wardrobe Shift: Back in her Drag Race days, Sharon was mostly well known as a "goth queen" because of her use of very gothic makeup (deathly white foundation and black lips, e.t.c) and creepy colored contact lenses, but she has since admitted that she took the decision to go down this road during the show mostly to make herself stand out from the crowd and have a very defined aesthetic so that people would remember her. Since the show, her drag look has evolved fairly significantly (while still usually maintaining a "spooky" or punky edge) and she now has no qualms about going full-on ultra-femme, sexy, pinup and/or glamazon as well as the traditional goth.
- Statuesque Stunner: She stands at 6 feet tall out of drag, so when you add on her (usually obscenely high) heels and hair, Sharon in drag is closer to 6'5" or even taller!
Happy Halloween, Hail Satan and kill your parents!
