It’s me and the drag queens backstage. Here we are in the heart of Chicago’s underground queer nightlife — as in, we are literally in the basement. “How do you pee when you’re in a look?” I ask. The closest bathroom is upstairs and I don’t want to prematurely reveal my outfit to the crowd. “Well, there’s this drainage hole back there…” a queen named Imp responds. “It’s an old queen trick!” And there I am, my own drag Piss Christ, inaugurated into the world of queer drag in all its grit and glamour.
It’s Pride week in Chicago and I’m here for a performance at a local gay club, and Imp Queen is up on the roster before me. She is wearing a pink number with cartoonishly sized fabric-stuffed breasts (a collaboration between her and Ophelia Bulletz). It’s garish and deeply endearing, and very Imp. She takes control of the center of the dance floor while singing one of her tracks, “Amanda Lepore,” named after the legendary NYC club icon.
Then she takes a shot of estrogen right there in front of us.
It’s a work of political art.
Just a few months ago RuPaul, one of the preeminent drag queens in the world, expressed his resistance to trans women participating in Drag Race because when it’s not cis men doing it, “drag loses its sense of danger.” And here we have Imp Queen: a trans woman drag performance artist taking the very hormones that RuPaul dismissed as “performance-enhancing drugs.”
Take that!
Imp is an iconoclast — one of the most visible drag queens on social media who has not been a contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race. She uses her Instagram to document the looks she wears out for nightlife gigs in Chicago: dazzling the masses with her iconic pink countenance, regal balloon crowns, and unyielding reservoir of creativity. In Imp’s world looks are a postgender bliss…to be found on aisle five in heaven next to the neon lip liner...thank you very much! What is striking about Imp’s online presence is she doesn’t only turn looks, she also talks shop. She goes live speaking candidly about her transition, her struggles with mental health and harassment, and her own frustrations with the drag scene. In this way she poses a double whammy: She can contour your face to the gods and lecture you on queer performance theory along the ride.
Over the past decade with the success of RuPaul’s Drag Race, DragCon conventions, and the popularity of local drag festivals like Bushwig, drag is experiencing a sort of renaissance. Drag queens have become interchangeably our self-help gurus and seasonal lookbooks, IRL memes that we use to communicate who we are. “Who’s your favorite drag queen?” is the new “What’s your astrological sign?”
We put drag queens on stages to sell us fantasy — they become the symbols through which we learn to love ourselves and reconcile our own difference. But I wonder if in all of the mythology we create about drag queens we neglect their materiality. In other words: Who heals the healer? Do we allow drag queens to struggle, be depressed, let alone exist beyond their utility?
What happens when a drag queen speaks out about her own violation from the very people snapping for her? What happens when the fantasy becomes a nightmare?
Imp Queen’s journey is a story about the Internet and how, like most things that give birth to us, it finds a way to abuse us and call it love. It’s story about trauma and how we try our best to adorn it, call it “art” and hopefully even a living. A story about impossibility, false lashes that might be more real than we think, and the things we do not say. Mostly, Imp Queen’s is a story about transmisogyny: how they live for her performances and don’t care about what happens to her when they’re over.
They say: “You better work!”
Trans performers say: “Where will they hire us?”
I first met Imp in Chicago when I was in town for a gig back in 2016. I was struck by her thoughtfulness about everything she does. It was so rare and precious to have someone else in my life navigating simultaneous transmisogyny and public recognition: Few people understand what it feels like to not know whether the stranger approaching you on the street is going to attack you or say that they follow you on Instagram.
A few months after our meeting she tagged me in a Facebook status critiquing how every time an article is published featuring “Trans and Nonbinary Artists You Should Know,” drag performers are never mentioned. It was a clarion call-out: Whose exclusion is our inclusion tied up in?
In order to gain acceptance, trans people have had to differentiate and distance themselves from drag queens, asserting that their/our identities are endurant (rather than ephemeral) and permanent (rather than performative). This distancing has come with good reason considering the historic prevalence of transmisogyny within drag spaces, but it also takes the form of casting “drag” and “trans” as mutually exclusive — erasing trans drag queens — and failing to account for the fluidity and variance among trans communities.
This is where trans people find ourselves today: We are burdened with the task of the real in a society drunk on the myth of its own naturalness. In a world where ideology masquerades as biology, we have to convince the doctors and the feminists and the partners and the parents that we are real in order to be recognized, let alone respected. Our cis counterparts are not held to this standard of interrogation. We are never allowed to critique whose standards of legitimacy we are appealing to. In order to be real we have to be permanent, to be a subject and not a verb (gender is something we are, not what we do!), to always have known. The stakes of this are high: If our identities aren’t believed, then the discrimination we face isn’t real. We are seen as just making it up.
This is the way misogyny works: Legitimacy is distributed like a scarce resource. White cis men are seen as the prototype and the rest of us as concentric circles around them like a stone thrown into a lake. Legitimacy ripples outward. The further we get the less real we are. The less real the work we do is. The less real the harm we experience is. Disbelief is not just interpersonal, it is structural. Trans people on the fringes — and especially transfeminine people — are constantly dismissed as imposters, frauds, mistakes. Add drag queen on top of that and, well…
We have to construct ourselves in their image of who we are in order to be granted personhood. Until then, we are snowflakes, impossible and absurd. It’s a divide-and-conquer strategy: Rather than pointing up, we point across and compete with one another for access to legitimacy. We become naturalized as citizens of the real by saying “I am not that.”
What is the use of legitimacy of it relies on projecting illegitimacy on others? Is it really freedom if it requires conformity?
In this marketplace of coherence where some identities become valid precisely because others are invalidated, trans drag queens face an extreme barrier to belief. The narrative goes: How can you be a drag queen when you dress like that off the stage? But such inquiry is rooted in a fundamental misrecognition and reduction of drag as an art form. Drag is not just “female impersonation,” it’s a political, comedic, and aesthetic sensibility which has been practiced by people of all genders for ages.
In Imp’s work there is type of playfulness, elasticity, camp, and circumstance that not only disregards this gladiator fight to be real, but flagrantly and flamboyantly mocks it. She goes from wearing a baby bump on stage to dressing up as a banana, to wearing a bodysuit to boot! Conventions of humanity, style, and gender are all artfully subverted. In a world where trans women and femmes are confronted with so much pressure and scrutiny on our appearances — Imp’s looks create a necessary visual archive that constantly reminds us that no matter what we look like, our gender is not up for debate.
She templates how we do not have to separate our genders from the stage — indeed, how the stage can produce our genders, and that doesn’t make them any less real.
At the heart of the dismissal of trans drag queens like Imp is our relationship with contradiction. Dismissing identities and scenarios as “absurd” or “impossible” reveals more about ourselves than anything: We refuse to adjust our optic, acknowledge the limitations of our frame. Every contradiction is an opportunity to think more ambitiously. Contradictions reveal the need for a new paradigm. Imp’s artistry does that work — she does not compromise her womanhood for her drag or her drag for her womanhood.
The real absurdity at play here is not Imp’s performance art, but rather the world’s refusal to embrace her for the superstar talent that she is. And this is why I find Imp so fascinating: Her hypervisibility online and her financial instability off it suggests everything wrong with gender and how we police it. The impossibilities we create ideologically engender impossible lives materially. The images we hold of what to be true have direct bearing on the bodies we recognize and defend. Fantasy has flesh.
It’s time for a new paradigm.
The day after the show we do together I meet with Imp Queen at a sushi restaurant of her choice (insert “fishy” jokes here). As femme protocol would have it — we begin by complimenting each other on our outfits. She is wearing an Authentic Skid Mark jumpsuit that has “I’M NOT OKAY WITH THIS” painted on the back. Later she tells me that she knew we would be talking about her discontent in the drag scene. A perfect fit! Then — as trans protocol would have it — we establish that she has been harassed three times on the way to our meeting. It’s a painful reminder of the stakes of this conversation.
Alok: How did you come to do what you do now?
Imp Queen: I grew up in a volatile household and school wasn’t great for me because I was visibly queer from a young age. I ended up in performance because it was a space where adults listened to me and respected me and it was a space where I could get a roomful of people to cheer for me. The performance space always felt more real than walking around in life.
How do you navigate a drag world dominated by cis men?
It wasn’t until Drag Race that our culture sorted drag queens as men. If you watch the first few seasons, they pushed that idea so hard. In all of the confessionals, having a girl say, “I dress up like this, but I am a boy.” This idea of drag queens as men out of drag is relatively new. The growth of that idea has allowed a lot of people to do drag who maybe would have had hangups about it if it was placing them in a more gender-nonconforming category in how they are perceived day to day. It’s hugely about desirability, about being able to say “I’m still a man and have sexual capital. I still belong in Gay Male Society.”
How do you navigate your safety as a transfeminine person while working nightlife?
I feel like it’s this baggage that I carry into a drag space that I don’t see cis male queens carrying: what it costs for me to get there. I am routinely sexually assaulted at work, I have bosses who will make he/she/it jokes about me who ask “if I still have a dick or if I’ve cut it off.” [Later Imp informed me that this same boss kept asking about her dick when she asked for her money. She still has yet to be paid for her work that night.] The violence is so routine I can’t even sort it as violence. I don’t have space or strength to carry that as violence.
There will be gigs where I’m like: I need a large thing around my body to keep people away from me. Or: I need a mask because I don’t want to be seen right now, but I need the money I’m going to make tonight.
Do you ever speak out about the harassment you face as a trans drag queen?
I don’t think that I realized when I started the extent to which the drag community would feel like a boys’ club. I struggle to articulate it to cis male drag queens, in large part because I want to stay amenable, bookable, and friendly. There is a material consequence to talking about the violence that you receive. There is a material consequence to expressing your sadness in those spaces.
One of the reasons I was slow to start my medical transition is: You do the show [RuPaul’s Drag Race] and then you transition, because that’s the model that you had. I think seeing those comments from Ru right during the week the tapes were due, something broke inside of me.
What does social media mean to you?
It’s given me a lot of really great opportunities — a lot of my medical transition is possible because of social media. I’m not bearing the brunt of the harassment on social media. I’m able to grow quickly on social media because I’m thin and white. But people think I have financial resources because of my looks, but the secret is most of the looks don’t belong to me.
What does it feel like to have fans tell you how much they admire you?
DragCon was really intense because it was three days of people coming up to me nonstop telling me that they love me, are inspired by me, and taking a photo of me, and then going and icing my feet in the hotel room and crying because I feel overwhelmed. It’s hard to feel equal to it. It’s hard to give them what it seems that they want.
I don’t trust people easily, which I think is part of what attracts me to the stage: You don’t have to trust your audience, because you know them. You know what an audience is and how it behaves. It’s a different kind of intimacy. An intimacy where I feel more in control and less at risk.
After the interview we are doing a photo shoot for this piece. We are shooting in a club venue, which only seems natural. I watch Imp spend over six hours to get ready. There is a genius craft to the way that she inflates every balloon she adorns atop her head, the way she carefully places on her eyelashes and meticulously draws her lips. This is serious business. But — of course — because it’s associated with the feminine, with the performative, with the aesthetic, with all of the things we dismiss as artificial and not real — we don’t see it as such.
What struck me most about speaking with Imp was her recognition of the material consequences that accompany being trans and femme…and honest. There are material consequences when you adopt all of the things society dismisses as imaginary. Drag queens like Imp mostly have to pay for their own looks and makeup — even though they are offering their services in a professional context. Venues, bars, and clubs would think it absurd to have to sponsor these things — even though they rely on the queens serving full fantasy in order for the bar to be full. They want us to look good, but they don’t support us in doing so. What would happen if drag queens weren’t just paid for their 10-minute sets, but instead for all the time it takes to get ready, to come to the venue safely, to host the party? Why isn’t there a labor union for drag queens? Why might that question seem absurd to you?
I ask Imp if she’s seen more money come in with her increased social media visibility. She tells me that she is still struggling financially and is finding the staggering disconnect between the support receives online and the reality of her life to be increasingly challenging. This is what happens to trans feminine people: You watch people get life from the art you are creating all the while you struggle on how to finance your own. You are constantly extracted for inspiration, but rarely — if ever — allowed to focus on your self-preservation. How can you get back up when they think the only reason you are falling is a death drop? Complex people are reduced to the summation of their looks: “toot or boot!” We don’t ask how they’re getting home safely (or even how they got to the venue). We dismiss their legitimacy as we simultaneously extract from their looks for our mood boards. We love their look, but we won’t pay for their songs or tip them at venues or demand fair compensation for their work. We say that they are “impersonating females,” but we lack the vocabulary to name how cis women and the cis beauty industry continue to pilfer from trans/drag aesthetics. Who is masquerading as whom?
What would a trans movement look like that fought for compensation as hard as we fought for representation?
As we pose together in the club I feel both woefully inadequate and utterly okay with it. Imp is working all of the angles. She’s inventing angles, darling. She is giving supermodel, baby! And I think to myself: If Imp was a cis woman, people would be calling her a model. She would get paid for this: Call it “lifestyle,” call it “influencer.” She would have a modeling contract, a beauty brand, a manager negotiating all of her fees; she would be booked at all the five-star hotels. But that’s not how the world works. People like Imp can only be loved on stages — always from a distance.
Posing with Imp — looking at you — I wonder if you will stay around beyond the look. I wonder if transfemininity has a worth beyond its fantasy.
I wonder what it is about you that makes you dismiss trans women who do drag as real.
Photographed by Falyn Huang
Designed by Edaa Birthing
Installation by A Queer Pride
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