Raafe Purnsley, also known as the drag queen Stormie Daie of Durham, North Carolina's House of Coxx, opens up about what it was like to grow up queer and Black in the South. Raafe shares his childhood love of Storm (X-Men) and how as a young boy, he avoided expressing his admiration for her out of concern that he would be deemed effeminate for liking a female character. As Raafe started to explore his identity as a gay Black man, he embraced Storm as the inspiration for his drag persona and tapped into elements of his heritage and identity that he had once been afraid to access--including his love of Black hair and his first braids.
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