Faux Queen: A Life in Drag

PRAISE FOR

FAUX QUEEN: A LIFE IN DRAG

Monique Jenkinson is the Jane Goodall of drag. As Fauxnique, she has also become one of its most admired primates. This book is a profound herstory of a uniquely fabulous tribe, as well as a deep dive into how to discover, then honor, your own transcendent path. Read and learn.

—Justin Vivian Bond, trans-genre artist

"I’ve read many books about drag over the years and Monique Jenkinson’s Faux Queen is officially my new favorite—and I swear it’s not just because I’m in it! Her life story in drag is unique and inspiring. She beautifully and thoughtfully describes an outrageous, provocative, and magical time in San Francisco drag history that’s often misunderstood in hindsight. I’m so grateful to Monique for writing this incredible chronicle of our lives!"

—Peaches Christ, filmmaker and cult leader

If multiplicity is to your taste—Monique/Fauxnique can give you a FEAST. Heralding a career spanning three decades that meets at the oh-so-perilous intersections of drag, post-modern dance and performance art, feminist theory and critique, and activism, this woman is someone I hold dear as a local performance art hero and a sister who has always answered the phone whenever I called. STEAL THIS BOOK!

—Brontez Purnell, author of 100 Boyfriends

"An incredible window into the magical kiki of San Francisco’s underground drag scene. A voice that is dazzling, sassy and philosophical all at the same time. In writing her memories, Monique/Fauxnique has gifted us a rare invitation to unlock the treasure of queer herstory through the eyes and vision of a faux queen. Taking us on a journey of ballet, punk and fake eyelashes Faux Queen is a living document of the deep connections and histories built by drag queens. I live!"

—Julián Delgado Lopera, author of Fiebre Tropical

"Faux Queen is a playful, engaging, critically serious, counter-culturally crucial memoir that is full of joy—the primal joys of art-making, fandom, connecting with like-minded weirdos, finding your place in the world and allowing your art and obsessions to lead you to it. I love this book."

—Michelle Tea, author of Black Wave, Against Memoir and Valencia

THE FOLLOWING MUSIC LYRICS ARE REFERENCED IN THIS WORK:

This is the time. And this is the record of the time.

Anderson, Laurie. In the Air. Warner Bros. 1982

Well I went to school . . . Do it for the kids, yeah. Erlandson, Eric/Hole/Love, Courtney/Pfaff, Kristen/Schemel, Patty.

Rock Star. DGC. 1994.

I’m gonna take my hips to a man who cares.

Harvey, PJ. Sheela-Na-Gig. Too Pure. 1992.

Sit back and enjoy the real McCoy.

Sioux, Siouxsie. Monitor. Polydor. 1981.

Why do we always come here? I guess we’ll never know. It’s like a kind of torture to have to watch the show.

Henson, Jim/Pottle, Sam. The Muppet Show Theme.

Arista Records. 1977.

We could be married and then we’d be happy.

Asher, Tony/Love, Mike/Wilson, Brian.

Wouldn’t It Be Nice.

Capitol Records. 1966.

"Will I miss the sky? Will I miss the clouds?

Will I miss the city lights?"

Ono, Yoko. Will I. Capitol Records/EMI. 1995.

Take a cruise to China, or a plane to Spain . . . Meet a girl on a boat, meet a boy on a plane.

Oakey, Phillip/Wright, Phillip Adrian.

"The Things That Dreams

Are Made Of." Virgin. 1981.

Fuck the mothers, kill the others.

Sioux, Siouxsie. Night Shift. Polydor. 1981.

"I still have my hands, I still have my telephone,

I still have my allergies."

Monk, Meredith. The Tale. ECM. 1980.

You aren’t never goin’ anywhere.

Gordon, Kim/Moore, Thurston/Renaldo, Lee/Shelley, Steve.

Tunic (Song for Karen). DGC. 1990.

"I did go from wanting to be someone, now I’m drunk

and wearing flip-flops on Fifth Avenue."

Wainwright, Rufus. Poses. Dreamworks. 2000.

Keats and Yeats are on your side, while Wilde is on mine.

Morrissey/Marr, Johnny. Cemetery Gates.

Rough Trade. 1986.

"Sometimes I’ve been to cryin’ for unborn children that

might have made me complete."

Hirsch, Ken/Miller, Ron. I’ve Never Been To Me.

Universal. 1982.

Go out on the lawn! Put your swimsuit on!

Brownstein, Carrie/Tucker, Corin.

I’m Not Waiting. Chainsaw. 1996.

When I think of those East End lights, muggy nights/The curtains drawn in the little room downstairs.

John, Elton/Taupin, Bernie.

Someone Saved My Life Tonight.

MCA Records. 1975.

For my blood family & my drag family.

For Mitzi, Tom, Marc & Kevin.

FOREWORD

SLAY, ILLUSION

When I try to remember one of the first times I saw Fauxnique perform—around 2008, when San Francisco’s drag subculture became my unofficial beat as a freelance alt weekly arts reporter—I see myself on a Sunday, walking into a bar in the Castro in the middle of the day. Near the door, in a little circle of bar floor space cleared for performance—the kind of improvised ritual performance space I’ve come to associate with that place and time—Fauxnique stands, making angular turns and gestures, reflected and reproduced in a video monitor while ominous, discordant music plays: Laurie Anderson’s From the Air.

I knew this song from my own misfit teenage years in the 90s spent seeking arty escape hatches from suburban life on Bainbridge Island, Washington: my queer friends and I, like Monique and hers not so long before us, ran to music for solace and for provocation, for some mirror, too, in which we might catch a reassuring glimpse of our own outcast inner lives, worshipping Nina Hagen and Yoko Ono and The Slits. Now Fauxnique was lip-synching, or maybe she wasn’t:

This is the time. And this is the record of the time.

And I was there reveling in this postmodern glory because the search had, naturally, continued: into the clubs and bars of the Bay, dark and sticky rooms where generations of art-damaged seekers mixed and mingled, recognizing one another in, if nothing else, this shared mission of discovery and of love: love of music and, more often than not, of the women who made it; love of irreverence and of subversion; love of absurdity, of play, of making things, of breaking things, of casting spells, of glamour. 

It all came together in drag. In those years in San Francisco, drag appeared to be enjoying a special moment, part of a long and continuing process of mutation. Drag was busy both celebrating and transcending itself: the drag scene there was also a performance art movement, one that predated and foreshadowed drag’s storming the gates of popular culture. 

Drag has always been here and it always will be: to slightly alter what Jeff Goldblum’s Dr. Ian Malcolm says of life itself in Jurassic Park: drag finds a way. (Incidentally, Jeff Goldlbum appeared as a guest judge on Rupaul’s Drag Race in 2020, where he got himself into hot water; questions he posed to one contestant, Jackie Cox, an Iranian Canadian, about Islam being anti-homosexuality and anti-woman led to outcry and argument online.) Who could have known that one of the ways it would find would be Fauxnique, the first faux queen winner of San Francisco’s biggest drag pageant, which started as a parody of a drag pageant, doing, essentially, a conceptual dance number in the middle of the day, at a gay bar in the Castro, to a song from Laurie Anderson’s Big Science? 

• • •

This book is the time, and this book is a record of the time. In it, Monique Jenkinson traces her artistic lineage from a childhood curiosity excited by difficulty practices (acting out Mary’s sudden blindness in Little House on the Prairie, for example) to full-fledged, pageant-winning performer, guiding us through the cultural moments and movements that whirled through her imaginative world like weather systems: Punk, British New Wave, New Romantic, Goth. Meanwhile, too, the rigors of ballet, which shaped her artist’s psyche and embodiment in indelible ways, fostering discipline on the one hand and dysmorphic perfectionism on the other—a complex inheritance that she would eventually fold into her work, integrating it into a creative metamorphosis that took place on the stages of San Francisco’s drag clubs.

Chief among those stages was the eight-by-ten foot one at Trannyshack, the drag night where we undoubtedly first met. The name has since changed; among the many pleasures of this memoir is the way in which Monique reflects upon and examines the ever-changing deployment of language and identity in this and other respects, putting it into the context of a specific time, place, and personal history (or herstory, as she would have it). This, too, forms part of the artist’s archaeological examination of how she came to be:

When I entered the drag world, the word, though transgressive, was so generalized and casual a term of endearment that people used it almost as one would use girl today, that is, for pretty much everyone in the scene, myself included. It would be disingenuous for me to erase that moment and the words those generous people used as they welcomed me into their family.

Faux Queen, too, is anything but disingenuous—a quality which got you nowhere at Trannyshack, unless you were making a self-aware (and self-destructing) spectacle out of it on stage. Instead, it approaches the task of memoir—the dance of memoir, the drag of memoir—in the same spirit that ruled over those Tuesday nights at the Stud (the bar that hosted the ‘shack): honest, unflinching, and irreverent; funny, experimental, subversive, bold. Monique will explain to you, shortly, what a faux queen is, but only as the beginning of a much more capacious and complex conversation about what it might mean to be queen, queer, female, or faux. The drag world from which Fauxnique emerges contains multitudes, and even its multitudes contain multitudes: a context for irreverence, as she puts it, where fluidity reigned (not to mention actual body fluids of every imaginable kind, incorporated into a cascade of three-minute performances).

All this to say that, while unfolding a personal history of artistic inquiry, feminism, and the metamorphosing self, and while capturing the artistic-efflorescence-through-drag taking place during a particular era of San Francisco’s nightlife, Faux Queen also looks back at the people, the places, and the social and cultural forces that enabled, in Monique’s life, that most vital, most quicksilver creative practice: play.  

• • •

I have a confession to make: I’ve never watched Rupaul’s Drag Race. Okay, that’s not entirely true—I watched a few episodes when it first came out, just to see how it was set up, but nothing since then. Competition for status saturates nearly every aspect of American life, and I have minimal interest in watching people compete—which is to say, play to win—in this particular way, whether it’s in the arena of sports, modeling, fashion, or drag. 

In a state of true play, you’re not trying to prove yourself to anyone, which is why it so often opens up into the thrill of true freedom. Of course, discoveries made in play may then be taken and refined into extraordinary creations through the rigors of work—a process Monique depicts here with the seasoned artist’s obsessive love of detail and specificity. But the fundamental energy of play is exploration for exploration’s sake: finding something new to do, or a new way to do something old, and then doing it because it feels interesting or exciting (and, maybe, forbidden). 

Play also happens, more often than not, with others; accomplices real or imaginary. Describing a museum event she orchestrated at which children created outfits for drag queens, Monique writes:

Kids with all kinds of gender expression were thrilled to play with living dolls who then proudly walked the runway in their kinder-craft creations. The event reaffirmed something I’ve known forever: drag queens and kids are like chocolate and peanut butter. We like to play dress-up and dream ourselves into fantastical ways of being. And anyone who has spent time with both a cranky two-year old and a messy queen can confirm that they are kindred creatures in more ways than one. As Margo Channing in All About Eve says of children, they’d get drunk if they could. 

It’s the people in Monique’s story—the messy queens, the people who met and played and fought and flourished around Trannyshack at the time—that remind us of the difference between those most remote, most spectacular specters of reality show drag stardom and our co-conspirators on the ground, in the bar, on the street, and backstage. From the middle of any discourse about what is faux and what is authentic, the creative friendship shines forth, moving and complex and undeniably human. 

What drew me to drag in San Francisco was, believe it or not, its humanity. This world of illusion was made up of people moving through rooms, people with all their particular shapes, voices, and smells, their virtues and their foibles, their inner lives and their outer ones, their madness, their reason, their realness. Drag pop culture, in this respect, can never hold a candle to it, preoccupied as it is—as so much of our popular culture is—with competitive hijinks edited and glossed and groomed to seamless surface perfection. 

People, relationships, and works of art are imperfect. What’s more, the best of them aren’t afraid to be. The best of them are capable of laughing at themselves, knowing they are always works in progress. Monique Jenkinson knows this; her knowledge is hard-won and meaningful, and it’s part of the reason she writes with such wise humor, knowing that the magic in all of it comes from the very imperfection that makes us so ridiculously and beautifully human. Through her own history—herstory—she bears witness to the authenticity of messy, complex, constant change.

If our day and age is marked in some major way by hand-wringing about what (existential) freedom really is and who really has it; I offer up, after reading Faux Queen, one fleeting, imperfect, improvised definition among many other simultaneous and perhaps even contradictory possibilities. Freedom is the courage to look at yourself and to see that you are fluid, not fixed; that you are changing, not concluded, and then, with a pure heart, with a heart full of wonder—no matter what else the world may say about your heart—to laugh.

Evan James

New York, New York

July 2021

WHAT’S

IN MY PURSE?

Well, history has been made tonight. . . . It’s been a long time coming. We’d like to introduce to you, Miss Trannyshack 2003. Fauxnique!

This announcement is the reason I’ve written a book, the motivating event behind anyone’s possible interest in my life. I was the first cisgender woman to win a pageant for drag queens. The inevitable question How did that happen? comes next. The multiple, wordy, roundabout answers fill the pages that follow.

• • •

When I was eight, my mom, Mitzi, drove us the two hours from Modesto to San Francisco to join my dad, Tom, at a business dinner. I wore a dress of white linen piqué with a Peter Pan collar and big red pockets in the shape of tulips. Retro. Midcentury-little-girl drag. In 1979.

Upon meeting me, Bobby, the man we were dining with, squatted down to my level, looked straight at me, and said: Love the dress. And those pockets, honey! I didn’t realize it at the time but I’d just met my first queen. In the surreal lingo of the era, he opened his mouth and a purse fell out. And it was beautiful.

I replied, Thank you, politely, as I had been taught. But I imagine saying "Bobby, honey yourself! I love your lavender snakeskin cowboy boots and your mauve polo shirt. Don’t think for a second I didn’t notice how they set off the sandy tones of your tidy mustache. Thank you. Thank you for getting it, for getting me."

I love gay men. I always have. When I am among gay men, I am among my people. That’s the easiest way to say it. Not all gay men, not only gay men, but most, and mostly. The people with whom I share affinity—cultural, intellectual, philosophical—are gay men.

People have simplified this by saying Oh, she’s a gay man trapped in a woman’s body! but I never have. Even as I write the phrase gay man for the sake of convenience, I know that gay men are not a thing for me to distill into an easy category, an essence that I could trap in my body. Besides, though my life isn’t a constant expression of unabashed liberty, rarely do I relate to the word trapped. I live in the contemporary world of the queer, in which we subvert the binary and use trouble and complicate as verbs to act upon terms like gay and man.

I would say my affinity with gay men is just perfectly natural, but of course I bristle at the word natural just like Oscar Wilde, my good Judy (that’s old-time gay speak for pal). Nature is a concept I like to trouble and to complicate. Then there is the nurture part, which comes, as most nurture does, oh yes it does, from Mom. Mitzi instilled in me a system of cultural values that one might call Old School Gay, with an attendant love of all things associated with it: black-and-white movies full of swelling soundtracks and mid-Atlantic accents, the exuberant and wistful outpourings of musical theater (see Judy above), sophisticated fine design, and wicked, sometimes withering, humor.

The girl with the tulip pockets and sassy mother spent her teen years aching to be taken seriously and trying to be good. Perfect, even. Conflictedness shaped my sense of self; pleasure was suspect. I’d be tempted to call my affliction anhedonia, but there was a kind of hedonism, a fervor, to my state that bore the traces of what one might more accurately term Late-Stage Baroque Puritanism or perhaps Genetic Catholic Martyr Syndrome. But beneath that seriousness, and my desire for its affirmation, were strata of glitter, lava flows bubbling with glamour and delight.

Performing drag helped heal some of the most stubborn wounds of my angsty youth, inevitable psychic damage from formative years spent under the microscope of classical ballet training. My closest friends and I, many of them men who do drag, have recognized a common ground of intense scrutiny and high stakes between growing up a sissy boy and growing up a fledgling ballerina. Each of us strove to please, to diet or quiet ourselves down to fit into a damaged culture’s idea of perfection. Thank God, or Goddess, or Goddex we failed and found each other.

I found acceptance where a layperson might assume I wouldn’t: at a drag club, the infamous Trannyshack in San Francisco. Trigger warning and buyer beware! This word is now Problematic with a capital P. Or rather, a capital T. It is a big ol’ purse full of problems, which we will examine.

Dear reader, if you don’t want to see me dump out my purse, don’t want to see the broken compact, the old Kleenex, the stubby eyeliner, the bloodstained dollar bill, the expired condom, the half-empty baggie of ketamine (where did that come from?), the stale gum and the tampon wrappers, this book may not be for you, even though you may be one of the people for whom I wrote it.

That is the well of sorrow under this work, my fear that the contents of my bag will truly offend you. But we might be a lot alike, you and I. Maybe you were a funny kid full of innocent glee who had to grow up and perform or represent something she didn’t want to. A sensitive child begging to be taken seriously and carrying a burden too heavy for her little arms. From oversized dance duffel to gem-encrusted it bag, there are a few purses in this story. But it isn’t about the purses. Nora Ephron did the purse to perfection and I thank her.

As a cisgender woman performing as a drag queen in a world of cisgender men doing the same, people ask me if I get accused of trespassing, when what they really want to ask is Are drag queens as bitchy as they are on TV? Do they hate you? By drag queens they mean real drag queens. By real drag queens they mean men. I answer no. Not in my world.

I conceived and birthed my drag persona in a warm pool of liberation and love surrounded by cheerleading drag doulas. Sure, there was the rare naysayer who questioned my presence while clutching her pearls and clucking about women treading on gay men’s territory. She was not drag family, but usually a distant relative from out of town (even if by out of town I mean just across town). I was ushered into the San Francisco drag scene by queens who valued me for my talents as well as my quirks, who embraced and encouraged me. These queens understood deeply that I had been performing drag my entire life, that we all perform our genders to an extent, most of us in some form of drag at least some of the time. And even when those queens dragged the abject and ridiculous aspects of femininity, the loving intention of their humor was clear. I went from the club back into the world feeling valued, celebrated, and intellectually engaged.

The drag club gave me a release valve exactly when I needed it. I walked into that queer space mortally afraid of saying the wrong thing, and the generous people there clobbered my fear with laughter. They said all the wrong things in all the most wrong and most fearless ways and then put it all onstage, and somehow it felt right. We exorcised our demons and paraded them around. The demons were ugly and pretty, smart and stupid, evil and banal. Some demons were sexist, racist, capitalist, misogynist, xenophobic, homophobic, transphobic. Some were truly frightening and some redemptive, positively angelic. Despite, or perhaps as a result of all of the demons onstage, backstage was by and large a place of loving care.

Trannyshack was not perfect, but its timing in my life was. After the release valve came relief. Its atmosphere of anarchic joy undercut my attempt at cool-girl art-criticality and transformed me into a shameless, screaming fan. A stressed-out, serious young woman rediscovered that she was a funny girl. I was afraid nothing I had to say was relevant, so they gave me an audience. That audience and its performers validated me the way that Bobby had. They encouraged me to show my edges and underbelly, all my garish colors. Suddenly I had something valuable to offer. Maybe someday I would be fierce.

We live in a fractious time when people who should be on the same team can’t seem to stop hurting each other or claiming to be hurt by each other. Is this always what happens when we raise consciousness? We were raising consciousness then too, and people had been for decades. I must note this, not to undermine the here and now, but to remind us not to rewrite the intricacies of history.

A memoir is and is not a history. Histories are supposed to tell it like it is, or rather, like it was, but the telling must always force itself through the clumsy sieve of the teller’s subjectivity. Memoir, unlike most histories, admits this clumsiness. My (her)story, because it is mine, will leave out some important perspectives. I cannot tell your story, yet my story may hold yours.

Every memoir is a subjective story, but also a story of subjectivity. Inasmuch as I acknowledge that, while you cannot possibly feel what I feel and I cannot possibly feel what you feel, I am going to make a hopeful little leap toward you. I will attempt what seems impossible right at this cultural moment: to come together in difference. This book is about difference. It is about being different, feeling different, and finding commonality. Radical acceptance in a radical space. Or, radical at the time. Every era tends to find its own radical and reject what came before. For me, that space was Trannyshack, in all its fierce, flawed glory.

There I found a spot to lay down my burden, my big heavy purse. I found not only kinship, but also a creative practice, a career path, and maybe even some kind of relevance. All the things serious people want. I gave over to artifice and found authenticity. I gave over to humor and found myself being taken seriously. I found my people. We thrived in irreverence and still committed ourselves to the project of coming together in difference. The unsafest of safe spaces helped us enact an impossible project: to get free.

IT’S LIKE A

KIND OF TORTURE TO HAVE TO WATCH THE SHOW

I knew Kevin was going to end up being one of my favorite people ever. He and I had met and bonded on a tour to Chicago with a friend’s dance company in 1997. After an epic kiki (drag lingo for deep talk) on the plane ride there and a sweaty night of dancing at a gay bar in Boystown, we were instant pals.

Girl, you really need to come to Trannyshack, he said in the summer of 1998.

Hmmm. I had replied. I dunno. I love drag queens, but they scare me.

Kevin was the first person I heard mention Trannyshack, the infamous Tuesday night weekly at the Stud in San Francisco. A lot of my other friends from the dance world were queer, but not the kinds of queers who went to nightclubs. Like me, they were enmeshed in a culture built around morning technique class at least three times a week.

I was a dancer, but rarely did I go out dancing, especially not at midnight on a Tuesday!

After working most nights waiting tables I skipped the post-shift drinks that my twenty-something coworkers enjoyed. Instead, I got up in the morning, pulled on sweats, and lugged my ass to the dance studio, sometimes up an actual steep and very narrow stairway, as the song from A Chorus Line goes. I couldn’t imagine a Tuesday late night out, but if Kevin thought I needed to go to Trannyshack, he was probably right. He was right about a lot. I had always loved drag queens and the drag aesthetic. In college I discovered RuPaul, Wigstock, and the grand ball culture depicted in Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning. They had me at the word work, as in You betta work! That I could relate to.

But, drag queens did also kind of scare me. Weren’t they mean? Wouldn’t they bristle at having women in their space? Would it not be a kind of appropriation, an invasion, for me to even show up at a drag club? Kevin reassured me this was nonsense.

"Don’t worry, honey. It’s totally fierce, but not scary. I mean, it’s kind of scary, but in a fun way, a performance-arty way. And it’s not a total sausage party either. Lots of women go. You’re gonna love it."

Okay, but I might not want to stay too late. Tomorrow’s Cunningham class!

"Whatever, Mary, I mean Merce. The show starts at midnight. See you there at a quarter till."

I rode my bike through the wet-cold windy night to the corner of Ninth and Harrison, and locked up at a parking meter. I found Kevin inside and we sidled up to the bar, a lopsided mess, sunken in the middle from rot caused by decades of beer puddles. This place was a landmark, its rotten bar a monument to the legacy of a forty-year nonstop bacchanal.

A club soda for me, I said, reminding Kevin that I had dance class in the morning. Over the sound system, right after Propellerheads’ History Repeating (featuring Miss Shirley Bassey), came a sound from childhood.

The opening theme to The Muppet Show.

Why do we always come here? I guess we’ll never know. It’s like a kind of torture, to have to watch the show, the two crotchety old Muppets sang.

Come on! Let’s get closer to the stage, said Kev as he guided me away from the bar. That means the show’s starting.

I kinda already loved the show and it hadn’t even started. What’s not to love about drag queens who, at the outset of their show, admit their affinity with Muppets? We paddled through a sea of people. There were trans-femmes of all stripes from the imposing Miss Chocolate at the door to gals in sensible pumps and daytime realness to glam working girls. Then there were cute boys and baby dykes, big-bellied bears, genderfuck queers in messy wigs and just a smear of lipstick, and more than a few gay-boy/gal-pal combos like us. Everyone was pliant and friendly as we pushed past. When we found a good spot, the muscle queen in front of me stepped aside so I could squeeze forward to see better.

Thanks so much! It’s my first time.

Werq! he shouted, and raised his pint glass.

There was that word again: work, but this time a sassy e and q were implied in his joyous, haphazard delivery. This wasn’t the first time I had encountered this word as a cheer and an exclamation of encouragement, and it would be far from the last. It meant everything from you’d better take this moment seriously to amen.

The show created some illusions of course, as drag shows must, but totally shattered others. This was