In "kiki" with Out in the Bay, Jenkinson shares live performance clips; reads from her memoir, Faux Queen: A Life in Drag; and spills T about where drag and feminism meet and about words that are “now Problematic with a capital P. Or rather, a capital T.”
Faux Queen takes readers into “the ‘shack,” the club gay male friends invited her into and that was central to the extraordinary, edgy San Francisco drag scene of the late ’90s and early 2000s.
Trannyshack was a late-night performance club that ran weekly from 1996 – 2008 with an annual pageant and later occasionally in SF and other cities, influencing drag globally. Deferring to transgender activists, founder Heklina changed the name to “T-Shack” in 2014, then to “Mother” in 2015.
“I’m not a transwoman and it’s not my purview … to say who can use this word,” Jenkinson told us, “but in the moment [tranny] was a cute nickname that drag queens and trans women had for each other” and it was used “very lovingly.”
The club transformed Jenkinson, who’d trained in classical ballet as a youngster, into Fauxnique: “Being invited into this weekly kind of down-and-dirty, loose, but very frequent and regular practice was a game-changer.”
Since her 2003 pageant win, Jenkinson, performing as Fauxnique, has created more than a dozen solo shows combing dance, spoken word and extravagant drag, including Faux Real, The F Word – clips of which we hear on Out in the Bay – and C*NT, or The Horror of Nothing to See. (Click titles to see photos and video clips.)
Anger fueled some of her shows. Especially when creating C*NT, she toldOut in the Bay, “I was deep in my feminist rage.” Yet she says it’s important to “keep your sense of humor and use it. All the gay men in my life have taught me that. They survived a plague through humor."
Learn more about Monique Jenkinson on her website, Fauxnique.net.
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This edition of Out in the Bay produced by Kendra Klang with sound design and editing by Christopher Beale.
