Tampa Bay’s 1st Place Favorite Local Drag King and 1st Place Favorite Local Law Firm
You may not see the similarities between practicing law and donning drag, but Edson Abadia Jr. — also known on stage as Mr. Gripp, Sissy Gripp and just Gripp — has found great success where they intersect.
“People think they’re big, different worlds, but they’re really not,” Abadia explains. “I feel often that being an attorney is drag. I go into rooms or conversations where I put on a character and do my best to kind of put on the show, to do what’s best for my client, and it’s the same for drag. They both have a lot of power to change law and society.”
It’s why he’s worked to bring them together on and off the stage for years, particularly since forming Abadia Law Firm in early 2024. It serves the LGBTQ+ community, other creators and small businesses with compassion and creativity, which made it Tampa Bay’s 1st place for Favorite Local Law Firm this year.
Abadia, who is barred in both Florida and California, previously worked at an employment defense firm. He says after a few years he “realized I got off track as to why I went to law school and why I’d been working my whole life to become a lawyer.
“It was to help people, to help LGBTQ+ people, to help Spanish people and to help low income people,” Abadia stresses. “So I took the scary step to leave a very comfortable position and start doing what I should have been doing, which was helping people.”
It’s a sentiment the performer carries with him on stage, whatever his gender expression may be in character. That authenticity led readers to recognize him as this year’s 1st Place Favorite Local Drag King.
“It’s interesting,” Abadia says. “I get asked a lot how I identify — as a drag king, drag queen, nonbinary performer, all these things … and I do think I’m kind of all of them. I had to remind myself that I can be all of these categories and embrace them all.
“That’s why I do both,” he says of drag and being an attorney. “That’s why I keep trying to make them more and more connected, because I think there really is more power when it’s all together.”
To see all the other 2025 WONDER Award winners, go here.
