St. Pete drag queen Adriana Sparkle ringing in 2025 at Mari Jean Hotel’s NYE party. Credit: Dave Decker

Adriana Sparkle spent last Sunday running back and forth between three gigs in St. Pete, a standard weekend night as one of the area’s most popular drag queens.

She’s had tons of opportunities over the last eight years—performing and being photographed alongside “Drag Race” stars, bringing talent to St. Pete as Cocktail’s entertainment director, and even having an award-winning sushi roll named after her.
Part of what makes her iconic is also what makes her controversial—her beard.

Sparkle styles and dyes her beard with the same precision she puts toward the rest of her drag, making it look like a beard is just as necessary to any queen’s look as lashes or lipstick. But the brilliant bristle goes against old school drag’s standard of “female impersonation.” That’s what made her hesitate to start doing drag in 2017. And it’s what lost her a lot of gigs.

“I’ve had a lot of ‘no’s,” Sparkles told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. “There’s a couple clubs in Tampa who literally said, ‘Over my dead body. We don’t do that bearded shit.’”

She kept the beard though, and continued honing her look and performances.

“No matter what style you’re doing, you can elevate it to the highest degree if you really try,” she said. “That’s kind of what has put me a cut above the rest. Beard or no beard. I spend way more money on my drag than any other queen in this town. I invest in the art.”

Mari Jean Hotel

2349 Central Ave., St. Petersburg, FL

(727) 289-1298

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That got her a lot of yeses, including from MariJean Hotel and Cocktail bar owner David Fischer. He chose Sparkle as his entertainment director before Cocktail opened in 2021, and she’s since helped make it one of Tampa Bay’s most popular LGBTQ bars.

Even now that “RuPaul’s Drag Race” has relaxed its standards for drag, a bearded queen has never competed in the U.S. franchise (though several have been cast in international seasons including U.K. season four winner Danny Beard).

But Sparkle isn’t intimidated. She already impressed RuPaul in an encounter at DragCon in 2019.

“She was walking and she turned to double back at me. And then she mouthed to me, ‘You’re gorgeous,’ and I’ll hold that with me forever,” Sparkle said.

“I feel extremely confident the minute she lays eyes on me, she’s gonna be like, ‘Oh my god, that was that bitch.’”