We meet up with Caiden in the bar of a trendy boutique hotel in Shoreditch, where the interior can be described as the city's hippest attempt at commoditizing Instagram aesthetics. The occasion deserves some cocktails.

"There is a kind of commonality to all drag right now because that show has influenced so much. So many people can have the same references, which isn't necessarily a bad thing," Caiden explains, who shares his funny, outspoken and down-to-earth insights on his successes in an industry that was brought into the mainstream and homogenized by RuPaul's Drag Race. "I always perform the same character and don't change looks. Fixed identities don't go down well there," he admits, as a reason for why Caiden isn't sure if he'd go on a show like Drag Race.

Virgin Xtravaganzah wears a corset and glamorous headpieces, has a mustache and never tucks. To Caiden, the Virgin Mary is devoid of gender. She was stripped of her womanhood when she became a symbol of virginity, which is why he portrays her as a character that defies sex-role stereotypes in his self-styled 'genderfuck drag'.

Caiden started performing as a child actor in Los Angeles. His early successes in Hollywood gave him the confidence to pursue acting as a career and he moved to London to finish his acting training. "I came in strong on the first day of drama school with eyeliner on, and mascara, and a fishnet shirt. I was like, 'Yas, she's here!'" he says mimicking his former self with an exaggerated gesture. "They were just like, 'No, no, no, you can't do that. You need to be a man. You need to be able to look heterosexual in order to get roles'." Caiden felt himself being molded into a blank canvas so that he could be more versatile as an actor. His training stripped him of his eccentricity and he graduated not knowing himself as an artist. "It was so damaging that I ended up working in a call center for seven years," he adds with a chuckle.

Gradually, though, Caiden started exercising his creativity again. He enrolled in a playwriting course and made YouTube videos featuring various eccentric characters—the Queen of England, a beatboxing angry flower and an elderly Englishman called 'Blidworth'.

This was all in 2014, the year Caiden also decided to take part in a drag competition with his Virgin Mary character. "In those days, Virgin Xtravaganzah was very different than what she looks like now," he says about his own rendition of the Christian icon known as the mother of God. "I didn't know how to do makeup, and her costume was a piece of green tablecloth and a broken lamp shade—very DIY." It's this way that Virgin Xtravaganzah won her take on pop star Rihanna's single 'Unfaithful', which led her to more performance opportunities and eventually turned her into the fierce Matriarch of the Messiah she is today.

These days, Virgin Xtravaganzah is a household name in the London drag scene and is on her way to conquering the world. Caiden has been to most countries in Europe and parts of Asia but is quick to note that he's never performed in the United States. "It would be very interesting to see how Virgin goes down in a place like the US because, first of all, there isn't a sense of fundamentalism regarding religion in the UK." Caiden was raised in a small, conservative town in Oregon. He attended Catholic school and went to church every Sunday but as a queer-identifying teenager, he soon became the odd one out in the religious community. The hypocrisy of the church felt particularly acute when he was bullied by the same people who sat next to him at Mass.

"Virgin Xtravaganzah has actually been a very healing, therapeutic form of expression for me because, in one way, it enabled me to really face a lot of demons from my childhood and teenage years," Caiden says. "At the same time, it helped me rediscover the love that I have for good stories and the Bible's a great story. I often think that Virgin Xtravaganzah is not actually against religion, she's against the institution of the church. I don't think there's anything wrong with religion."

Caiden turned the Virgin Mary from an empty vessel whose only purpose was to give birth to a Holy man, into a character through which he could talk about his own dramas, pop culture, and current political issues. "I wrote a whole piece about myself as a child but it was narrated as the Virgin meeting this little boy in pink roller skates and a pink T-shirt," Caiden explains. "The lesson that that little boy taught her was about overcoming bullies and not giving a fuck about life. In this way, I marry both of our narratives. I have it quite easy in that respect because I already have this character that is external to myself—the Virgin Mary."

Caiden is conscious of finding the right balance between honoring his artistic vision and pleasing his audiences. He sees the evolution of Virgin's look as the result of opportunity but her persona has been stable since her creation in 2014. "We forget sometimes that the most important thing is that we enjoy what we're creating because when we enjoy what we're doing, people smell it, they can sense it, they pick up on it. They want to be a part of that because, again, they are also working in a sea of people needing validation. Then when you have someone who's just like, 'I really like this,' they're like, 'Oh, my god, give it money!'"

The Virgin Xtravaganzah shows are a combination of stand-up comedy and song parody with no stage visuals. The performance revolves around the Virgin Mary's life—she is the mother of God and yet there are only 14 lines about her in the entire Bible. Here's a woman who is a huge part of the Christian faith but is given no voice and no personality.

Caiden re-writes the lyrics of existing pop songs to tell the Virgin Mary's story from a contemporary perspective. He re-wrote 'Sexy Back' by Justin Timberlake into 'Abstinence', a dance-pop piece about her not having sex and how fabulous abstaining can be. He also satirized Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah', turning the secular hymn into a first-person narrative where the Virgin Mary leaves the church and realizes that there are plenty of different terms of praise from other religions, like 'L'Chaim' in Judaism or 'Allahu Akbar' in Islam.

Some songs are purely comical, marrying the sacred with the profane, but some are explicitly political. "Performing in cabaret can be hard sometimes," Caiden admits. He recently wrote a song about the breakup between the UK and the European Union to No Doubt's 'Don't Speak'. "Cabaret is celebratory. Theater is cerebral. Doing cerebral cabaret can be tricky but that's why I love Virgin's character because she treads this line of being funny enough on a very base level because it's the Virgin Mary telling a dick joke. Then you just have to coax people into, 'Okay, now I'm going to get really political. We're going to talk about Brexit.' It's a little dance with a cabaret audience. You have to tame them."

"With drag, as so often with cabaret, the audiences don't really expect that much," replies Caiden to the question of whether he enjoys this challenging dance with the cabaret audiences. "They really just want you to look pretty and if you do that, you've already ticked most of the boxes. This means that the vast majority of drag is allowed to have absolutely no content whatsoever. If you make your rent lip-syncing to pop songs and that's all you do, good for you. I'm not saying that any art is not valid but I have no interest in it whatsoever because it is not telling a story, it's not demonstrating anything. I'm just not interested in looking at something sparkly on the stage just for the sake of it."

Written by Andrea Kelemen