The world is overdue for a kiki — in drag parlance, a time to relax, take off your makeup and talk abouteverything.
“Faux Queen: A Life in Drag,” the new memoir by San Francisco performance artist Monique Jenkinson, a.k.a. Fauxnique, is that kiki. The book is like a postshow conversation with the cisgender female drag queen, minus the drink tickets and baby wipes.
“I always knew I would eventually write a book,” says Jenkinson, 50, whose performances include “Faux Real” in 2009; “Beautility,” performed in the San Francisco City Hall Rotunda, in 2011; and her ongoing “Disintegration” video series. “I wanted to render this place and time that I was lucky enough to experience with both reverence and irreverence.”
Jenkinson’s stories can segue from recalling early drag gigs at the Stud’s Trannyshack night to contemplating feminist theory by philosopher Judith Butler, or recalling how her childhood obsession with “Little House on the Prairie’s” blind heroine, Mary Ingalls, manifested in her work.
Over the years, Fauxnique’s performances have offered a melange of dance, storytelling and explorations of feminine constructs that has become her signature, which has allowed her to move among drag clubs, art galleries and conventional theatrical spaces presenting her work.
“The way that she’s willing to both draw upon tradition and then subvert it are things that artists are doing in my program,” said gallerist Catharine Clark, who haspresented workby Jenkinson at her San Francisco gallery. “She fits in conceptually and materially with the approach that a lot of the artists have. Take somebody likeTimothy Cummings,who’s looking at young people struggling or trying to define who they are outside of a binary system. He’s doing that through paint. … I think Monique does something quite similar.”
In “Faux Queen,” Jenkinson ties each narrative thread in a sequined bow of context that both entertains and informs readers about the San Francisco scene from which Fauxnique emerged.
The memoir’s title, “Faux Queen,” refers to a term for drag queens who identify as female. As a cis woman with a male partner, Jenkinson was in some ways an outsider among gay male queens and yet also a performer widely accepted and beloved within the scene. It also refers to Fauxnique’s “herstory,” which includes being crowned 2003’s Miss Trannyshack, the first faux queen to win a major drag pageant.
It’s required reading for the anthropological framework in which it places turn-of-millennium drag culture, as well as the sensitive explanations of now-dated terminology and practices that were part of it. (See for example the use of the term “fish” as a feminine descriptor and the name Trannyshack itself.)
“I didn’t want to ‘set the record straight.’ I want to set the record gaily forward,” Jenkinson says. “I think we tend to see this sort of continuum — ‘things were problematic then and now they’re correct’ — and it’s always more complicated. I wanted to show the complications, the joy, depth and sorrows. It’s that very human desire to honor and preserve history.”
Jenkinson points to a book quote by performer Justin Vivian Bond, who called her “The Jane Goodall of drag” after the famous primatologist.
”她接着说,“作为Fauxnique,她也become one of its most admired primates,’ ” Jenkinson recalls. “For Vivian to say I’m also one of the primates is very important. I’m kind of an outsider among the outsiders.”
After two decades in the scene, Jenkinson is in a unique position to share the queer San Francisco history “Faux Queen” covers. In the fall of 1998, she began performing at Trannyshack, a Tuesday drag night at the now defunct Stud Bar in San Francisco’s South of Market area hosted by queen and nightlife entrepreneurHeklina. Jenkinson identifies the ethos of Trannyshack as “art damaged,” a term used by Heklina to describe the mashups of cultural references and avant-garde sensibilities that would grace the stage. For example, Jenkinson’s first performance there saw her and a partner dressing up as male Mormon missionaries for a tribute to same-sex marriage set to the Beach Boys’ hit “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?”
Trannyshack — whichchanged its nameto Mother in 2015 after the term “tranny” became acknowledged as offensive to the transgender community — was also a drag space that allowed a wide variety of identities onstage including trans performers, drag kings and cisgender women.
In the sometimes chaotic scene at the Stud and other drag nights, Jenkinson often stood out more for her attention to rehearsal and precision than she did for her gender, something she traces back to her practice as a dancer-choreographer.
“I always used to make fun of her — ‘oh, somebody didn’t get enough attention as a child’ — because she’d be backstage before she went on listening to her song, rehearsing, while there was so much debauchery going on around her,” said Heklina. “But I love that as prim and proper as she could be offstage, she could really let herself go onstage.”
Faux queens, also called “AFAB queens” for “assigned female at birth,” are not unusual in San Francisco’s drag scene. At the same time Jenkinson was finding herself in drag, Ana Matronic was already established at Trannyshack before gaining fame as a musician with the band the Scissor Sisters. At Jenkinson’s book signing at Oasis nightclub last month, fellow veteran faux queen Trixxie Carr was one of the featured performers. In recent years, performerSnaxx还开发了一个和他在这座城市吗r appearances at Oasis and her podcast “Talkin’ Snacks With Snaxx.”
“Fauxnique definitely inspired me,” says Snaxx. “When I started, I got questions constantly about whether I was a ‘real girl’ or why I did female-presenting drag if I was already a girl. People like Fauxnique and Trixxie Carr were inspiring because they showed women have always done drag.”
But in the wider drag world, definitions of the art form can be more narrow. It’s only been in recent seasons that transgender contestants have competed on the popular American version of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” The U.K. version of the show welcomed its first faux queen, Victoria Scone, in 2021.
So where does Jenkinson see the art form going in San Francisco and in a post-pandemic landscape?
“I think there will always be weirdos finding their ways to express themselves,” Jenkinson says. “In this complicated, huge drag scene, when you get these kinds of weirdos in one place, you get all of these branches that kind of grow off of the main ones, or brooks and creeks that flow off of the mainstream, as it were. I don’t think there’s any one direction drag is going to go in. There are always smart people who are looking to resist the flattening of drag into one thing. I’m way more interested in them.”
Faux Queen: A Life in Drag
By Monique Jenkinson
(Amble Press; 291 pages; $18.95)
KQED Live Faux Queen: A Life in Drag With Fauxnique:7 p.m. Thursday, March 3. $10. KQED, 2601 Mariposa St., S.F.events.kqed.org
Monique Jenkinson in conversation with The Chronicle’s Tony Bravo:6:30 p.m. March 23. Free. Modern Appealing Clothing, 387 Grove St., S.F. To RSVP call 415-863-3011.
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